The Art of Crafting an Irresistible Personal Brand

How to leave a lasting impression and attract the right people

Some people leave a lasting impression on the places they’ve been.

The thought of being there, seeing what they saw, and sharing the same experiences makes you feel something powerful.

Stephen Ambrose spent two decades studying the Lewis and Clark expedition. He and his wife traveled the same route the expedition took. At the beginning of their trip, his wife said “walking in Lewis’s footsteps makes my feet tingle.”¹

Every year 2.1 million people, from all over the world, follow in Jesus’s footsteps walking down the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. At the 5th station, people observe where Jesus put his hands on the wall as he carried the cross.

Graceland, Elvis Presley's home and final resting place gets 600,000 people a year. People come to see where the artist lived and recorded his music.

How do some people cultivate such an attractive presence?

Your personal brand image

I like to compare our personal life to startups, and how a business would make their presence known?

Through a well-crafted brand.

We all have our own individual personal brands. Every interaction is an infusion of our brand image. In the marketplace, a brand image makes or breaks your product. Your personal brand image determines your relationships with other people.

In You Belong With Me, Taylor Swift illustrates this point when she says, “but she wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts. She's Cheer Captain, and I'm on the bleachers.”

Different brand images will appeal to different people.

A brand image is 90% of what you sell in business. The same is true for building an attractive presence. Studies have shown that people make up a judgment about you within a 1/10th of a second of meeting you.²

In this time, people aren’t understanding anything about you, they’re making a determination based on your image.

It pays to have a brand image associated with good qualities.

Cultivate a becoming style

Most of the struggle with your brand image is trying to find something that aligns with your core values. When you find something that works for you, meaning it attracts the right people, keep developing it.

Your reputation is built on one quality.

The best brand images have a becoming style.³