Building Your Personal Brand with Harvard Business School Professor Jill Avery (ep.172)

Talk About Talk - Communication Skills Training

Building your personal brand is about identifying and communicating your points of difference. Harvard Business School Professor Jill Avery joins Andrea to talk about why personal branding is so important and why many people hesitate or reject this whole premise of personal branding.

TAKE THE PERSONAL BRAND SELF-ASSESSMENT

• https://www.talkabouttalk.com/personalbrand

RESOURCES

• “A New Approach to Building Your Personal Brand” by Jill Avery and Rachel Greenwald HBR article: https://hbr.org/2023/05/a-new-approach-to-building-your-personal-brand
• “The Brand Called You” by Tom Peters FastCompany article – https://www.fastcompany.com/28905/brand-called-you
• Jill’s recommendation: “Breaking Glass: Tales from the Witch of Wall Street by Patricia Walsh Chadwick – https://amzn.to/3yWBxWL

CONNECT WITH ANDREA & TALK ABOUT TALK

• Website: TalkAboutTalk.com
• Communication Coaching Newsletter: https://talkabouttalk.com/newsletter
• LinkedIn Andrea: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreawojnicki/
• LinkedIn TalkAboutTalk: https://www.linkedin.com/company/talkabouttalk/
• Youtube Channel: @talkabouttalkyoutube

TRANSCRIPT

Particularly in today’s world. Avoiding personal branding is just really not an option.
And I’m not sure it ever has been. You know, people point to the rise of social media as building up the hype of personal branding. But we’ve always had a need for personal branding. We’ve always had a need to communicate the value that we bring to the world. So our medium is different in the way that we communicate it. We use, you know, online and and social media and other digital technologies to help us. But we’ve always done this work. And there’s always been a need for this work.

That was Jill Avery, marketing professor at Harvard Business School and personal branding expert. Last year Jill co-authored a paper in Harvard Business Review called “A New Approach to Building Your Personal Brand.”

Jill is not only a personal branding expert, she’s also a friend and a wonderful human. I can’t wait for you to her what she has to say share with us about personal branding. Let’s do this!

Welcome to Talk about Talk podcast episode #171 “Building Your Personal Brand with Harvard Business School Professor Jill Avery”. In this episode, you’re going to learn why personal branding is so important – mandatory really, and also a few reasons why many people hesitate or even reject this whole premise of personal branding.

In case we haven’t met, my name is Dr. Andrea Wojnicki please just call me Andrea. I’m your executive communication coach. I coach executives like you to improve your communication skills so you can communicate with confidence and achieve your career goals. To learn more about me and what I do, check out my website, talkabouttalk.com where you can read about the coaching and workshops that I run. Plus there are a bunch of free resources for you there.

Ok, let’s get into this. I’m sure you want to hear from Jill. Here’s how this episode is going to go. After I introduce Jill, we’ll get right into the interview. Then at the end I’m going to summarize with the three learnings that I want to reinforce based on our conversation.

I met Jill over 20 yrs ago, when I was in my first year of the doctorate program at HBS. She was considering joining to program. We met and instantly hit it off. We quickly learned that we had similar backgrounds – we both worked in Consumer Packaged Goods (or CPG) marketing, she at Gilette and me at Kraft. We also both earned our MBAs, but we loved school and we both ultimately earned our doctorate.

Today, Jill Avery serves as a Senior Lecturer of Business Administration and C. Roland Christensen Distinguished Management Educator in the marketing unit at Harvard Business School. She’s a prolific and award-winning author of 100+ publications on branding, CRM (that’s cust relationship mktg), and digital marketing.

In addition to her role as a faculty member at HBS, Jill remains close to practice by serving as a board member, consultant, educator, and advisor to companies and their executives.
She is a passionate and enthusiastic award-winning teacher and a creative and innovative course designer, currently teaching two courses, Marketing and Creating Brand Value.
She also leads a new Harvard Business School Executive Education program on
Creating Brand Value designed for senior executives and two Harvard Business School Online courses: one on Creating Brand Value and the other on Personal Branding.

