Who are you, what do you do, and why should anyone trust you? If your audience can’t immediately answer these questions, you may need to hone your personal brand. A well-developed personal brand helps you connect with the right people, highlights your skills, and opens doors to new opportunities.
Great personal brands might look effortless, but they’re built on thoughtful questions, exercises, and self-reflection. Creating one is not a rote personality exercise ripped from a résumé template—rather, personal brand traits go deeper than how you act at work.
Here’s how personal brand development ensures your professional choices embody your true strengths—and how to make those strengths more marketable in your field.
What is a personal brand?
A personal brand is a strategically crafted portrayal of your personality, made by weaving your unique skills, expertise, and professional style together into a cohesive experience across platforms.
A successful personal brand parallels a corporate brand but emphasizes the individual. Where a company brand touts its mission, story, and attributes to sell products or services, a personal brand focuses on your singular talents, characteristics, and experiences to build a professional persona with a unique selling proposition.
Why and how to use personal brand traits
A strong personal brand relies on individual traits, or the personal version of brand attributes. These core traits guide both your marketing output and positioning—like social media posts or a weekly newsletter—as well as your actual work.
Identifying personal traits gives your brand a cohesive throughline. That brand consistency lets you build credibility and improves personal brand equity—or the measure of trust your audience places in your brand.
You can keep your own personal brand attributes private or broadcast them on your personal website, media kit, or portfolio to clarify your professional approach for potential partners or employers.
Examples of personal brand traits
Here are some popular personal brand traits and what they might say about you:
Purposeful
A strong sense of purpose gives meaning and direction to your work. You must solidly understand your motivation, direction, and goals to call yourself purposeful or purpose-driven. Those goals could be external, like helping women succeed in business—or they could reflect your internal drivers, like a desire to shape graphic design trends.
Rebellious
Not one to ride out a trend or follow a typical path to professional fulfillment? Challenge norms by emphasizing a rebellious streak in your personal brand, signaling your willingness to go out on a limb and experiment for better results.
For example, a content creator may choose riskier, controversial topics and take a provocative tone; meanwhile, a consultant may question authority and solve problems in unconventional ways.
Curious
Interested people are interesting. Curiosity may be one of your central brand traits if you ask a lot of questions, push yourself to develop new skills, love exploring different perspectives and topics, and seek to understand the people you interact with.
For example, a writer with a curious personal brand could share their gaps in knowledge, find experts to interview, and ask open-ended questions to their readers.
Agile
Agility, your ability to adapt in shifting tides, can be invaluable in many different industries, especially where priorities—or budgets—tend to change without much notice. It might reflect your grasp of new mediums—like a marketer who understands how to optimize for the latest social media trends—or a particular fluency between formats—like a graphic designer with a gift for both static and motion design.
Collaborative
People with a collaborative brand trait are generous with their contacts, insights, and time. Include collaboration in your brand to build the foundation for future partnerships, surface below-the-radar opportunities, and create a helpful, grateful community.
How to incorporate traits into your personal brand
- Understand your position
- Seek input from trusted sources
- Make a list of current and future traits
- Practice your brand traits
- Track and adjust over time
So, how do you choose the best brand traits for your niche—or even know what you’re good at? Here’s how to find and implement your core attributes:
1. Understand your position
Most branding exercises begin by clarifying where you currently stand. Jot down reflections and goals or perform a personal SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). For example, a freelance designer may plot their analysis like this:
| Strengths | Weaknesses |
|
|
| Opportunities | Threats |
|
|
2. Seek input from trusted sources
Bridge the gap between how you see yourself and how your audience sees you. Reach out to respected peers, past clients, coaches, or mentors and ask them for an honest review of your strengths. Rather than ask leading questions (“Do you think I’m a funny writer?”), ask open-ended questions about your approach (“How is my writing distinct?” or “How would you describe my writing to someone who has never read it before?”).
Founder and entrepreneur Alexa Curtis of Be Fearless, Inc. recalls how input from trusted sources shaped her early success and radio show. “I was not someone really who sat down and had a vision board or manifested being an icon for helping people be fearless,” she says.
The idea came up when she cold-pitched networks. Ahead of a meeting with Disney, her manager suggested she present her personal brand as fearless. She didn’t initially understand how it related to her, but came to own it: “Now I see, yes, that actually is me. I’ve had to go through so many terrible and incredible experiences to really define that word for myself and be able to say to people; this is how you become fearless.”
Today, she’s expanded that personal brand across platforms, running a podcast, hosting events, working as a motivational speaker, and maintaining a consistent social media presence.
3. Make a list of current and future traits
Distill your comprehensive list of self-reflections and external reviews into three to five core traits. Any more can make your personal brand appear unfocused and vague.
Look for concrete evidence that your chosen traits accurately reflect you by combing for patterns in your feedback and past work. If you don’t have evidence of a trait you’d like to be known for, keep it on your list to find opportunities to develop proof.
“One of the beautiful things about having a personal brand is that if you are authentic in the way that you do it, and the way that you have built it, it really should all be in one,” Alexa says. Often, this means emphasizing existing talents and traits to shape your brand rather than focusing on future, idealistic traits that aren’t natural to you.
“It really depends on the type of brand you have built,” she says. Though Be Fearless, Inc. is entrepreneurial, Alexa is quick to point out that her brand doesn’t look or feel like similar businesses because of how personal many of her posts are. “When you follow any of my work, or come to an event, or listen to my podcast, I’m more like your friend.”
4. Practice your brand traits
Keep your list of brand traits somewhere visible and review it regularly. Your brand traits should function as a gut check and a compass, reminding you of what you stand for and where you want to go. Communicate traits across your channels to embody and stay accountable to them.
Aim to express your personal brand traits in professional interactions, creative output, internal goal-setting, and project planning. They can also inform your brand collateral, like your personal brand statement or logo.
Use the traits to shape big moments, like contract negotiations or presentations, and everyday tasks, like emails. Staying true to your brand traits can also mean turning down partnerships or being selective with clients. Check-in on how your brand traits express themselves in what you’re doing and choose the actions that best represent your brand with intention.
5. Track and adjust over time
As your personal branding efforts evolve, your work will evolve to fit your chosen brand traits. It’s now time to update or develop them. Reflect on how you’ve practiced your brand traits and compare them against your ideals. Think about how you’ve responded to challenging situations, which can demonstrate how central these traits are to your brand.
Alexa centered her brand around fearlessness, which illuminated secondary traits that became staples of her persona. To be fearless, she realized, meant sharing her insights and experience with a degree of authenticity and vulnerability that others weren’t.
“Most people who are business owners, for example, would not talk about the amount of credit card debt they have, which is a very vulnerable thing to post on the internet, right?” she explains. “[But] I know the reality that [aspiring entrepreneurs] are living in, because that’s the boat that I was in for so long.” Her willingness to be authentic in that pursuit, to be truly vulnerable, transformed her audience into a true community.
Personal brand traits FAQ
How do I find my personal brand traits?
To find your personal brand traits, combine self-reflection with peer feedback. Look for recurring themes in your past work or interactions, and aim for a balance of how you naturally express yourself and what you’d like your brand to be known for.
How should I express my personal brand traits?
Aim to express your personal brand traits in professional interactions, creative output, internal goal-setting, and project planning. These traits can also inform your brand collateral, like your personal brand statement or logo.
Why do personal brand traits matter?
Personal brand traits give your brand a cohesive throughline, helping your target audience contextualize your output and set realistic expectations. That brand consistency lets you build credibility and improves personal brand equity, the measure of trust your audience places in your brand.
