The night’s off to a great start. You can’t wait to get dressed and head out the door to meet up with your new friends.
After leaving your place, you meet up with them at O’Malley’s pub and quickly catch onto the conversation. Everyone is talking about Mike, Mike’s new condo and when they think Mike will show up.
A while later Mike finally shows up. Immediately, everyone starts buzzing around him, giving him all of their attention. When you try to talk to him, he introduces himself but doesn’t give you that much attention. He slowly turns and starts talking to the other people.
You don’t even want to bring up the fact that the two of you already met last week.
Eventually, the night closes to an end and you aren’t nearly as thrilled as when it started. Actually, you are bummed. You are borderline depressed.
Why is it that everyone gives all their attention to Mike? Even when he’s not around, they keep talking about him.
Don’t they realize that you’re just as fun as he is? Why does everyone always flock to him?
This happens to people way too often.
Too many people are wasting great opportunities to make friends because they are displaying a poor version of who they really are.
So how do you become like Mike? How do you get people like Mike to WANT to get to know YOU? How do you draw people into YOUR world?
By displaying the best version of yourself.
Some people might be quick to tell you, “Just because you want to be Brad Pitt’s friend, it doesn’t mean he wants to be your friend”. And yes, they might be right. Just because you like someone doesn’t mean they will like you back.
But often times your gut is right. If you think you and another person would make good friends, there’s a good chance that you would – as long as you both do the right things at the right time to give the friendship a fighting chance.
So how can you get people to like you – to WANT to become friends with you?
By making it inevitable that people see your greatest qualities and attributes.
Think of yourself as a brand. By doing a little work upfront and being deliberate about the image you portray, you can hand-sculpt the way people see you and attract the people of your choosing.
Use this simple 4-step process to start branding yourself in the light of your choosing:
- Figure out who you are and who you want to be by defining your Personal Branding Attributes.
- Come up with different ways to portray your awesome qualities using Attribute Displays.
- Test your new displays and use feedback to fine-tune your self-brand.
- Document anything that helps capture the image you want to portray.
Don’t make it hard for people to figure out your awesome qualities. Let them radiate from you at all times.
Let’s dig into the details.
1. Figure out who you are and who you want to be.
First, you want to make a list of your Personal Branding Attributes using the following five categories:
- Things you like to do
- Thing you intellectually like
- Other things that are important to you
- Qualities you’d like to portray to others
- Interesting experiences you’ve had
Here’s what my personal branding attributes look like for the first four categories:
You should be able to easily talk to someone about items from any of the first three columns since these are all interesting or important to you.
You can also include things you would like to do, or things you are intellectually curious about. For example, I rarely go camping and rock climbing, but I’m very interested in doing both of them more often, so I included them here. I would still be able to have a good conversation about camping, although I might be asking more questions than I would be if I were talking about surfing.
Here’s my list for category 5 (interesting experiences I’ve had):
You want to have stories you can tell that will help display some of your awesome qualities. If you’ve travelled, done anything challenging or difficult, helped others in a unique or interesting way, done anything crazy, exciting or scary, then these would be good things to jot down. Any notes and details you add to it will help you later on.
Action-Step: Create your own list and come up with 5 Personal Branding Attributes for each of the 5 categories above.
2. Come up with different ways to portray your awesome qualities.
To draw people into your world, you want your best qualities and interests to radiate from you. When someone sees you, do you want them to say, “He looks successful,” or “He looks like white trash”?
Here are 12 different Attribute Displays to help you portray WHO YOU ARE:
Clothes and Style
What you wear and how you wear it speak volumes about you as a person, so be cognizant of how you dress. Do you want your clothes to tell people that you have good style? That you are a businessman? Or maybe you want to show more of your personality. In casual settings, I like to wear shirts that pertain to things I’ve done and are unique to who I am. For example, I like to wear my Tough Mudder shirt or my University of Oxford shirt.
If anyone asks me about them, I have pretty cool stories to go along with them.
Also, think about how you look. Did you just roll out of bed, throw on some sweats and head out the door? Or did you take a shower, do your hair, and get ready for the day. When you look good and it is obvious that you put effort into how you look, it shows. Coming off as someone who takes care of yourself is much better than the opposite.
Stories
Stories are a great way to give people an idea of who you are. And the best part about it? YOU get to decide what qualities you are portraying. This is where you use the lists you made earlier and find ways to weave some different qualities into your stories.