Yep, she’s qualified!

Here we go!

INTERVIEW

Thank you so much, Jill, for being here today to talk with us about personal branding.

Jill: I’m thrilled to be here, Andrea. Thank you so much for having me, and it’s delightful to be working with you again.

Okay, let’s get right into this. My 1st question for you is with regards to the benefits of developing your personal brand you mentioned to me when we met that it seems to be a hot topic. It’s in demand with your Mba students and your Exec Ed students. why do you think that is what are the benefits of developing your brand.

Jill: I think there’s so many benefits for developing and managing your personal brand over time. And I I think this is why people are so excited about this topic right now, and a little anxious about it. As well. I to me the greatest benefit of personal branding is empowering yourself empowering yourself to to tell your own story. But you know, think about personal branding as giving you the opportunity to tell the story that you want to present to the world about who you are and what value you have to offer, and what difference you’d like to make in the world. and how you can create value for those around you. So to me, that’s that’s kind of the central reason to to do a personal branding effort. There’s lots of secondary effects. Things like enhancing your visibility in your field and and establishing yourself as an expert making yourself more memorable to the people that you meet, enabling you to fit in by communicating something about your legitimacy, to to be in a space, and enabling you to stand out by communicating what makes you different. What makes you unique in a certain group of of people? It’s about communicating your competitive edge. So you can expand your social network, open up new opportunities for yourself. but I think not to be forgotten in all of this, because all of those sound, very professionally enriching, and and, you know, helpful for my career I personally believe that a personal branding journey is really about helping you uncover and celebrate and share the unique value that you offer to the world. It’s about self reflection, and and having the luxury of time for self reflection, and then being able to uncover and celebrate what makes you you. and effectively communicate that to people around you.

AW: Right? Right? So when I coach folks on their personal brand, I identify a bunch of strategic principles that we follow. and I have a feeling that these are going to align based on your Hbr article I know that they align with with what you think. If I had to choose one, though it’s about focusing on what makes you unique. And I’m wondering what you think about that. I have this saying that people seem to love. It’s unique is better than better.

Jill: Yeah, I think personal branding is about discovering what makes you unique. It’s about discovering what we’ll call in marketing your points of difference. What makes you stand out from others around you? I think, unfortunately, we’ve been socialized for so much of our life to try to fit in with others, to try to to assimilate or or blend, or make ourselves more like the people that that we surround ourselves with. When our real value as a person is about being different, being unique, seeing the world differently, approaching the world differently and creating value in a way that nobody else can. And for me, that’s what personal branding is all about. It’s about uncovering those differences. finding ways to make them valuable in helping us achieve our goals and finding ways to communicate those to people, so that they recognize those differences as valuable and as something that that can help them in their journey, as well.

AW: Right. So it’s what I’m hearing you say is, it’s about 1st identifying them and then creating a narrative around them right? And then consistently reinforcing them with your audience or your target market, you might want to say, Yeah.

Jill: Yeah, absolutely. And and you know, sometimes we think of our differences as deficits. I’m different than everybody else. But in personal branding. Those things are often the things that make you the most memorable or or the most willing to to stand out in a crowd. And so it’s finding how to turn differences into a positive story about how they have shaped you and how they help you contribute in a differential way.

AW: So you’re making me think about Dei right? And and you know, over the last, let’s say 10 years. It’s it’s become a bigger part like it’s more often, for example, a topic in Hbr, and there are courses being taught on it. There’s all sorts of projects going on. Do you think that Dei might be fueling the interest in personal branding, or vice versa? Or are they just? Are they somehow related.

Jill: I think there’s been so much talk and conversation about diversity, equity, inclusion belonging. How do we bring our authentic selves to the office, and and what precludes us from from doing so. And I think it’s a really healthy conversation. What I find when I present my work on personal branding to diverse audiences. The people who are perhaps the most intrigued and the most agitated about what I have to say are often underrepresented minorities, whether that be women or people of color, or Lgbtq plus individuals. They come up to me after the presentation, and they say I’m fascinated.

