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Staying consistent and coherent throughout our journeys is incredibly difficult. Without a solid plan, we can't expect ourselves to always stay 'on brand.'

I believe in order to build a personal brand, we need to unearth what we value most in ourselves: the opinions, beliefs, values, and strengths. What we value most helps us to say "this is who I am."

Now, it's difficult to write down all of our values and beliefs. We have many to choose from. However, there is an exercise and core component of branding that helped me choose from the list and find what is most important to me. I'd like to share this next step I took in my brand building efforts.

What did I learn?

The component is Guiding Principles. These principles are what helps keep myself accountable to my values, beliefs, and strengths. They keep me consistent with who I am, so people don't think I'm a chaotic weirdo. Ideally, I just want to be known as a brand and environmental weirdo!

I first learned about them in Simon Sinek's book, Start With Why.

Simon says that "…guiding principles enhances the organization's ability to work to its natural strengths and hold the organization and all employees accountable." (pg. 66) The same can easily be applied to us as individual entrepreneurs.

Simon also stresses the fact that guiding principles are more powerful than "values." Organizations used to think (and some still do) that "integrity" or "innovation" plastered on a wall is enough to ensure people adhere to these values.

But I agree with Simon this is just not true. These words say nothing to how people need to act.

So, instead of nouns, Simon believes guiding principles need to be verbs. It's not "innovation," it's "look at the problem from a different angle." For me, it's not "responsibility," it's "always advocate for positive change."

How do we turn our values into meaningful guiding principles? Or take the beliefs and transform them into commitments?

What you can learn

I followed a three-step process, and I want to share this method with you. The first step is to run through an exercise of finding values that resonate with who you are. You'll find a list of values within this PDF created by Russ Harris of Act Mindfully Materials. The values are on page 23–24.

Read through the values and write down the ones that stick out to you. The ones that stood out to me were the ones where I could say YES to "is this a filter that I can use to make hard decisions in my life?"

The final step is to ask yourself what each value means to you. If you had to make sure you stick to it, what would you say in a short phrase?

Empathy was another one of my core values, but what does that mean to me? I can't use the word 'empathy' in my life. It doesn't mean anything to me until I add context. So, the phrase for 'empathy' is "strive to always understand other sides (& be kind)."

Now I know for any decision I make, I have to strive to understand all sides and make a decision according to this understanding, and ensure I'm being kind to all sides too.

Here are all my core values with 'guiding principle phrases' attached:

In the document created by Russ Harris, each value has a definition attached. I used the definitions to guide the principle phrases, but I didn't copy and paste the definition. For many of them, the definition didn't actually resonate with who I am.

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