Powerful Personal Branding | Ann Bastianelli | TEDxWabashCollege

[Music] no matter where you woke up this morning we all live in the same home yep and no matter what people tell you about how many different types of people live here there only Just Two Types of People people those who use themselves to benefit others and those that use others to benefit themselves yeah I first learned this this lesson when I was 5 years old I was sitting having a conversation with my dad which was kind of rare because my dad is a well he was a busy guy and I was the middle child

and sort of starved for attention so I never wanted to miss any opportunity to get his attention and to impress him well anyway this is how the conversation ended hey Dad I'm thirsty okay milk or water uh h both okay which first uh water first because then you won't have to wash out the glass before I have the milk wow Annie great idea what a smart little girl you are and there was the lesson there was the lesson I had always assumed if I was ever going to get Dad's attention it would be because of

something about me turns out it was something about him and and all I really did was save him the time and trouble of washing out a glass you know years later I learned the same lesson again when someone said people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care don't be deluded into thinking that real life is going to be like college it's not high G Pas in the world that life is really a whole lot more like high school see in high school it's about popularity and in life the things

that make you popular start to matter again you go into the store you see all of these brands on the Shelf they're there because they're popular they're there because they do something that benefits people people seek them out they talk to other people about them they follow them it's the same thing with your personal brand you're not entitled to a place here you have to earn your place and I'm here to talk to you about that powerful personal branding how do you define who you are how do you get attention from people how do you

earn your place here so we're going to talk a little bit about the benefits of personal branding and then I'm going to tell you what steps you go through there's just three to build and cultivate your own well first of all you already have a personal brand you know what it is Forbes did a study and they found out that 70% of professionals believe that they've defined their personal brand and that they know how other people feel about them they know their public reputation except only 15% of them were right especially about the reputation part

so what happened there well people when they hear the words personal and branding in the same sentence think it has something to do with talking about yourself all the time than self-promotion but yes see the lesson is it's not about you it's about who other people know you to be so how does that work why should you be concerned because there are three important benefits of having a strong personal brand you lead more you win more and you earn more you lead need more because people think they know who you are authentically and so they

follow you more enthusiastically and they get more people to follow you you win more because it turns out that life is really just a lot of negotiations one right after another so if you're trying to get into grad school or if you're trying to negotiate a new starting salary or if you're just trying to win an argument with your significant other it's important to know what the other person truly values in you then you negotiate from a position of confidence not of fear and you earn more because well if you have a strong personal brand

you win 10 to 25% more earnings every year so for perspective uh a business school graduate makes $52,000 a year on average 25% more than that is $65,000 a year pretty big difference especially when you know that 2third of Lifetime wage growth occurs in the first 10 years of a career now if you think about a 40-year business career that initial difference blows up to something like half million dollars this is important stuff so how do you do it how do you build your own strong personal brand into what you want it to be three

steps so self-awareness this is not just about the you you know this is not just about who you know yourself to be between your ears in your head because by definition that's your personal identity so nobody but you knows that self-awareness is just as much about your reputation who others know you to be so if you're concerned about whether or not your personal identity matches your public reputation there's an easy way to find out find some friends and peers and colleagues who will be brutally honest with you and ask them what's like experiencing me as

a friend as a colleague as a peer as a leader and if you hear answers that you hadn't expected you'll have a little bit of direction about where to start building your personal brand you see we're all just a little bit like Mr Potato Head really I mean who knew that Mr Potato Head has all this stuff inside it and the same is true with you you have all this stuff inside you Mr potatoe head is a very multifaceted multi-talented guy on any given day he can pull any of that stuff out from inside him

and Define who he is to the world and so can you but see nobody knows what's inside you except you so the first thing you have to do step one is you have to decide who you want who do you want to be defined as and then look inside your Potato Head and figure out what do I need to bring out to prove to people that's who I am that's what I can do now you can't fake this because you can't bring things out of your potatoe head that weren't there to begin with but that's

how it works in terms of self-awareness now once you've decided that kind of stuff now step two is about telling your story and living it every day providing the world with living proof you are what you say you are now this is a lot like my my conversation with my dad and that you cannot waste an opportunity to try to share your story with them why because you're always getting evaluated you're always being interviewed for jobs and roles that may not even exist yet personally professionally so everything counts the way you talk the way you