But personal branding is really hard for me, because I don’t bring my authentic self to the office, or I often hide aspects of myself. And and how do I stop doing that. How do I present myself in a more authentic way that feels safe for me, and that helps me communicate my values. So I think, particularly for for people who feel underrepresented in a setting. Personal branding is even more important because you want to be the one to tell your story. You don’t want other people.

Jill: Narrating your story for you if you will. So so I think it’s more important. One of my top episodes of the over 160 episodes to date is called controlling your narrative.

AW: And it’s really about that. And people tell me that they find it really empowering. And it’s for that reason, right? Sometimes there’s this other saying that I’m hearing a lot lately these days. It’s it’s not a bug. It’s a feature. right? So you can take what you may have thought was a bug. It could be a personality trait it could be. It could be something you were born with, or something that developed over time, or whatever it is. It’s a you think it’s a bug, or people tell you it’s a bug, and you can you know, turn it within reason. You can turn it into a feature by controlling the narrative around it and establishing it and reinforcing it as part of your personal brand.

Jill: Absolutely. I think a big part of personal branding is what I’ll call embracing your blemishes, finding those things that are different about you, and that you may have hidden in the past because you might have been anxious about them, and finding ways to turn those blemishes into something more memorable about you.

AW: Beautiful. I love that embellishing your blemishes. Love it so. You said that it may be an even more powerful exercise. I’m paraphrasing, but it may be an even more powerful exercise for folks who do already have unique characteristics about them, and and they may have been hesitant to do so. Let’s shift that now to what about junior folks who are more early in their career versus the senior leaders. for whom is personal branding more important? Or is it the same.

Jill: I I don’t ever like to answer a question with both. But I’m gonna say, both here, Andrea, I think early in your career. You need to think about your personal brand as a somewhat blank slate. Right? You. You haven’t started to fill up the narratives or communicate the narratives about who you are and what you have to offer your resume, if you will, is a little sparse, your Linkedin profile a little empty so early in your career. You’re looking for opportunities to begin to tell your story, to begin to establish your credibility, to build connections. Think about early in your career as making a 1st impression, and we know in communication the importance of 1st impressions and managing them strategically. So as a a new employee. Everything you do is being watched and observed and assessed and evaluated. And so everything matters when, when you’re early in your career. but later in your career, personal branding and the need for it doesn’t end, I think, of personal branding as an ongoing journey, of negotiating and renegotiating our personal brand with others around us and that renegotiation needs to happen over your lifetime. Because you’re not the you that you were yesterday. You’re changing, you’re growing, you’re developing. So there’s new narratives. There’s new attributes. There’s new value to be communicating to the world.

I think the other thing for senior leaders is to remember that while you’re focused on promoting your personal brand in doing so, especially if you do so authentically, genuinely, with humility, with vulnerability. You’re creating the conditions and the culture at work to allow others on your team to bring their authentic selves to work. The more vulnerable you can be in your personal branding effort as a senior leader, the more it makes it okay for everyone on the team to express who they are and their individuality and the value that they’d like to to bring.

AW: That is such a good point. That’s such a good point. I also share your opinion that it’s important throughout your career. You know you and I both have kids in their twenties, and 1st impressions are really important. You need to nail yourself introduction and then follow up by reinforcing that said, it is a lovely time when you can experiment right. And I sometimes say, and when I’m doing workshops in particular, I say the most common mistake people make with their brand copying others. But it’s kind of okay to do that early in your career, because you’re experimenting with different. If you want to call them personas or points of difference. And and we’re social learners. Right? We look around. We see other people who are successful. Oh, I’m going to try what she tried, or I’m going to try what he tried. and see if that works for me, and how it feels when you get to be a middle manager and definitely a senior manager. You’re never going to reach your potential. I don’t think, unless again, you’re really celebrating what makes you unique. Right?

