In the marketplace of myriad product choices, it’s a product or company’s brand that has one of the strongest influences on your purchase decisions. In the world of interpersonal relationships and interactions of all kinds – personal, business, leader, follower, peer, server or served – the strength and clarity of your personal brand will determine your influence in those relationships and interactions. USA Today small business columnist Rhonda Abrams suggests four reasons for a small business to consider their brand. I believe that these reasons are just as applicable to you if you want to have greater influence and interpersonal effectiveness. Here are four self-reflection questions to help you consider how to manage your personal brand.

• Your brand will help people to remember you. What is it that you want people to remember about you?
• Your brand will build loyalty. What is it that will cause people to want to be connected to you? What is that people should keep returning to you for?
• Your brand tells people what they can expect from you. If someone knows they are going to talk to you, what are they thinking and feeling about you before the interaction? Are they anticipating a positive or negative experience? And if they’re not expecting anything, why not?
  
• Your brand makes you more valuable. How useful are you to others? In what ways do you make others lives better?

I believe that every person already has within them the power to be special in their own way and can create positive experiences that others will continually want. I also know that most people don’t know what those powers are because they don’t think about them.[1] Or if they have some idea about their powers, they haven’t been intentional about using them.

These questions above require introspection and self-awareness to answer. And the point of those answers is to manage your thoughts, feelings, attitudes and actions in such a way that you can bring all of your gifts – your unique personal brand – with you to each and every interpersonal encounter. When you do that, you will begin to achieve the full impact and influence on others you are capable of having.

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[1] Only about one third of people can meaningfully identify their strengths. Alex Linley, Average to A+: Realising Strengths In Yourself and Others (Coventry, England: CAPP Press, 2008), 92.