A couple of days ago I shared about how important it is to know why you do what you do. Whether its starting a business, staying home with your kids, or keeping your conventional job, they key to consistent happiness is knowing WHY you do it! I also shared how for me, that “why” is my freedom! Today, I’m excited to get a little juicier with this.
For me freedom is more than just dropping everything & spending the day exploring Los Angeles with my husband (although that is a wonderful and significant part of this whole thing for me:), its also being free to do more than survive; to build a business that excites me AND provides for my family AND enables me to help others. Does this sound too good to be true? Its not.
The best thing about building a strong personal brand is that it doesn’t limit you to a single business or topic. A brand built around who you are and what makes you different from allllll the other people who say they do what you do & paves the way for you to pursue your heart’s desire. A brand built around you enables you to dream BIG and love what you do for a living.
Okay, let me break this down. I’m not sure if I’m ‘supposed’ to say this, but up until, maybe two weeks ago I hated (like with a passion) blogging. I felt like it was something I HAD to do, a task that was required of those who want to be successful entrepreneurs. I was willing to do it because I love my business so much, but I was going to do it kicking and screaming. As I am sure you can imagine, this did not feel good and really did not resonate with my “why”. So one night I started thinking about why I didn’t want to blog and what it would look like to want to do it.
As I considered this, two issues came to light. First, I simply didn’t know what to talk about and that scared me. It also led to me understand my second issues. I realized I was limiting myself to what I thought I “should” be blogging about. And that’s when it hit me: These two rather similar issues, in reality, were me limiting my brand. Or, me limiting ME! (and that’s just silly!:)
You see my branding coach (who happens to be sitting next to me at Starbucks right:) always said that we need to build businesses we want to run and nix all of the crap we think we “should” be doing but don’t really want to do. There are so many things like this in life where we think we understand an idea or principle until we have to apply it in our own lives and then we promptly loose all perspective and objectivity. So all of a sudden, standing in my kitchen, I finally understood what that meant to love blogging. So, to ensure I didn’t forget again & get all sad that I “had to blog”, I made a couple of promises to myself.
Here is my blogging manifesto:
- I will blog about everything brand, hold nothing back, and share my own experiences.
- I will NOT blog about things I think are boring.
- I will nor be afraid to integrate more of the things I think are interesting into my blog because more than likely there’s someone else who will think it’s interesting too.
There ya have it! It may seem very simple because, well, it is! The best thing about brand is that it is exactly who you are. What you care about, what you think is funny, what you do in your business, the list goes on and on. How can blogging be boring and burdensome when all I’m doing is writing down all of the things I spend time thinking about and caring about anyways!?!
Regardless of what you do for a living or where you are in your branding process, what are some topics that get your blood pumping? Things that you spend time thinking about, talking to your friends or spouse about? What makes you mad? What makes you want to change? What makes you so SO happy you can’t help but share? Tell me about those things in the comments below:)
