Episode 45: Riffing on Professional Reputation, Brand, and Identity
This week, Eric and Nayla enter the arena to tackle a topic that comes up nearly every week – our clients’ concerns about their professional reputation.
While the conversation is free form (and likely to take a few episodes to reconcile), we start by distinguishing between three terms: our identity (how we see and understand ourselves), our professional brand (what we choose to show the world) and our reputation (how the world sees us).
This topic is so highly sensitive because while we may have the impression that we can control and manage our personal brand (even as we flex and adjust it depending on our audience) we cannot always control how people perceive us – our reputation.
Getting comfortable and owning the shadow sides of our reputation as we learn about them allows us to accept ourselves and decide how to engage others in our personal growth. We advocate this through moving away from the secrecy and ‘big reveals’ of 360 data collection and other forms of building self-awareness, instead moving our reputation into the light through ongoing conversation and more openness with colleagues. Let them in on what you’re working on. This way we can have and acknowledge incremental progress as we make it and get help along the way!
The inside job is doing the conscious work of reconciling our desired brand with the way we are perceived, deciding what we can live with in terms of discrepancies between the two. Then, we can decide what to do about it – which we’ll explore further in a future conversation.
As always, we’d love to hear about your experiences, so please contact us via insidejobthepodcast.com or on Instagram and Facebook @insidejobpodcast.
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