Jill: Yeah, I think there’s a lot to be said, though, in personal branding for modeling after others. Right? If I if I think about my personal brand. It’s definitely influenced by many of the mentors that I’ve had in both my professional and and personal life. Not that I’m embodying or trying to be someone else. But I’ve picked up tips and tricks and strategies along the way that I’ve incorporated, and that I enact authentically in my brand that help me be the person that I am today. So so I think that practicing modeling is is an important part of of exploring your personal brand.

AW: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point. While we’re celebrating our uniqueness. we are social learners. and we should be unapologetic about taking advice that we or or modeling other successful folks. Again, the the word, though, is that you used is authentic, right? It needs to feel true to you. You’re not trying to act a certain way you’re like, Oh, that’s interesting. I’m going to try that right? Yeah, it’s it’s an interesting balance. So a couple of times. You’ve said the word points of difference, and it just reminds me, back in the day you and I both worked in consumer packaged goods. and then we shifted to Academia. And now you’re you’re teaching in the Mba program in the Exec Ed program, and I’m coaching folks. And but we still have this Cpg background.

Jill: We do?

AW: The advertising brief. Do you remember writing that document like this is the brand name? The brand personality is this, the brand values are this. Here’s the benefit. Here’s the differentiator. Here’s all these, all these things. So do perfect analogy like, can we take product, brand strategy document and use it to fill in what our personal brand is.

Jill: So I think there’s a lot of points of overlap between marketing products and brands and marketing people. And when I started approaching this area of research. I relied upon the the big body of research that we have in the product and brand area for branding versus the people branding area which was more underdeveloped.

So I think there are concepts that transfer incredibly well, I’ll talk about one step in the personal branding process as creating a personal value proposition. And that’s a 4 part strategic statement that looks just like a customer value proposition. So if you take my Mba marketing course, you’d be like, I recognize that. And I think it translates really well, it it encourages us to focus on who is our audience? Who are we branding for and to to focus on the people on the other side of the table. It enables us to think about that point of difference or that unique value claim that we’d like to make and it helps us understand that we do that in the context of competition. And it allows us to imagine the evidence or the proof points that we need to put forward. So there’s a nice parallel between the world of products and people. But there, I think there’s 1 really important difference between marketing, a product and marketing a person.

Jill: And that is that we are human and we act human. And that means we make mistakes, and we sometimes act off brand and we do things that aren’t always accretive to our brand or creating brand equity in a more positive way. And so when we’re managing a personal brand, we have to get good at managing inconsistencies or multiple identities. I think there’s you know, there’s there’s other things that get in the way of personal branding that we just don’t have to worry about on the product branding side things like we’re personally and psychologically invested in ourselves to the point where we’re biased. We can’t easily see our weaknesses. So when we do a personal brand audit on us.

We we can’t really interpret the data well by ourselves. We might need other people to come in and and help us interpret that so so because it’s us, and because we’re human. We, you know, it is a little bit different from marketing products and and regular.

AW: I can see that it would be so. I was thinking as humans, no matter what, every day that goes by. We’re also aging. But but so is a brand right like you. You could, if you were forced to. You could even say what what you were just talking about is is similar to like a brand transgression, right?

Jill: It is, it is. We have brand crises in both personal branding and in product branding, that that we need to manage and and negotiate our ways our way through.

AW: Yeah, yeah, so it’s like, it’s a force fit. But I love. I love your point. It’s actually the difference is that we’re human. And the box of tide on the shelf is not.

Jill: Yes, and so it’s much easier to manage the brand of a box of tide, because tide doesn’t act up over time.

AW: Much easier, but not nearly as satisfying.

Jill: Exactly.

AW: Again, we’re self-interested. So okay, I love it. I love it. When you and I met Jill we were talking about how, in both of our experiences. We found it really interesting that some people are hesitant to develop their brand right? It’s like they they put up a bit of a wall. Can you share with us? What? What your experience of what you’ve heard from people who are, who have this hesitation.

