If you don’t know yourself, it’s impossible for you to operate in your fullest potential as an entrepreneur and personal brand. Therefore, self-awareness is the #1 key to success.
To be a successful personal brand, it’s imperative that you know your gifts, skills, strengths, weaknesses and abilities. And, to help you accomplish this, I have 3 self-awareness exercises I want you to do that will help you identity what makes you unique, identify your strengths and weaknesses that can be used as essential components of your personal brand.
For example, if you’re a strong communicator, perhaps you want to incorporate public speaking into your branding and marketing strategy. If your weakness is video production, a way to use that to your advantage is to partner with someone (perhaps a college student) who’s getting their start in video production and you can be a case study for them. These are just a couple of examples how you can use your strengths and weaknesses to your advantage.
Let’s jump into the three self-awareness exercises.
1. The Mirror Exercise
The Mirror Exercise, which is where you self-identify your gifts, strengths, weaknesses and skills. What do YOU believe about you? This is not going to be an easy exercise, but in order for it to work, you must be brutally honest with yourself.
2. The Peer Revelation Exercise
The Peer Revelation exercise is where you ask 3 of the closest people to you what they believe your gifts, strengths, weakness and skills are. Be sure to ask people who won’t sugar coat it and who will be honest with you. The worse thing you can have is someone who’s trying to be nice just to spare your feelings. This exercise isn’t about being nice–it’s about getting down to the nitty gritty of who you are as a person so that you can become better. If done correctly, after completing this exercise you will be very enlightened about what people think of you–it may not be what you expect.
3. The Reality Check Exercise
The final exercise is called Reality Check because it is the intersection of what you believe about you and what others believe about you. This is where you write down the commonalities from your and your peers’ answers to exercises 1 and 2. What are your takeaways here? What qualities (positive or negative) do you have that can be used to grow your brand? What weak spots do you may have that can hinder your growth if left unchecked?
The last thing I want you to do is write your Personal Vision Statement (your vision for your life), your Life Purpose Statement (reason for living) and your Why Statement (the reason you wake up and do what you do).
At the end of this lesson, you will have a deeper understanding about who you are as a person, which is far more important than anything else in business. Again, you are the brand, so having the ability to self-assess is vital to your continued success.
As best practice, go through this self-discovery process at least once per year. If you do all of these exercises with honesty, integrity and with an open mind, you will be on your way to becoming a better you and ultimately a better entrepreneur.
To make this self-discovery easier, I’ve created a mini-workbook that has spaces for you to complete these exercises. You can fill it out on the computer or print it. Good luck.