work the way you play the way you interact with people all of it ultimately all of those things even status happen because other people believe they know who you are and believe you fit with them and if you fit they hire you they marry you they loan you money because they know your story so what does it take to tell a compelling story that's relevant to the marketplace Well turns out there's three steps to that too it's just like an advertisement number one got to be attention getting we do live in a turbulent chaotic world

where everybody's vying for attention so it's got to be attention getting secondly it's got to be relevant it's got to be clear what the relevant benefit is that you offer to the world so people can tell what it is the ways that you might match with them and third it's got to be memorable because if you've done all this work to try to earn your place here you don't want people to forget your name or not know where to find you so these are the things that go into telling your story the third step is

in deepening relationships it's not really enough just to be able to fill the needs of those who matter most to you now their current needs because this is about building trust and loyalty so this also involves recognizing and anticipating their future needs and filling them before you're asked to do it so you might remember Nicholas Spark's novel The Notebook in this love story The Woman develops Alzheimer's and the Man in the story finds within his Potato Head a whole new capability because of his love and his loyalty to her and he goes to her every

day and reads to her from a notebook a diary of their shared experiences together and that helps him cope with this devastating disease a another example uh Apple is terrific at building and deepening relationships you guys Apple users probably lots of you sure and your relationship with apple began probably when you bought a laptop which was more simple and more convenient than a desktop the Apple story is about Simplicity and convenience everything about it so you buy the laptop they start the relationship with you and then they look inside their Potato Head and say is

there anything else in here here that we can use that we can bring out that will show people new ways to simplify their life they have more convenience in their life and you know what they found miniaturization they found more functionality and that's what they built into the iPhone that's what they built into the iPad the Apple phone you know the idea you probably own all those things and this doesn't mean that they don't have competitors oh je they're competitors offer similar products sure and they're all trying to tell you their story but you're not

listening to them because Apple has been so terrific at knowing what it is that you need and anticipating what it is you're going to need in the future and taking care of that before you even ask him you know every time I talk about this subject I always think it's important to tell you about one of my first job experiences CU it turns out to have been a master class in personal branding I played volleyball and basketball at Indiana University and graduated with a graphic design degree and a few months after that I was named

sports information director for the 10 Varsity women's sports which involved promoting uh the sports that the 10 uh teams and talking about the results and so forth and so on so this was terrific for somebody who eventually wanted to get into Big Time advertising me and I was in that position for about a year when I developed a friendship with bob Knight now in his 29-year career at Indiana University bob Knight won 75% of his games three national championships 11 Big 10 titles 12 Coach of the Year titles two International gold medals as the coach

Bob Knight is a guy who used himself to benefit others specifically his players to a boy who wanted to play college basketball wanted to earn ear a degree wanted to win championships wanted to be best prepared for the NBA or whatever else life held after graduation Indiana was the premere program and bob Knight was the reason why now the thing was Bob had two different public reputations one of them was he was clearly unquestionably the best college basketball coach anywhere the second one was that his that his language that his behavior that his ways of

motivating his teams were sometimes so over the top that some people thought that was completely unacceptable no matter what his win loss record was I became friends with Bob just about the time he was named head coach of the Pan-American basketball team and our friendship started as most do you know pleasantries in the hall head coach you know and then these little pass by sort of graduated to longer conversations more substantial I found myself thinking of him it was again almost like these conversations with my dad where I'd think you know I'm just really listening

for things that I can do things that I can maybe he hasn't thought about this yet maybe I could come up with something to help him and so then he started to ask me for my opinion about stuff we talked a lot about you know what should you do in this situation with the PanAm organizing committee or hey Annie what would you do to publicize the PanAm games because nobody out there seems to know what the heck they are and how important they are to the Olympic movement we talked a lot about the media we

talked a lot about sports writers as you might imagine well on one of these conversations finished and he said I got to tell you what man you you your ideas are completely different than everybody else I know including me I'm telling you one of these days we're going to work together I'm thinking yeah sure we are well the team went off to Puerto Rico to play the PanAm games and it was the best of times and worst of times for Co Knight's brand best of times the team won the gold medal convincingly scored more than