For example, I could show that I’m adventurous, I like to challenge myself, I like going to new places and I like doing new things by telling a story about doing Tough Mudder. But rather than just saying my accomplishments, I can tell a funny story and let the other qualities show themselves throughout the story. So instead of saying, “I went to Beaver Creek and did a 13-mile obstacle course,” I could say:
“I hate getting electrocuted. I went to Beaver Creek with some friends to do Tough Mudder, one of those 13-mile obstacle courses that beat the shit out of you. And the only thing I was really nervous about was getting electrocuted. There were four obstacle stations that could potential shock you. I was so pumped because I had managed to get by all of them untouched – well, except for the very last station which was literally 10 feet from the finish line. All I had to do was weave through these hanging electrical lines, and I thought I had it. But I ran right through one clear one that I didn’t see at the very end and it practically zapped the nipples off my chest. I then face-planted and crawled the last 10 feet to the end. God I seriously hate being electrocuted.”
The point? Using the interesting experiences you wrote down, come up with ways to show the qualities you want to portray while telling those stories.
All great story tellers have told their best stories multiple times. You should have some under your belt as well.
Photos / Videos
Whenever you are doing something that shows who you really are (and it’s something you would like other people to know about you), try to get someone to take a photo or video of you doing it. The more people see you in certain situations, the more they will apply that attribute to you.
Home Decor
Whenever you have people come over to your house, apartment, or wherever you live, what they see on the inside will help determine how they see you as a person. If you want people to think that your family is really important to you, then you should have photos of you and your family around your house. If you want to be seen as creative, stylistic or artistic you should probably have cool artwork and unique design in your house.
I already mentioned that you should have people take photos of you doing the things you do. Now you should make some prints of those and start displaying them around your home.
Possessions
Anywhere from homes, airplanes and cars to bikes, phones and barbecue sets. Everything you own says something about you. I love the fact that I live by the beach, by my friends and by downtown Huntington Beach because I can ride my beach cruiser to any of these places. So owning a beach cruiser says something about me and my lifestyle, especially when I show up somewhere on it.
Personality and Body Language
Are you that fun-loving, positive, energetic, spontaneous funny person? Or are you that quiet, shy, dull person? Not everyone is going to be super energetic and have a huge personality, but you can definitely become more upbeat, positive and happy. If you come into your interactions smiling, with good posture, in a good mood and with good energy, people will see you as that person.
Make a conscious effort to project the personality and body language that you want to be known for. The more you do it consciously, the more you will do it naturally and regularly.
For more on this, check out my post on how to make a great first impression.
Actually Doing the Activities
If someone meets you while you’re hiking, they obviously know you like to hike. You won’t have to mention it.
If you just joined an adult-league soccer team, anyone you meet while practicing or playing a game will automatically know you play soccer in your free time. By doing the things that you want to be known for doing, you are strengthening your self-brand in that regard.
Groups and Friends You’re Associated With
Any group, team or social circle that you are a part of will be part of your personal brand. Once someone finds out that you are part of a group, they will assign certain qualities to you, depending on what they know about the group.
This can be good or bad. If they know you’re good friends with a bunch of jerks, it won’t reflect very well on you. But if they know you are friends with successful entrepreneurs, business executives or any other successful people, then they will probably think there must be something special about you to have friends like that.
Knowledge / Curiosity / Genuine Interest of Topics
What you like to talk about will definitely help brand you too. By talking about things you know well and things that interest you, and asking questions about things you are curious about, people will see what is important to you.
I love entrepreneurship and human psychology. When I find someone else that has either of these interests, I can talk about it for hours. It almost seems guaranteed that a bond will be formed.
Social Media
Social Media is a great place to display your personal brand. Show photos and videos of you doing the things you love. Talk about things that interest you. Share stories and articles that intrigue you.
When people go to your page, you want them wonder how they can get to know you better.
Word of Mouth
There’s not much you can do here, but word gets around. Your reputation is everything. If people think you’re a dick, and they tell other people, it can ruin a potential friendship before you even meet.
On the flip side, if your friend tells Christina how awesome your trip to New York together was and says good things about you, Christina will probably be more interested in you when you finally meet (or the next time you see each other).
Relationships
I put this one last not because it’s the least important, but because I really want to hammer this home. All of the above will be for nothing if you aren’t connecting with people and building relationships. Keep in touch with people. Communicate on social media. Remember their birthdays. As Gary Vaynerchuk likes to say, bring 51% of the value to the relationship. Meaning you should always aim to add slightly more value than the other person to every relationship you are in.
If you aren’t connecting with people, they won’t care to know that you went on a hike. But when Mike thinks to himself, “Oh, that guy Rob I met the other weekend wished me happy birthday”, checks out your Facebook page and sees a bunch of recent photos of you doing fun stuff, he’s now much more likely to be interested in getting to know you better.
Now it’s your turn.
