It’s a question I get a lot. Is Personal Branding the same thing as discovering your purpose?

Let me explain it this way.

I discovered that my personal brand is that I am The Success Storyteller!  Obviously, because of my career in journalism, I WAS a storyteller.  That was clear.  But it was the ‘success’ part that surprised me.

It made sense however.  Ever since I was a little girl, and perhaps, influenced by my fascination with my famous grandfather, World War One flying ace Billy Bishop, an enduring Canadian brand,  I couldn’t wait to hear someone’s story and especially about how they had achieved their own measure of success.

Finally absorbing this understanding about myself had enormous repercussions for my life – the most dramatic of which was that I did indeed leave my job as a journalist after a 20-year career — at mid life when it seemed like a really stupid thing to do.

But the reason was quite simple. I had spent 20 years doing stories about what was going wrong in the world. Admittedly there is a place for that. People need to to be informed about the injustices in order to fix things. But I knew that I now wanted to focus on what was going right – the successes and not the failures.

I can tell you figuring that out was one of the most liberating experiences I have ever had and I never looked back.

So, kind of like finding your purpose, you might ask? Well yes it is, when you put it work in a most meaningful and focused way. However, you can only do that if you really understand what your personal brand is in the first place.  It is my experience working with hundreds of clients from executives to hairdressers, from football players to surgeons that most people don’t know they even have a brand and are just stabbing away at things hoping to hit pay dirt.

Take it from me, you are wasting time when you could be the best you can be and doing what you love every day, all day.

 (Next time — Let’s Get Going With Your Personal Brand Breakthrough Exercise)