Friday's Rocket Fuel: Easy Personal Branding Excercise, Just 6 Steps

Your personal brand describes your unique value to others. For your career it's what makes you special and will help you find the right employers or clients to work with and help them find you. Here is a quick and simple exercise you can do now to help you get started.

1. Take a piece of paper, or create a new document on your computer.
2. Create two columns
3. Label one column "Same"
4. Label the other column "Different"
5. In the column labeled "Same" start listing qualities or skills you have that are the same (or pretty close) to what everyone in your career field has. This might be something like college degree, computer skills, etc.
6. In the column labeled "Different" start listing the qualities that make you different from everyone (or most everyone) in your career field. Keep going until you have those skills or personal qualities that make you unique.

An exercise like this can help you get started with personal branding. If you really want to identify your personal brand, and make sure that others see you in that way as well, you will need to do more work with a personal branding strategist.