Jill: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of anxiety. There’s a lot of frustration out there about the need for personal branding. Even myself every semester my Mba students would come to me and say, Professor Avery, you know this course was really interesting, but do you have anything on personal branding. And I would be like. Yeah, we well, I don’t do that. I you know, I market products and and brands. I don’t market people. And I had this like sense of uncomfortableness about it, that that it was fundamentally different. And as I present this work to audiences, I often have people who sit in the audience with arms crossed, you know, shaking their head, disagreeing with me, and they come up afterwards, and and they start to argue that they don’t want to be a personal brand. They don’t want to feel commercialized by this, that they just want to act authentically. They just want to present themselves without having to be strategic or intentional about this. So so it feels to some people false. It feels like they’re an actor on a stage rather than just being themselves in in life. I think the other point of uncomfortableness comes from the fact that we’ve grown up in a world where we’ve been socialized to not toot our own horns. We’ve been socialized to be humble or demure or not not really tell people what we have to offer. And so there’s a social reticence to personal branding. As well.

And then there’s other people who have seen people’s efforts at personal branding that have gone awry, and you know some people do this in a very inauthentic way, or smarmy way, or they’re too sales mini, and it feels uncomfortable, and and people don’t want to be perceived as as that themselves. And then I think, there’s there’s some people who don’t like caring about what others think of them. They don’t like that concept that other people are always judging them. And so they say, I I don’t care about managing my personal brand. I am who I am, and I don’t care how you perceive me. And with those people I often say, great you be you. But remember that a lot of your professional and personal goals rely upon other people. And so you must think about how you’re communicating your value to those people if you need them, in achievement of of your your professional or personal goals. So so I find that one interesting. It is. I I think that the getting us through this getting us through the anxiety and the uncomfortableness really important, Andrea, it’s it’s about finding a way to do personal branding in a way that feels true and authentic and not smartmy.

Jill: It’s a way to, you know. Put your story out there, but in a way that allows you to do that naturally, so that you can enact it in every touch, point in every day of your life, without like effortful thinking and strategy for it.

Jill: So the the effort and personal branding, I think, has to come at the beginning of the process where you’re uncovering and refining your stories. The enactment of those stories should feel natural and authentic. Otherwise my opinion you’re doing it wrong.

AW: Yeah, I owe Jill. This is music to my ears. So so much of what you’re saying, I say in just in different words. It’s 2 steps. The 1st is articulating or creating, and the second step is communicating, and then there’s the updating. If if there was a 3rd step, it’s of course it’s constantly evolving most coaches and probably even faculty that are focused on personal branding don’t spend enough time on Step One. They they shift right to, you know, finding social media followers, or whatever step one is really like you, said the self-discovery where you identify what makes you unique. And so I say, garbage in garbage, out quality in quality out, let’s spend 75% of our time focused on the articulation and and creating the narrative that is authentic to you, and then step 2 is so much easier. It’s so easy.

Jill: I know. Matt, I told you that I actually have had this experience a couple times when people have hired me to coach them over the course of, say, 6 months. And so we we create a plan. Of course, the the plan changes over time. But we create a plan of the topics that we’re going to cover. And it’s all the usual things that you would think about from a communication coach. Right? It’s confidence and listening and storytelling and formal presentations, and so on.

AW: And then personal branding, so creating your personal brand, and then communicating your personal brand, and a couple times when these folks have then gone to their managers to get approval. The man it has happened where the managers have said all the topics look great except personal branding. Take that off. So then I said, Okay, well, let’s call it something different. Let’s call it professional identity.

Jill: Yeah. About, you know, identifying your unique and authentic strength so that you can focus your career in those areas and your value to the organization. And then suddenly, it’s approved. Right? So.

Jill: Fascinating.

AW: Has baggage.

Jill: It has the word brand has baggage, and I and I think it goes back to that. I don’t want to be a commercial product. I want to be a human. I want to be a person. And so sometimes I’ll I’ll talk about this. If people are uncomfortable with the word branding. I’ll talk about this as discovering and communicating your personal narratives. This is about storytelling and and getting people comfortable with uncovering. composing, and and creating the stories that that make them them, and then communicating those.

