Why building your personal brand matters

Purpose

"Ensure the purpose of my session is communicated to the people who come on the course in multi-formats i.e. in writing and in a short video clip. To begin with I just had writing and not everyone fully read and there was feedback around "not meeting expectations"’ so I made a video which explained the course and this received brilliant feedback."

Focus on the most powerful content

"When I first started the slide pack was in excess of 50-slides and I struggled to keep the session to the 2-hour slot. Overtime I analysed feedback and adapted the slides to pull out the most powerful questions and exercises, whilst sign posting other content to review in their own time."

Low numbers shouldn’t mean cancelling a session

"To ensure I offered this to all Opencast Hubs and ‘further a-field’ (40+ miles from a hub) people, I said I will do a face-to-face session at each site and a virtual session too. The point I am about to make reminds me of my rugby days when I turned up to training and there was only two people training, the coach would get there and say "To hell with this, I'm off", passing the blame to those two people who had made the effort. Whereas those two people wanted to train and had made the effort to get there, so the coach should have adapted and found a way to make the session valuable for those two, rather than punishing them.

"So looping it back to my sessions, there were times where I was travelling to London or Glasgow and we had low numbers, but I still travelled and carried out these sessions, because everyone should have the same offering ie the session style of their choosing (face-to-face or virtual)."

Speak up if you have an idea

"Thomas Edison once said, "The value of an idea lies in the using of it". Many of us have amazing ideas, have the confidence to share your ideas with your colleagues and don’t be scared to experiment, even with a small group!"

Understand yourself and make a plan

"Albert Einstein is reported to have defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results". So you can accept what people think about you when you are not in the room or you can find out what that is now and make a vision and plan of how you evolve that perception / brand.

"Start with self-reflection, try the Johari Window exercise to analyse people’s views on yourself, then start to populate:

• what’s important to you

• what isn’t

• what inspires you

• what motivates you

• what you’re good at

• what you want to be good at etc.

"From this form a statement of where you want to get to and make that plan to take you there."