Action-Step: Choose 5 Attribute Displays to create or improve upon to deliberately portray one or more Personal Branding Attributes per each display. Here are some examples to give you some ideas:
- Next time you go somewhere new, do something new, do something cool or exciting, or just do anything that is more interesting than an average person’s regular day, document it. Take photos WITH YOU IN THEM. If you’re with other people, get photos with you AND THE OTHER PEOPLE IN THEM. Force yourself to take more photos and videos than you are currently comfortable taking. Also, if you can get something that you can wear, use or display that is obviously from that unique place or event, do it. It doesn’t have to be nice or expensive. A coffee mug, a t-shirt, whatever. Then, if someone ever asks you about it, you have a story to tell.
- Try dressing up a little more or being more deliberate with the clothes you wear to represent the way you want to be perceived. When I started wearing Chukka boots, dress boots and casual dress shoes more often, usually paired with a button up, I could absolutely tell that the people I was meeting were reacting more favorably than when I wore tennis shoes and a t-shirt.
Now I still love wearing personalized tees in casual settings, sandals at the beach, etc. Of course, this is just my style. It’s up to you to figure out what will work best for your situations. - Do new things and things that you LOVE as often as possible. It’s what you do that makes you who you are. You aren’t a rock climber because you like to read about it and you aren’t helping needy kids by saying how important it is. It’s by going out and actually rock climbing, actually volunteering your time. The more you can do the things that make you WHO YOU WANT TO BE, the more stories you can tell, photos you can take and friends you will have telling others about your adventures together.
3. Test your new displays and use feedback to fine-tune your self-brand.
Once you have a list of Personal Branding Attributes and you’ve come up with 5 ways to display some of those attributes, it’s time to put them to the test.
If you’ve decided you have a story about seeing a bear 20 feet in front of you in the mountains and it scared the shit out of you, find a way to tell that story. Try telling it to many different people, improving the way you tell it each time.
How do they react? Does it seem to get them to open up to you? Or do they start to give you weird looks? You’re goal now is to pay attention to the feedback you are receiving (their reactions), and see if you can learn from them.
It doesn’t have to be a big crazy story either. Feel free to talk about being stoked than you just ran a 5K because you’ve been wanting to do it and finally followed through with it. Or if you have a Mathlete shirt you won from some math competition, rock it! Be proud of being you and rock the shit out of it.
Just make sure you are promoting the qualities in you that you want people to know (you like running, camping, whatever). You are building your personal brand one small step at a time.
You will notice that stories are very integral to this. Wearing a Harvard shirt or having a photo of you from college will definitely link you to Harvard. But if you also tell a story about going to Harvard, your association with Harvard will be that much stronger in their mind. If you want to be associated with all these awesome things, then you should have stories from when you were DOING these things.
And that’s exactly the goal. You are trying to strengthen all of the good associations of your choosing.
If someone asks you about your Iron Maiden shirt, tell them a story from that night. Someone mentions that they’re building a website, and you are as well? Ask them about their journey and share yours. Show that it’s interesting and important to you. Draw people into your world.
Action-Step: Test your five Attribute Displays and see how people react. Test them multiple times. Practice or tweak your stories to get them right. Keep doing it until you are happy with the way it works. Then keep using it and find new Attribute Displays to use.
4. Document anything that helps capture the image you want to portray.
I’ve mentioned this above already, but it’s worth repeating. Make sure you are documenting all the fun, interesting things you are doing. Even if you’re at an energy conference that most people wouldn’t consider as “cool”, if you are passionate about your work and industry and find it interesting then show it off! Let people see the real you!
Even if your a gamer, feel free to post screen shots of your high scores. However, if you really want to make friends with adventurous socialites and only play video games because you don’t have anything better to do, then it might not be best to show that off. You need to be cognizant of what you are displaying to other people and show what truly drives you as a human being.
Every moment of your life is a possible branding opportunity. With cell phones these days you can take a photo or video practically anywhere.
It doesn’t mean that you need to document every moment though. Keep your privacy where you want it. Just capture all the other moments.
Action-Step: Plan a time on your calendar for you to do something you are passionate about or to have a new experience. Force yourself to take photos or videos while you are doing it. And take more than you think you should (although there’s no reason to get too excessive). That’s it.
Keep the cycle going.
Once you’ve gone through these four steps, you just rinse and repeat.
Add to your list of Personal Branding Attributes.
Come up with more Attribute Displays to let people really know who you are.
Test them. Tweak them. Perfect them.
Continue documenting your awesome life.
In today’s day and age, it’s much easier to display your personal brand. With the internet, you can find a shirt that says practically anything you can think of and have it shipped to your doorstep. With phones and technology, you can document pretty much anything you’d want to and post it to your Facebook instantly.
Just make sure to stay true to yourself. Be who you want to be, and love it. The more unique you are, the more you will stand out. And you won’t be unique by being somebody else.
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