AW: Beautiful, beautiful. So I call them themes. I like calling them stories. That’s that’s wonderful. So some people have different. It’s not to say, other people’s definition is wrong. It’s just that’s not what what you and I are talking about. We’re not talking about monetizing people. We’re not talking about creating different people right? Or changing a person. It’s it’s discovering their stories. I really like that. So so separate from that misconception. Are there any mistakes, or maybe other misconceptions that you have witnessed that people make when they’re developing and managing their personal brand.

Jill: There’s a few common mistakes that that people make in personal branding, I I think. The one, and it stems from the anxiety and the hesitation that we’ve been talking about. Andrea is having an underdeveloped or insufficient personal brand and you know, this might be characterized by a person who says, Oh, I I just I don’t have a Linkedin profile.

And in today’s world, not having a Linkedin profile, says something about your personal brand. You know you can’t avoid having a personal brand like it or not. In professional and personal settings. We all have a personal brand, and everything we do or don’t do, contributes to the building of of that brand. So if we make a conscious choice to really disengage from personal branding that builds our personal brand, but not in a way that’s that’s very advantageous for us. So so be careful about opting out of, you know personal branding activities that most people are are engaged in.

AW: A long time ago, years ago, I wrote an blog and an email newsletter about you know this, this main point, that we all have a brand whether we choose to strategically manage it or not, and you might be surprised at how easy and even enjoyable or satisfying it is to do some of that discovery work and then develop your brand. And I said, the analogy is your credit rating. so you have a brand whether you choose to manage it or not. You also have a credit rating, and you can ignore your credit rating, but your credit rating doesn’t go away, and it it can, and probably will affect you when you’re, you know, making a major purchase, or even getting a job right?

Jill: Yeah, that’s a great analogy.

AW: An hour.

Jill: It’s, you know, particularly in today’s world. Avoiding personal branding is just really not an option. And I’m not sure it ever has been. You know, people point to the rise of social media as building up the hype of personal branding. But we’ve always had a need for personal branding. We’ve always had a need to communicate the value that we bring to the world. So our medium is different in the way that we communicate it. We use, you know, online and and social media and other digital technologies to help us. But we’ve always done this work. And there’s always been a need for this work.

AW: We’ve always had a reputation or an identity. Right? So when I’m working with my clients on defining first, st what personal brand is it is, if you, I say to them, if you’re thinking reputation and identity, you’re bang on. That’s really what we’re talking about.

Jill: Exactly, exactly.

AW: On that I hope so.

Jill: Yeah, I. I explain it to my students as the image that other people hold about you in their head. And that image is very impactful because it it affects the way people perceive. You understand, you value, you experience you. It’s it really molds a lot of the way people interact with you. And so it’s important for us to care about. That brand that exists. you know. It’s it’s funny to think about our personal brand as something that we can curate and try to manage and shepherd. But it actually doesn’t belong to us. It exists in the minds of other people.

AW: Oh, very well, put Jill. You are going to be quoted on that that is, I would say, a lovely I need to think of the word a lovely. not interpretation. Actually, that is, I think, a very eloquent interpretation of Jeff Bezos. Quote where he says, your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room. So that used to be my definition that I used with my clients. And and I said, it’s now it’s more like a mental exercise. Right? What is your boss and your boss’s boss saying about you when they’re meeting to talk about promotions. and your name comes up in conversation. What do they think? And what do they say? That’s your brand? And then I see the looks on people’s faces like -oh! And I say, this is all good. There are things that you aspire to. There are things that you’re working on, and there’s things that you are that they don’t know yet, and we can. We can work with all of that. So.

Jill: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that points to one of the other mistakes that people make often in personal branding where they think it’s all about me. It’s all about what I want to say, and you know who I am and how I project that to the world.

