personal branding | braid

Before the holidays (yes, a while ago) I took the Personal Branding class over at Braid with Kathleen Shannon. This particular class was all about defining your personal brand, your professional brand and what kind of magic happens when you get them to mingle and overlap a little.

One of my favourite exercises was the “dinner party”. We were to imagine that we were having a dinner party with six guests, all of which represent aspects of yourself. The exercise really focused on bringing these characters to life, by giving them names, values, a personality, wardrobe and more. I thought it would be fun if I shared some of mine.

The Designer is super detail oriented with a passion for concept driven designs that tell stories and don’t merely look pretty. She loves talking about typography and nerding out about anything design related.

The Observer is a good listener and always eager to learn about people and their passions and experiences. You can usually find her quietly sitting in the shadows soaking up all the surroundings and conversations.

The Business Woman is a topnotch go-getter, always thinking ahead, dreaming up new projects and thinking up ways to monazite them. She’s professional and enjoys talking shop with fellow business owners.

The Hippie Artist is free-spirited, passionate and inspired by all things colourful. She cares about this little planet she lives on and is constantly experimenting in different artistic mediums happily getting her hands dirty in-door and out.

The Traveler is pretty fearless, curious and always up for an adventure. She loves to get lost in foreign cultures and explore new little corners of the world.

The Photographer makes herself invisible while capturing special moments and memories.  She doesn’t believe in posed shots and rather her subject ignore her.

I’m curious, who would you want to learn more about?

Once you really take the time to think of who your different dinner guests are you naturally take it a step further and evaluate how these different personas may be incorporated into your business, your personal life, your blog, etc.

The above moodboard  is supposed to represent my six dinner guests in a visual way. I grew up by the beach, love the sun and ocean and now go swimming at the community centre every week. Although my favourite colours are not blue and yellow, without planning for it, most of the images I was collecting for this moodboard ended up having this fresh and bright colour scheme. I guess it is a pretty good representation of me!