Motivation failure in personal branding – what to do?

Every career transition involves a personal branding development opportunity. Typically, when you’re just starting the process, regardless of what made you decide to invest in your personal brand, you’ll most likely be quite motivated to differentiate yourself. You will have a clear strategy and probably you’ve already worked hard with a coach or a personal branding strategist to outline an action plan as well. But what happens if at one point, you notice that you can’t sustain your efforts as you used to, your motivation goes down and you find yourself struggling between ”I must do it” and ‘I don’t feel like doing anything’, and you end up procrastinating?

As a personal branding strategist, I had a few situations when my customers’ motivation was decreasing despite all the effort they initially put into the development of their personal brand. Based on my practical experience, I have good news to share – it’s not irreversible and you can do something about it when this happens! Here are a few reasons why this happens and some tips on how you can turn things around quickly; hopefully you’ll find them useful for your own professional journey:

• Time management issues – personal branding requires daily action; you cannot work on it today, have a break and work on it again after 3 weeks…
• Lack of resources to sustain the process – time, money, outsourced resources – all these need to be planned and budgeted for at least one year in advance. It is much better to communicate less, but efficiently, while maintaining the same pace rather than having communication gaps.
• Not enough commitment – it is ok to change your mind or to just accept that it all might be too much for you. It might also be that you had the revelation that it wasn’t the right path anyway – that’s fine too! However, if you need to rethink your strategy, make sure you don’t confuse your personal brand community, your followers and your strategic connection; have the right conversations at the appropriate level. It’s also important to accept that sometimes the investment done so far might be lost, but remember the lesson is never lost!
• Your career goals are not matching your calling – that’s a tricky one. Sometimes, we are on a certain professional journey, having the strong belief that we are fine and satisfied, when the inner voice kicks in. It might tell you that your calling is not equal to that promotion or the visibility you wanted in the market. In this case‚hibernating’ a little bit, more introspection on this won’t do any harm; your temporary motivation failure to pursue your current personal branding plan might be in your advantage!

You own your journey, whichever this might be; you decide your pace, you are the engine! However, credibility is key and your personal brand needs it regardless of how much fine tunning you need to do to build your strategy. Way too often changes in direction end up being confusing and have a negative impact on people’s networks and communities. Lack of consistency and credibility can harm your brand, so don’t forget to manage the communication process carefully – you might discover that if your network undertands where you are going, they will come with you and what an exciting journey that is, when this happens!