Yes, it is about you, but it’s about you in relation to other people, and the value that you want to deliver to other people. And so the best personal branders are the ones who really get into the heads of their audience, who understand the person on the other side of the table, and all of the misconceptions or stereotypes, or existing brand associations, that they might already hold about you. and then using your personal branding efforts to change their minds, to adjust that story and renegotiate your personal brand with those people over time. Now, is it all people do. I need to care about what everybody thinks about me? No, I just need to care about the people who are important to my goals, and that might be people at work, people in at home. But if someone’s important to me and and important to the achievement of my goals. Then I do need to care about what, how they perceive me and and what my personal brand is in their mind.

AW: This morning I had a coaching call with a client. and we were kicking off the personal branding stuff, and he started making some comments about his response to things that were going on in some meetings. and I said to him, You sound like you’re very self-aware, but externally self-aware. So you are consciously thinking about what other people are saying and doing, what your response is to them, and how your response is interpreted by them. You have this high external self-awareness, I said, most of us have pretty high if we’re successful anyway, high internal self-awareness, and we call that self-awareness right? But we may be less conscious of our external self-awareness. And I think what you’re describing is shifting the lens from. I know who I am to. What do other people think about me. It’s almost like it’s less selfish. right? It’s less myopic.

Jill: It’s almost like you’re having a meta understanding of the social interaction. Right? You’re you’re understanding how you’re acting, how that’s being perceived by the other person, and how that perception is going to affect the opportunities that you have to create value in the world. And so it’s it’s having other awareness. But it’s also having a more sophisticated social awareness of how your actions insight, response in someone else and how that’s going to cause their actions to be different towards you.

AW: Over time consistently reinforcing those things. So it just becomes like they don’t think about it. You walk in the room. They know exactly what they’re getting right.

Jill: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

AW: Okay, are you ready for the 3 rapid fire questions.

Jill: Yes, I am.

AW: Okay, I love it. They don’t need to be that rapid fire.

Jill: I know rapid fire questions always scare me. I don’t know why.

AW: The 1st question is, are you an introvert or an extrovert?

Jill: Oh, I think I’m an extroverted introvert. You know, as a professor I I speak in public every day, but I still get nervous before every class. And you know I I it’s it’s amazing to my students to see that and to hear that. And and they say, But you seem so calm, and I’m like no inside. I am shaking every time I have to do public speaking.

AW: So that’s why you do so well, Jill, because you have positive energy. That’s that’s what I tell my clients. When you feel that adrenaline in your. I feel it in my chest, too.

AW: Don’t think oh, no, I’m nervous. Think? Yes, now I’ve got the positive energy to go out there and knock it out of the park, and that’s what you do.

Jill: Yes, definitely. 1 1 of my colleagues at Harvard Business School, Allison Wood, Brooks, has a fascinating piece of research that teaches managers to reframe nervousness to excitement, to enhance their performance. And so I’m not nervous. I’m excited, says Alison.

AW: Being excited. It makes you smile when you say it right. I mean.

Jill: Exactly exactly, and I think you know I don’t think the anxiety will ever go away for me, but I think I’ve learned how to manage that anxiety in my communication practices, and so I’m an over preparer for any public speaking engagement that I have, and I write down notes, and I bring those notes into the classroom, and I lay them out on the table.

But once I start speaking I never look at the notes. It’s just a security blanket for me that I know, no matter what happens, whatever contingency happens, I’m prepared. And so that’s just one of my practices that I put in place to help me manage that anxiety.

AW: Sounds familiar. Jill.

Jill: Okay.

AW: Question number 2, what are your communication, pet peeves?

Jill: Oh, definitely, when my students start a comment with quote, this may be wrong, but. And I hate that you’ve just undermined your credibility. When you start a statement with that I want my students to speak with confidence. I want them to defend their ideas and and stand behind them when you lead off with. This might be wrong, or what I might be wrong. You’re sandbagging yourself. You’re you’re you’re making your audience, not listen as intently or not. Take your recommendation as seriously. So start strong. Finish, strong. Don’t sandbag.

AW: I love it. It’s the whole apologetic language thing right? And they, you know, the research shows that women use more apologetic language, and they preface their recommendation or their comment with. Can I just say a question, can I just say something? Or this might be wrong, but, like, just stop.

