A PERSONAL BRAND IN NON-ACTION A.K.A A PLOY TO PREVENT BURNOUT SYNDROME (EN)

published in July 2023 | audio version SoundCloud | YouTube | follow LinkedIn newsletter 

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Is or isn’t a personal brand just an abstract “fancy” concept? Is it possible to work on personal brand development with ease or is it sometimes more about personal PR which is pushed too much? Why and how specifically can I work with the topic of personal brand if I am an employee and definitely not about to quit my job? And can working on personal branding also be a tool to prevent burnout syndrome? Since I mention it in the title, I guess so;)) So how can personal brand work be conceived in a more developmental, long-term way?

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#burnoutsyndrome #careerrestart #personalbrand #personalbranding #prevention #professionalchange #professionaltransition #career #careercounseling #careercoaching #careerdesigner #wellbeing #careerskill

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“Making a career”, “climbing up the ladder”, “career growth”... most of us probably have rather negative associations after reading such phrases. Something selfish, egotistical. Some of us, from past experience, have a less than flattering picture of past or present colleagues who are willing to sacrifice anything for their careers and often have too sharp elbows. And when we subsequently open up a topic like “developing a personal brand in professional life” with clients of career workshops or individual consultations, many of us again think of the same rather negative emotions around it. 

However, consciously working on one’s professional growth, or career if you will, is a natural part of working on developing one’s personal brand, which in itself can also be a significant part of preventing burnout syndrome, where, in layman’s terms, simply through regular self-reflection and a learned sensitivity to self-perception, I don’t let a situation get too far and can identify early on that something is not ideally set up.

A personal brand is not just a “marketing cliché”, but also a helper: ...in times of change!

If we first look at what a personal brand is, you will probably most often come across the classic bon mot that “a brand is what people say about you when you leave the room”.  Personally, I’m not a total fan of this “definition” although it captures much of the truth. And especially for the fact that it smacks a bit of “gossip and rumors”, which then distorts the view of what the concept as a whole is really about. 

And at the same time, I often hear clients object or question whether they therefore have to artificially create such an image of themselves in order to avoid a negative evaluation. And I would emphasize something else here. At the heart of working on a personal brand and reflecting on one’s own career path is the courage to be one’s own, it is authenticity, congruence, which for example is mentioned by the famous psychologist Carl Rogers. 

A personal brand is not a completely abstract and elusive concept but is made up of relatively clear concrete pieces which are then a bit easier to grasp when working with our brand. It is a puzzle of our strengths (but logically also weaknesses), our set of competences (hard and soft skills), our personality characteristics, values, the ability to say where I am coming from (professionally) and where I am now. 

Working with a personal brand is actually a little cheat sheet to sort through, to compose our thoughts about our career decisions throughout our lives. 

Most of us sort of naturally reach for some sort of personal-brand review when going into a career change. And it doesn’t matter whether the change is outward or inward, vertical or horizontal, radical or gradual... Any type of review/inventory is undoubtedly appropriate because it’s more effective to be at least somewhat structured when going through change: to piece together and connect information, but also emotions. 

This is where working with the sub-parameters of the personal brand can help us, as a kind of guide. In fact, having “something to hold on to”, “something to fall back on” just for those first steps in the change can at least partially reduce the stress level that usually surfaces around a professional change. 

Stress is perfectly natural in this situation (even if we are making the change voluntarily). 

And it’s good to take this into account. In a good way as a motivator and then from the other side to watch that it isn’t paralyzing for our planned steps. Generally speaking, any change is something naturally threatening for us, stepping out of our comfort zone requires special effort, time, and extra energy. And job change/loss is rightly listed among the top stressors compiled into a ranking by psychologists Holmes and Rahe (you can take a mini stressor accumulation test here, for example).

A personal brand is not just a “marketing cliché”, but also a helper: ...at a time when seemingly nothing special is happening!

From the point of view of “career self-management”, i.e. lifelong long-term work with one’s professional identity, the period of “NO-action” is just as important as the period of “action”. And I see two important levels there.

The FIRST level is “training”. In the period of action, or change of some kind, it is sometimes quite difficult for us to separate and prioritize facts vs. our emotions vs. the emotions of those close to us (who, like it or not, leave some traces on our decision making). Often there are also already stressors playing a role, such as time running out, money running out in the bank, etc. 

So it’s great if we can learn to work with the principles of personal career review in periods of calm. 

The term “career self-management” is most often associated with the word “skill”, i.e. the ability to consciously manage one’s career decisions. And the good news is that every skill is trainable. 

So if I get used to working with my own revision, my own vision, my own self-worth in the job market on an ongoing basis - in a crisis you’ll be ready. 

The SECOND level is a look at why working with personal brand continuously even during NO-action is actually preventing burnout syndrome. I have selected three authors who, although they do not primarily work with the topic of personal branding, their publications are full of references to specifically working with the subparts of personal branding. And they show a much broader interpretation of the topic than just a kind of, for some, elusive or sometimes even hated, personal marketing.

In the Czech Republic, you will probably most often come across the topic of burnout syndrome, popularized by Radkin Honzák in many books or lectures. For example, he mentions that one of the roles in the prevention and recovery from burnout syndrome is working with self-confidence. And this can be beautifully strengthened through reviewing real outcomes through the lens of personal branding. Not by artificial proclamations, but by describing real outcomes, situations, emotions, results from the recent past and present. 

