Uh, Personal Brand? I didn’t know people could have a brand.

Me too, so lets talk about it.

When I hear the phrase personal brand, I immediately think of influencers, CEOs, athletes, and those people whose LinkedIn profiles are perfectly curated. I, for a long time, thought of personal branding as something you had to create. But the more I’ve thought about my own personal brand, the more I’ve realized that people are already forming an idea of who you are based on what you do, what you like to share, and how you show up. Instead of asking if I have a personal brand, I started asking myself: What do I want my personal brand to say about me?

project KJ

Short form, my personal brand can be summed up in three words: adventurous, resilient, and inspiring. I’ve always been a jack-of-all-trades kind of person, especially when it comes to sports. So if you want me on your intramural team, I can play just about anything. Growing up in Colorado, being active and being outdoors was a big part of my life. I’ve played tennis, cycled, rock climbed, run, and, the newest addition, kayaking. I just don’t want to be known for one sport or activity. I would much rather be known as someone willing to try something new and figure out the rules along the way.

That mentality goes beyond sports. At Gonzaga, I’ve really been proactive in trying to take on leadership roles, meet people, start projects, and create opportunities to do things rather than wait for them. For example, creating the Gonzaga Bike Club. I saw a student in the stands of a basketball game with a retro cycling cap on and told him, “I really like your cap. Is there a club on campus for cycling?” And he said there was, but it’s informal now. And I thought that an informal club is closing a lot of opportunities to get a campus wide cyclist group together; I’ll just make a club. I didn’t just add another bullet point to my resume; I created a community, small but mighty, where like-minded and passionate individuals can be together doing something they love.

Another one of my values is resilience. Things don’t go as planned a lot of the time, whether that is in sports, at school, or life in general. Resilience is not never being knocked down. Resilience, to me, is about working out what you can do next and keeping going without sitting down or waiting. I had to get knee surgery over the summer. Totally fun, right? Most of the summer was spent on crutches, and as my first major surgery, I wasn’t used to the idea of sitting around and binge-watching. By day 7 of recovery, I told my mom I wanted to play tennis. I, bundled up on the couch, attached to an ice box, was not going to play tennis. You can’t blame me; I have a restless mind. Instead of listening to the doubt in my mind telling me that I wasted my summer, or that I’ll never be back in running or tennis shape again, I learned how to move differently. I became very interested in how the body responds to pain and how athletes adapt during rehab. And I learned that there isn’t a lot that can knock me down; I’ll usually find a way to work around it.

That’s what I want The KJ Effect to be about. I don’t want my personal brand to make me look perfect. I want it to communicate that I am adventurous enough to try and to take risks others won’t, that I’m resilient and able to adapt without getting deflated, and that I always encourage others to do the same.

Now Your Turn

The funny thing about personal branding is that you don’t need a logo, a fancy marketing team, or cool commercials.

In their systematic review, Frontiers in Psychology defined personal branding as the “strategic process centered on a person’s unique combination of characteristics and the way those characteristics are communicated to an audience.” In other words, your brand is a collection of the qualities and experiences that come to mind when people think of you.

The University of Georgia Career Center’s guide to personal branding summarizes by saying, “It starts with a pretty simple question: What do you want to be known for?” They call it a kind of professional reputation. That’s an important distinction. Creating your brand is not about trying to create a character you think other people will like. It should be about becoming more intentional about the aspects of yourself that you want to highlight.

Here Are The Steps:

Ask yourself: What words describe me? What do people usually come to me for? What do I care about? What shaped the way I do things? What do people remember about me?
Now look at how you’re presenting yourself. Is that how you are on social media? Does what you do support how you’d describe yourself? Would your family/friends say the same about you? Would your followers describe you the same way if they met you in person?
Not every LinkedIn update, TikTok video, or Instagram story has to stretch to fit a big brand strategy. In fact, doing so can make your personal brand feel less personal. So focus on consistency over perfection.

For me, adventurous doesn’t mean that I need to post a picture of me on top of a mountain every week. It can be trying kayaking, me with the stray cat on the corner, me celebrating someone I love, going somewhere new. There are a lot of ways to communicate a core quality.

Your Brand Should Grow With You

The other thing I’ve realized is that I don’t expect my brand to be exactly the same when I’m out of college and in the job world.

I’m still figuring out what I want to do, what I’m good at, and what matters to me. That’s part of the fun in making The KJ Effect. It gives me a place to record those interests, as well as learn more about marketing and how people present themselves online.

The image that the world has of your personal brand should not be a fixed image of who you are, but the flexible image of the values and characteristics that you take with you as you grow. You can always change things! But for now, I want mine to tell people that I’m someone who will do the hard things, take on challenges, adapt when I’ve botched things, and have a lot of fun along the way.

So what’s your effect?

Whether you wanted to or not, people have already associated certain things with your name, so your brand gives you the opportunity to think about whether those associations represent the person you want to be.

I know what I want The KJ Effect to say about me. What’s yours?

If you had to ask someone to describe you in three words and you weren’t there to influence them, what would they say? Do you think you present yourself as that type of person?

Until next time,

xx KJ