Jill: Yeah, yeah, no. Buts. Just make your recommendation confidently.

AW: Not just the recommendation that suffers the person. Actually, because you’re everything you say, you’re reinforcing something. You’re signaling something to other people about your brand about your credibility. Right?

Jill: Yup, it’s a it’s a weak posturing rather than a strong posturing.

AW: Beautiful okay. Last question is there a podcast or a book that you’ve find yourself recommending lately.

Jill: I am super excited about a book and it’s called Breaking Glass Tales from the Witch of Wall Street, and it’s authored by Patricia Walsh Chadwick, who actually is a colleague of mine from one of the corporate boards that I sit on. It’s a fascinating memoir. It’s a hero’s journey about a woman who grew up in a religious cult, who was expelled from the cult at age 17, with no education, no money, no place to live. and who worked herself up from that beginning as a receptionist in a brokerage firm to become a senior partner on Wall Street, breaking all kinds of glass ceilings having lots of trials and tribulations and adventures along the way. And I I love this book. It’s a story about perseverance. Patricia’s a fantastic storyteller. And this is a book that is also also a great social history of the 19 seventies, eighties, and nineties on Wall Street so highly recommend it.

I cannot wait to listen to it or read it. I’ve been listening to books lately, so oh, I can’t wait. I’m going to download it right now. Thank you so much.
Is there anything else you can think of that you want to share with the talk about talk listeners regarding personal branding.

Jill: I guess I would just leave you with. I know personal branding is a little scary. It might feel a little uncomfortable at first, st but I actually believe it’s the greatest gift you can give to yourself that time for self reflection that time to uncover and celebrate the real you, and that time to start owning the narratives that you’re putting out there in the world. Jill: All of that is going to help you make the difference that you’d like to make in the world. so just do it.

Thank you so much, Jill.

Jill: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

I could have gone on and on in that conversation, but I have to respect your time and Jill’s. So now, I’m going to quickly summarize with three of the themes or learnings here that I want to reinforce for you.

The first point is what I refer to as the most important strategic principles of personal branding – focusing on what makes you unique. Jill refers to it as your POINT OF DIFFERENVCE. She said, QUOTE:

Personal Branding is about discovering what we’ll call in marketing your points of difference. What makes you stand out from others around you? I think, unfortunately, we’ve been socialized to fit in with others, to make ourselves more like other people. Our real value as a person is about being different, being unique, seeing the world differently, approaching the world differently and creating value in a way that nobody else can.

And I loved her point about how we often think of our differences as deficits. Instead, she encourages us to… Embrace your blemishes. Maybe even embellish your blemishes. That’s what makes you memorable. It might even be how you add value.

The second point I want to reinforce from our conversation is that yes, we can take most of the tenets of product branding and apply them to ourselves as personal brands. We have points of different, and target markets and competition. But there is one critically important difference. Managing a person brand is more complicated because we’re human, We are complicated. Managing a product brand (like Tide laundry detergent) is much easier than managing a personal brand, but not nearly as satisfying. If you take the time and effort to focus on developing your brand, you’ll be amazed at the traction you get.

The 3rd and last point that I want reinforce is Jill’s reminder for leaders. She highlited how senior leaders should remember that while theyre focused on promoting their personal brand, they’re creating the conditions and the culture that allows others on their team to bring their authentic selves to work. She said QUOTE

“ The more vulnerable you can be in your personal branding effort as a senior leader, the more it makes it okay for everyone on the team to express who they are and their individuality and the value that they’d like to to bring.”

OK – that’s it for this episode!

.Thanks again to Jill for sharing her thoughts and expertise on personal branding. I loved every minute of our conversation, as I’m sure you could tell. I hope you too enjoyed listening!

If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you will refer it to one of your friends, and I also hope you’ll leave a review on Apple, Spotify or YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Thank you so much for listening. Talk soon!

The post Building Your Personal Brand with Harvard Business School Professor Jill Avery (ep.172) appeared first on Talk About Talk.