Your personal brand

IREAD an article in SUCCESS Magazine a while back called “5 Tips for Creating a Powerful Personal Brand”. A powerful personal brand is the first step in creating positive personal impact – a key ingredient to your career success mix.

The article listed five keys to a successful brand… 1. Brand yourself through your

professional presence. 2. Brand yourself as a valued partner. 3. Brand yourself with strong

communication skills. 4. Brand yourself by staying one step

ahead. 5. Brand yourself as being social savvy.

I agree with all five of these common sense personal branding tips. But I have one additional common sense personal branding tip to add: Brand yourself as a person of integrity. Tweet 62 in my career advice book Success Tweets says … “Your personal brand should be unique to you, but build on integrity. Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is looking.”

According to Wikipedia, “Integrity is consistency of actions, values, methods, measures and principles.” Integrity and consistency are intertwined. People who are consistent in their actions are seen as people with a high degree of integrity.

Oprah says, “Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.” This is true. If you practise situational ethics – doing the right thing only when you’re in the public eye — you aren’t really a person of high integrity, you’re just pretending to be one.

Besides, it’s hard to act one way in public, and another in private. So, to be safe, follow Oprah’s advice. Do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do – not because you’ll get credit, or avoid getting into trouble.

John Maxwell is a well-known business author. One of his books sends the same message. It’s called, There’s No Such Thing As Business Ethics: There’s Only One Rule for Making Decisions. According to John, that rule is the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In other words, do the right thing.

In a nutshell, if you want to brand yourself as a person of high integrity act as a person of high integrity all the time – not just when it suits you, or when someone might notice.