100 points a game but coach was arrested accused of assaulting a Puerto Rican policeman now there wasn't really reliably good news coming out of San Juan at that time so the only thing the public had to go on was coach Knight's personal brand and his reputation so the who your faithful the people who supported him they were concerned worried and the people who were his foes and the people who really were against him were emboldened to be more critical than ever it was absolutely unrelenting the team returned from Puerto Rico the entire panm delegation and

nobody knew where coach Knight was I mean the athletic director didn't know the president of Indiana University didn't know the governor didn't know which was important because people were talking about extraditing him so this is the scenario when I'm in my office one day sitting there working all of a sudden there he is in my doorway it's coach Knight does anybody know where you are I don't think so and he stepped inside the door and closed it softly behind him Annie I've decided it's time we work with one another okay I said what he stand

give give me a minute now listen you know what my my priorities are I know that what you want to do long term I don't want to deal with all this stuff I love the way you think I said okay but what do you want me to do for you he said I want you to explain why I do the things I do right after I do them how could I possibly know why you do the things you do he said listen I don't know why the hell I do the things I do I'll go

along with whatever you say so self-aware absolutely self-aware coach knew that it wasn't in his Mr Potato Head to deal with constant criticism from the public and the press it just he might not have even had the capability to do that but we'd had enough conversations we'd spend enough time together we' shared each other's stories enough that he knew was in mine and he knew that that's what I wanted to do big time someday so he outsourced his personal brand to me coach and I was the best coach in basketball but nobody but coach Knight

could control his behavior what I could do however what I could do was try to limit the occasions on which he might get provoked so I started to study the sports writers the people who were in these press conferences and I saw that a troubling number of the guys who were there had never written a positive story about him ever and then I started to watch how they were behaving and they seemed to just needle him in these in these press conferences there weren't good questions about the game or him or the strategy or anything

else just needling them so I revoked their press credentials and what was left was a press Corp that honestly and earnestly reported what happened in the game and what coach did in fact one of those guys was John Feinstein who wrote for the Washington Post you might remember he wrote a bestseller about the hooers and about Coach Knight season on the brink step three deepening relationships well clearly after Puerto Rico the relationship between coach Knight and the hoer nation frankly the public at large was fractured and so we had to come up with a strategy

for that and see the best strategy was transparency we're Indiana University we're the premier basketball program and he is our coach he's the best in the world at this I called the producer at 60 minutes I'll give you an exclusive story you have complete access to coach you can go into locker rooms you can go into games practices Hunting Fishing whatever it is you want to do he loved it and when the public and the press found out we were willing to be that open at that transparent all that negativity and and and public criticism

kind of died down almost died dead away when that 60 minutes program ran that following spring just before the NCAA tournament was the highest rated 60 minutes program at the time so what happened to the hooers coach night well in February we won the Big 10 champion I ship and he was named coach of the year in the conference in March he won the NCAA Championship and he was named National coach of the year in May half of the team was drafted into the NBA and 6 months later the Olympics committee named him the 1984

Olympics coach you know once he didn't have to deal with all that stuff that wasn't in his Potato Head he could deal with the stuff that was and what about me well after I uh had worked for Coach Knight my own reputation kept expanding because I became known as someone who could take challenging Communications issues and commun communicate to the right people at the right time with the right message and I really remember I really wanted to be in BigTime advertising and Coach Knight was good to his word it did help having work for him

I did my MBA I went on to launch my career in advertising and that led to famous campaigns that are still running today two scoops of raisins for Kellogg's raisin brand Lego my egoo for Eggo waffles Dow bath cleaner Scrubbing Bubbles happy meals for McDonald's now what about you if you haven't listened to anything else I've said here today and I hope you have but if you haven't here's what you need to remember having a strong personal brand will allow you to lead more win more earn more and it's a pretty straightforward process self-awareness telling

your story living into your story and deepening your relationships so I think when you came in they gave you a pen and a Post-It note did they give you that I got a challenge for you pull those out and write down what's in your Potato Head right now that needs to come out this is really important stuff you are always being evaluated you are always being interviewed for things that may not even exist today I want you to take that Post-It note when you're done with it put it in your wallet as a reminder to

live that way starting right now and if you decide you want to change your mind that's okay but do it consciously live deliberately because you can never know the day when someone might appear in your doorway and change your life or even better when you might have the opportunity to change someone else's thank you [Applause]