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What to focus on when creating a personal image? Imagine that you are about to get a tattoo and decide which symbol matches your sense of self. Facilitator and business coach Anton Morin will help to solve this problem.
If you want to understand yourself, get a tattoo
When I turned 38, I suddenly decided to get a tattoo. Not a small ladybug on the heel, which only a pathologist would appreciate, but a large, colored one, on the entire forearm.
Leaving behind the reasons that prompted me to do this, I will only say that I had all the inputs to make it: money, time, artistic taste (I am a designer by second education). There was even a colorful tattoo artist with pigtails in his beard, to whom I was ready to entrust my mortal body.
In general, there was everything except the main thing: ideas of what exactly to fill …
It was not possible to come up with a cool tattoo idea on the spur of the moment, and the motley set of images that I collected as examples for the master did not like me myself when I looked at it with a fresh head.
I had to change the approach and include an internal analyst. With his characteristic pedantry, he began to ask me various questions in order to understand what exactly I wanted.
And here an existential crisis happened to me, threatening to drag on for at least six months. Because it was not interesting to make “the same dragon” as from the catalog — I wanted individuality, uniqueness!
This meant that I needed to find the images myself that would characterize me and become that unique sign that I would not be ashamed to wear in the remaining approximately 40 years of my life. We all understand how often it happens that you don’t want to see tattoos made spontaneously after six months.
Image search
The search resulted in a rather deep and serious conversation with oneself, a total study and rethinking of oneself with prioritization.
It probably also helped to survive the sluggish midlife crisis — if, of course, it was him, and not just spring blues and beriberi.
It was like the job of a marketer to create a brand identity: a clear set of questions that you had to honestly answer yourself in order to get a truly valuable result. You can’t cheat — you’re doing it for yourself.
As a result, before rushing to search for pictures for visualization, my internal analyst sketched out the structure of the questions and began to think about each one. The questions were simple, but, as it turned out, they dragged along a whole train of thoughts that needed to be streamlined.
This is a great exercise to review, understand who you are, what is important to you and where you are going.
Here is a short example of what I ended up with:
- Who am I? Father of two twin daughters, friend, coach, facilitator, speaker, indefatigable twin.
- What am I? Lively, bright, searching, doubting, curious, sharing knowledge, inspiring, loving.
- What is important to me in life? Search for meanings, feel, learn, understand yourself, make friends, do unusual things, share knowledge, inspire people to discover themselves, give attention.
- Where am I now? I work in a global corporation, I do strategic analytics, I work with my head.
- Where am I going, to what goals? To greater interaction with people, learning and development, transformation.
These questions helped me to «probe» myself from the inside, to find and distill those grains of meanings that seemed important to me, that «resonated», that I wanted to strive for. After that, it was already much easier to pack them into specific symbols (Pinterest and other services with inspiring pictures to help everyone).
From the references found, a sketch was assembled and a tattoo was made. And, as a bonus, there was clarity in my head!
It really doesn’t matter if you get a tattoo or not. In no way am I promoting decorating my body in this way, realizing that for many people this is unacceptable.
The main conclusion that I have drawn from this situation for myself is that this is a great mental exercise to make an audit, to understand what you are, what is important to you and where you are moving.
And the result — for example, a sketch of a tattoo or just symbols put together — you can simply hang it on your wall in a frame. Then every day you will meet her gaze, plunging into these images that are important to you, so as not to forget about your movement towards yourself and your goals.
9 questions for personal branding
If you want to do this exercise in more detail, you can take a set of branding questions and replace the word “company” with “me”.
You will get something like this:
- What makes me different from the rest?
- What am I giving to the world?
- Why should I choose myself and not another person?
- What valuable experience do I have?
- What is my personality scale?
- What are my strengths and weaknesses?
- Where do I want to go in 5-10-15 years?
- Why am I needed on Earth?
- What motivated me to do what I do?
If desired, your symbols and values can be translated into clothes, how you appear on social networks, how you interact with people.
This is how you fully align your personal branding with your deepest values, and this will make it truly durable, alive and real. And I love real people, whether they have tattoos or not.