Using Your Brand to Set Your Goals

• Created: 01 February 2025
• career

Using Your Brand to Set Your Goals

When you hear "brand", you may think of something like Coca Cola or Gucci. Brands aren't just a name - in addition to being well-known, these companies make an effort to associate their brands with specific traits - high quality, exclusive, affordable, healthy - whatever it is they want people to think of when they see the brand.

A brand also apply to individuals as well as companies. This is where your "personal" brand comes in. Everyone has a brand whether or not they've built it intentionally. You brand is built from traits people think of when they describe you. Without intention, your brand may become something unexpected and potentially detrimental to your career.

Here are some questions to illustrate how your brand can impact your career:

Promotions: when your name is brought up in promotion discussions, your brand is what comes to mind. Do you know what skills or traits will come to mind when you promotion case is introduced?

Networking and referrals: networking and referrals are a critical tool to finding your next job, client, or employee. What are the top three things you want someone to say about you when connecting you with a potential new contact?

Career direction and job satisfaction: if you find your career path and progression is aligned with your values and personal goals, you will feel motivated to advance your career and rewarded by progress. Do you know what the top 3 most important things are to direct your next career steps?

This exercise is built to help you introspect and develop a personal brand. I will focus on using this exercise in two ways:

Understand what your brand is today to quickly and effectively communicate who you are and what you can offer to clients or employers

Use the brand you define through this exercise to guide your day-to-day and long-term career decisions to achieve the brand you want

Part 1: Values

Choose 2 - 3 words that represent traits that you value. Feel free to add your own values as well.

Start by choosing all the words you identify with. Next, group them together to identify common themes to help narrow them down. Finally, ask yourself some hard questions about what you value more. Think about situations at work or in your personal life where you make a decision that displays a value and decide which you relate to more.

For example, you need to decide between empathy and efficiency. Think about reviewing a colleague's code and leaving a comment. Do you want your colleague to refer to you as an "efficient" code reviewer or an "empathetic" code reviewer after reading your comment?

Part 2: Strengths

Just like the previous part, select 2 - 3 words that represent your strengths. At this point, you can start keeping track of current strengths and desired strengths. Keep the lists separate for now.

As before, feel free to add your own words and get down to detailed strengths like a specific technology stack or language. Similarly, consider what you'd rather see in a performance review or client testimonial to narrow down your selection.

Part 3: Passions

For the final time, select 2 - 3 words that reflect your passions. These are the things that motivate you and drive you to go the extra mile. As before, feel free to add passions that are not present in the list below.

I have heard people say "I'm not passionate about anything". One of the challenges is that people show passion in different ways. Being passionate doesn't mean staying up all night working on your passion or talking someone's ear off about it at a party even though that's how people often think passion should look. Another way to look at it is what you find rewarding or what gives you a sense of accomplishment.

Part 4: Putting it all together

Take your responses from the previous parts and apply them to this template (there are others below):

I am a passionate about to achieve .

Now you have an initial draft of a brand and you can iterate and refine it for you and your role. Example

I am a knowledgeable and empathetic developer advocate passionate about communication and innovation to achieve a strong developer community for an operationally excellent product.

As you iterate over this, you will develop your "self elevator pitch" or "personal brand".

Here are some other templates and examples:

I am passionate about working on by using to build a product.

I am passionate about working on complex, cross-team projects by using software design and communication skills to build sustainable and operationally excellent products.

I strive to achieve in my work on by leveraging my .

I strive to achieve empathetic and supportive teams in my work as a manager and leader by leveraging my communication and mentoring skills.

Back in the strengths exercise, you had the option to create two lists of words for what your current strengths are and what strengths you want to grow. Repeat this template exercise with the strengths you want to grow to shape the direction for your career.

Congrats! Now you have your own personal brand and maybe a future brand to work towards.

Bonus Part 5: How to use your brand

Here are a few ways you can use the output of this exercise:

Refine your brand statement and add it to your LinkedIn profile

Memorize your brand statement and use it as a self-introduction at networking and recruiter events

Keep a sticky note of your values at your desk and when you make decisions, ask yourself if your decisions align with your values or not (you may also discover you have different values than you thought)

When looking for your next role, assess whether the role is aligned with your values and passions by learning about the company or asking questions about your values and passions in interviews

Build a plan to learn and practice the strengths you want. Seek out opportunities that help you develop these strengths.

This blog post is an extension of a presentation made at the 2023 Grace Hopper Celebration call "Building yourself for success" by Zineb Slam and Miruna Ioana Rusu.

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