Managing Your Personal Brand: Quality of Life
Life is complicated. Everyone knows that. The question, though, is how can we make life less complicated? Well, knowing your personal brand – what you stand for -- is one way. And managing your brand consistently can help you own your brand in an integrated, intuitive way. Let’s take a look at the way a corporation would manage its brands. This model is a systematic framework from the corporate realm that can be applied to our personal lives. Applying these principles might help us learn to own our own “brands” and minimize some of the complexities that make life so unpredictable.
It seems that in our current digital age everything happens so fast that no one has time to focus on quality. If we look at the corporate PDCA (also known as PDSA) model, we can see that pretty much everyone has time to focus on quality. The letters stand for Plan – Do – Control – Act: a series of steps that can be followed for continuously moving your life, and your brand, forward.
If you’ve already developed your brand, chances are you’ve navigated your way through at least one or two of these steps:
Plan: start by defining your brand platform – Find It.
Do: move to “test” your brand – does in resonate with you? How does your inner circle respond to this brand? Own it.
Control: identify key insights gained in the “Do” step. Own it.
Act: update your brand based on what you learned in the “Control” step. Live it.
Which steps can you check off as finished? Even if you haven’t taken a single step toward developing your personal brand, you can easily find time to do it. PDCA may have been pioneered by scientists and statisticians, but it’s an easily understood process that anyone can follow. If this post has piqued your interest in PDCA, you can find more at these links:
Leverage your personal brand to improve your quality of life!
