Personal Brand – Practical Exercise

Career Positioning • Personal Brand — Practical Exercise

Write Your Personal Brand Statement in 45 Minutes

Career Positioning — Practical Exercise

The deep dive this week made clear that personal brand isn’t a performance — it’s a more accurate, more visible version of the professional you already are. The building blocks are already there: your expertise, your values, your characteristic way of working, and the results you’ve created. This exercise brings those elements together into a clear, specific personal brand statement — one you can use in your LinkedIn summary, your professional bio, your introductions, and your own thinking about where you’re headed. Set aside 45 minutes, work through each step without rushing, and you’ll finish with something genuinely useful.

The Exercise

1. Audit your current brand — Before building anything new, find out where you’re starting. Think of three to five people who know your professional work well — past colleagues, managers, clients, or collaborators. Send them a brief message (email, text, or LinkedIn message) with a single question: “When you think of my professional strengths, what comes to mind first?” You don’t need five responses before you continue — even two or three give you useful signal. Write down what they say. Look for the pattern. That pattern is your current brand, whether you shaped it or not.
2. Identify your expertise anchor — Write answers to these three questions: What type of problem do I solve better than most people I know? In what kind of environment or context do I do my best work? What results have I created that I’m genuinely proud of? Look across your answers and identify one or two themes that appear consistently. That’s your expertise anchor — the professional capability at the centre of your brand.
3. Name your working style and values — Think about how you work, not just what you do. What do people consistently say about the experience of working with you? What do you bring to a team or a client relationship beyond technical capability? Write down three words or phrases that honestly describe your professional character — the values and approaches that show up reliably in how you operate. These are the “how” of your brand, and they matter as much as the “what.”
4. Define your audience — Who specifically needs to know your brand? For your current career goals, write down the answer as precisely as you can: the type of employer, the industry, the role level, or the type of person making the decisions that matter most to you right now. Your brand statement should speak to this audience — not to everyone.
5. Draft your brand statement — Using what you’ve gathered, write a two-to-three sentence personal brand statement. It should answer: who you are professionally, what you do best (your expertise anchor), how you work (your character), and for whom. Aim for plain language and specificity over polish. A first draft that’s specific and honest is far more useful than a polished draft that’s generic. Write it, read it aloud, and ask: does this sound like me? Would someone who knows my work recognize this as accurate?

What to Do Next

Once you have a brand statement you’re happy with, use it as the foundation for your LinkedIn summary — rewritten as a short paragraph in first person. Then look at where else your professional introduction lives: your email signature, your bio in professional communities, how you introduce yourself in meetings. Does your brand statement show up consistently, or does each version say something slightly different? Consistency is where brand becomes reputation. The statement is the starting point — the daily actions are what make it real.