Furthermore, the topic of prevention (not only of burnout syndrome) is also dealt with extensively in the professional work, publications, and workshops in the field of positive psychology of Martin Seligman. In his PERMA model for positive thriving / well-being, he mentions in the context of personal branding e.g. knowing one’s strengths and applying them to “flow”, knowing one’s life values, discovering new things at work, setting realistic work goals, reflecting on successes and failures. That is,. everything that is part of regular personal brand work!

As part of his search for life happiness, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has researched globally different samples of the population to arrive at a description of the consensus across people of different races, cultures, and continents that the moment of happiness is in self-realization within activities where I feel flow. Sometimes I stumble upon such moments by accident. But most of the time, the more realistic scenario is that I purposely pursue such situations/work/interests.

So, what has worked well with personal branding, and what might the next steps be?

I hope I’ve given you at least one more reason to work with your personal brand on an ongoing, happy, easy basis. Now let’s take a look at how to do it.  For me personally - I recommend a minimum recurrence interval (for the NO-action period) of 6 or 12 months. 

And now the steps:

1. At least once a year, sit down for a few hours in a quiet and personally inspiring environment (for some, a cafe, for some, an office without people, for others, a park, a forest...) and prepare any tool that you are comfortable brainstorming, thinking with: for some, pencil and paper, for some, post-its, for others, an app on your ipad, …

2. Write down your view of the year: 5 of your top hard skills (what you get paid for at work), 5 of your top soft skills or personality traits (if you are completely stumped, you can use various diagnostic tools, but I recommend really thinking for yourself first), 10 of your current life values, your network of current important professional and non-professional contacts (who supported you, who saw and evaluated your professional achievements the most, ... ), your current feelings about your position (what it gives you X what it takes away from you), write down everything you have learned this year (whether on a course or through a work assignment or from colleagues), look at your work-life balance and health in relation to the style of work you have

3. For all this, try to create a variant for the year to come: what would you like to be part of in the year to come, what skills would you like to use the most at work, what values would you like to live by in your work team, try to describe the degree of probability (what is absolutely realistic vs. rather realistic vs. definitely unrealistic) ... etc.

4. Be as specific as possible when looking at the past and the next year, don’t skim the surface, feel free to look at your notes a few days later and fill them in again

5. Look at how your view of the past year vs. the upcoming year correlates with your current position - if there is a big overlap, it will probably reinforce that you are still in the right place this year, at this point clients often say that in the occasional somewhat creeping routine of being in the same position for years, it helped them realize that despite some stereotyping, the past year was interesting and that maybe they learned something new anyway

6. I also recommend looking at the specific activities you spent most time doing last year and try to compare them to how much energy they took vs. gave you

7. If your wishes are more at odds with the reality of the position (whether in terms of values, or the possibility to apply your skills, or in terms of your energy level and desire to work...), it can be an impulse to look around to see if even a small change could be a possible solution to your sprouting dissatisfaction - it could be, for example, about getting involved in a new company-wide project (i.e. we don’t have to change everything right away, but we can iterate gradually), or a chance to talk to my supervisor about changes in my job description, ... it may also be about changes in the non-work sphere - they are two connected vessels that cannot be separated anyway

8. ... and if the possibility of even minor changes, i.e. If you don’t see any change, or even just a slight redefinition of the job description, as a solution, look around the company for positions that meet your vision, or think about the possibility of a freelance job, or a combination of both, or for less radical solutions, the possibility of “side projects”, or volunteering, or a new hobby or course - keep in mind that most solutions are not a radical choice between black and white, but that there are many shades in between.

So, in any case, reviewing your personal brand (see the “what has worked” points mentioned above) can reduce the stress level around any career change. Not only by naming “who I am in the job market, what I offer, where I am going from here” helps to find other options for solutions, other scenarios for change. But it can also reassure us that we are now in the “right place” and do not need change now. In the case of many years in one position, it can also be motivating, refreshing for someone, for example, that there are still new moments in a long-standing routine, that even so we sometimes learn new competencies, etc. At the same time, we learn to work with our personal inventory in periods of calm, which secondarily can contribute to the prevention of burnout syndrome.

Can someone/something in my personal inventory help me?

There are a lot of continuous reflection tools on the market now (because personal branding is about looking at myself vs. looking at how I want to be perceived by others). Often these tools address the topic of time management a bit more with overlap (e.g. Doller, Bullet Journal, etc.) and are built on a daily, weekly, or monthly, multi-year basis. I do encourage clients, if they are not much of a writer or a fan of some sort of regular agenda, to try to do this at least once a year. It was for this approach that I created the Career DYARY a few years ago, which is just a space to look at the year past and future + provides a space to update all the important parameters of a personal brand. But maybe you can put together a certain set of questions yourself that suits and helps you, and plain paper and pencil will do:)

I’ll be glad if you take away from this article that naming “who I am and where I’m going from here”, at least in the job market (although the overlap into privacy, health and relationships can’t be artificially separated from that, of course), is not an annoying obligation related only to updating LinkedIn when I’m looking for a job, but a high-quality self-reflection tool. And we know that self-reflection is one of the tools to prevent, for example, burnout syndrome. Even when I’m still with the same employer and I don’t want to change that anytime soon. 

Petra Drahoňovská, Career Designer