How Starting To Build A Personal Brand

By ChulucanasGym

In actual times, when any market becomes highly competitive, surviving the question “what bodybuilder or athlete highlights in your town?” and finding a “I don’t know” as an answer, simply means you don’t exist, that your work or career  have no impact in a big part or a significant part of your community.

Of course, the usual is not to be a prophet in your own land, however let’s see beyond: think what could happen in a global market, where the possibilities that your name highlights due to information technologies are, relatively, more accessible but, notoriously, more challenging.

That’s why  we will offer you here some tips those could be useful for you to start building your own personal brand, that means to get your individual identity be connected to the excellence, or, at least, skillful in bodybuilding or any sports discipline.

Be Clear What Your Individual Identity Is

Two basic and mandatory questions begin the whole process of building a personal brand: “who am I?”, “what do I know to do?”. Look, we are not asking who the another person is or what the another person knows to do. We are focusing in you only.

The questions are too eloquent. However, it’s worthy we explain fastly what they refer to. The first one looks for identifying you to a name and a lastname or a nickname (“I’m John Doe.”), the second one looks for specifying what skill highlights you amid other persons who also practice your discipline (“I specialize in power training for 200-pound cathegory.”).

The “who you are” does not refer to any gaseous idea or an impersonal brand, but you, your name and lastname or nickname, the manner how you want the people to meet you or how the people already meet you and that you can use as your brand. The marketing tip is you ever use a name easy to remember, and the general rule is you try to use two-syllabe names  (and lastnames) as much, three exceptionally. Also, try it be easy to wwrite and pronounce in your language as well as anyone else.

About what you know to do, the key is that you feel more comfortable and that you Like to practice a lot once and again not boring. There’s no much secret here: somebody does better and becomes the best when does what fascinates really. Then, you are going to wear much honesty with yourself to find that field where your are going to highlight. Cheating yourself underestimating or overestimating only is going to frustrate you, and so your are going to reach anywhere.

Who Are You When The Lights Turn Off?

Another personal frustration cause uses to happen when the image we project has nothing to do with who we are intimately, when we are not really what we say or show. That is known as cognitive dissonance, and it’s a much more common problem what we suspect.

If you have focused to be a successful bodybuilder or athlete, get focused to be not only when everybody sees you working out at the gym or the training room or field, but especially when nobody sees you. It’s useless they look at you doing leg press with 250 pounds, when you consume forbidden substances alone at your home.

If you are not prepared for dealing personally with the own pressure this means, unfortunately you are not made to shine, what does not discard you can get visible achievements, but that are not enough for a major goal. Think they are not in vain.

Another useful tip  is avoiding to hide behind an impersonal name  as a commercial brand because it plays a masquerade or a disguise precisely. You can be a great reference in public but not in private, and the jump between both fields trend to be dangerous. At any time, one will finish to invade the another one, and the problems will start there. That’s wy the best is your personal Brand be your name or that nickname everybody meets you with.

Your Growth Plan Must Imitate The Trees

The ultimate mistake a bodybuilder or an athlete commits  at the beginning of the career is pretending to arrive when wanted to arrive. False. It’s just the beginning. The question is where and how grow to in all senses.

A task that could make you to reflectionate about is planting any type of seed, better if it’s a tree’s. The seed is small and when it breaks out, it’s an inoffensive blade, but with care, time, and patience, it can become a leafy and high  tree beneath you can find a shadow.

The same happens to you. Going to the gym, signing up, and surviving the first training week are not your ultimate goals, they’re just the step zero, the seed. It will take several weeks to your muscles or your resistance or your speed for breaking out. It will take you months to break your own records. It could take years until you get your first recognizements, and you have to be highly prepared for following up all that trail faintless, instead everything, the disencouragement especially.

And as in a tree, the root fixes first, then a trunk emerges, branches come out the trunk, leaves break out the branches, the same happens to your career. Start with small goals, once aat a time, those become more complex progressively until you get to reach that pinnacle you are looking for, and what everybody  is going to recognize for, as the highest and leafiest trees are recognized for. Never forget about that image.

Often Reinvent

Becoming to be recognized doesn’t imply to win a medal or a couple of them. That is a big goal, but it’s no the whole goal. In fact, reaching can cost you, but keeping constant along the time can cost you much more still. And this is one of the ways how your personal brand keeps not for months but years, and even decades.

If you are clear about who you are, what you know to do, where and how you want to grow to, you also must have clear you must learn to adapt to circumnstances appearing as the times change.

In that aspect, you have to analyse constantly for knowing to innovate, for knowing to reinvent, for taking something of what you know to do very well, or what you are, and working on so it be tomorrow a better version than today’s. Maybe a training technique, maybe the diet, maybe hthe space where you work out, or maybe the look. Although it’s true that an image trends to become more solid as it accumulate years, it’s also true that when you don’t refresh that image, it could begin to leave in the past no matter if chronologically you are in the present.

Look – we are not talking about being out of style, we are talking about  knowing to ask positively and proopossitively to the challenges appearing here and now, especially if appear people who try to compete to you. Don’t fear the competence, analyze it instead for working on your own evolution process not losing your essence.

Prepare To Be A Mentor

As your image and your experience grow, as the tree has gron, there will be new people who  will want to protect beneath your shadow, what means learning from you because identify you as a positive reference. Be joyful if that happens because that means your career and your whole sacrifice it has demanded makes a sense.

Then, don’t adopt and attitudde that makes those people approaching to you as affective and professional dependants  of you, neither ignore  them because you think there is only time for you. Give them space, give them time, give them knowledge, give them challenges, but also respect their spaces, their time, their learning, and their achievements.

And never fear to learn from who just begin. Possibly, has to teach you (ignoring it) something you didn’t know and you have to learn. And remember the trick is not about pretending to be who you are not, or encourage to do what you don’t do. Your example speaks teaches more than your  words. Neither forget to encourage them not to imitate you but those people fight to find their own identity and skills.

Manage Your Own Archive

In actual times, your word is not enough to sustain  your experience, neither the recommendations nor the references of the people who know you. You must show you have dedicated your life to being who you are, the best in you know to do. So, take time for making and managing your own archive with photos, videos, press excerpts, interviews, diplomas, actually all the evidences those sustain your career.

Have a physical and a virtual space  dedicated exclusively to save that information. Both must be safe and easy-access for you and people you trust, as well as they must be protected from other people who can alter or delete intentionally.

The useful of an archive is double: it allows your to reflectionate about what everything you have gone on (and realizing if you need to innovate something), and it’s so useful when the media look for you to speak about your life and career.

Features as albums, cupboards, and of course the online storage systems offered by many platforms, especially photos and videos, will be useful for you. Learn to use them.  Maybe in the future, they allow you to build a kind of personal museum with you did and you were in the present.

Read More:

Fundraising Your Sports Career.

Thanks!

As everytime, if you want customized advisory about this or any other issues, don’t doubt to find us on our Twitter account, or chulucanasgym@gmail.com or  or leave your comment below, that we wwill like to help you.

Thanks to Pedro Changanaquí for giving us the pictures from his personal archive those illustrate this article.