How can Emotional Intelligence Help You Grow a Stronger Personal Brand?
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence or EQ (emotional quotient) is said to be the ability to understand your own emotions, as well as that of others, in affirmative ways to distinguish between and label emotions correctly. It is the ability to use the myriad emotions effectively to guide one’s thinking and behaviour and to influence others around.
There have been studies published on the fact that EQ is deemed far more important for organizational success than IQ. A person might be highly intelligent, but if he lacks cognitive control and monitoring of his emotions, especially under stressful circumstances, he will never be able to go far up the ladder of organizational success.
How does emotional intelligence play a role in personal branding?
Psychologist Daniel Goleman stated in the 2013 Harvard Business Review that efficacious leaders are focused on three main targets: self, others and the wider world. For a leader to be effective at his job, he must be in touch with his inner feelings and be aware of how others view him at the same time.
EQ helps you take an Inside-Out Approach!
Step 1: Self Check
The first step to creating an effective personal brand is to understand your core values, passions, strengths and unique personality traits that make you, YOU. This understanding is what helps make your brand authentic and creates the skeleton upon which a personal brand is created.
Step 2: Feedback — because it’s a two-way process
The next step is gathering feedback from other important individuals around you based on your understanding of yourself. This helps in creating a holistic picture that makes your personal brand stronger and more reliable, and at the same time keep you grounded.
Step 3: Evaluation — so that you can be impactful
The idea is to break free from the general norm of associating yourself with simply what you do and what you know as a basis for who you are. You would have a hard time creating differentiation in the market if you follow this method of branding yourself, rendering you a simple commodity auctioned in the market for the lowest price. Your career would take a mere transactional turn, instead of the relational path that needs to be followed to build a thriving personal brand.
Going back to one of my favourite words by Simon Sinek — “Great brands first answer — “why they do what they do”.
So direct your efforts on your why and then to what.
A strong brand persona cannot revolve simply around your utility. It is the “why” we do what we do that matters more than the simple “what”. There will be someone out there who, say, is better at using the same SEO tools or Microsoft software that you do, or with a bigger pool of skills than you.
A Quick Insight to help you understand
I did my Master’s degree in Luxury Brand Management, a reality that belongs to thousands of individuals around the world.
But my differentiating factor lies in how I combine my knowledge with my emotional instincts that help me identify unique traits in an individual and brands and help them elevate using those traits, create unique brands that can communicate the authenticity and value, unique to me, that I am offering to my target audience.
To set yourself apart, you need to bring an implicit value to the table that is unique to your personality, that no one else can offer. This is where emotional intelligence comes into play at identifying and utilizing this value effectively through personal branding skills.
Using emotional intelligence to create a strong personal brand
Here’s how…
Usually, there are more subtle things at play in creating a strong personal brand, where you make sure that people think the right things about you, making you a successful brand. A lot of it has to do with emotional intelligence.
How you present yourself matters more than what you can do.
You may be great at what you do, but unless you have the skills to communicate it properly, it will prove to be of much less worth than is possible to achieve. Your reputation quotient is stroked by your emotional quotient, which helps in creating a successful personal brand.
Helps you ask the Right Questions: How much do you really know about your target audience?
It is not only important to know about what they do, but how they actually feel.
Are your stakeholders exasperated or compassionate about your cause and brand? Being emotionally intelligent helps you ask the right questions, adding emotional lines of inquiry that adds to your brand discovery efforts. It helps you take a more emotional approach to what you do, which ultimately boosts the quality of what you do. Because at the end of the day, we are all dealing with human beings with emotions and not robots meant to process data in binary language, where it is only true or false, yes or no, black or white; no grey. And it’s tapping into the grey that creates a prospering brand.
Helps you tap into your Non-Technical traits and turn them into your Super Power.
Knowledge of EI helps you to tap into the non-technical traits that help make who you are and discover the emotions that are associated with your brand. These are the emotions that define you as a person, and you use these to personify your brand, creating it as an extension of you.
Sir Richard Branson is a world-famous entrepreneur, adventurer, activist and business icon who have launched a handful of successful businesses. And this is despite the fact that he used to suffer from dyslexia, ultimately making him a school dropout. But he used this very fact as the basis of his identity, successfully communicating the right emotions is becoming more authentic in his endeavours.
Weave compelling stories!
Zaha Hadid and Oprah Winfrey successfully utilize emotions to weave stories into their brand, Hadid into her architectural pieces and Winfrey into her television shows, to build powerful brands that speak for themselves. They have used this to capture the trust of their audience, instil creativity and motivate their followers to step outside the box.
So let’s conclude
Emotional intelligence creates a relationship between ourselves and our thoughts that we can channel into our brands to better connect with our stakeholders.
The good thing about Emotional Intelligence?
It’s never too early, or too late, to develop emotional intelligence.
Let’s be more conscious of the story we tell ourselves and to the world!
Weaving our true emotions into our personal brands allows us to better tell why we do what we do, which is unique to us. And isn’t uniqueness what we are striving to achieve at the end of the day for our brands? Because we are not robots, and neither is your audience. So why let it stop your brand from communicating the same?
