Lifestyle: Brand building for beginners

A lawyer's image can have a huge impact on their success. Louise Mowbray discusses the core principles of a personal brand.

Perception is reality. Or rather, I should say that perception is a form of reality as it can be demonstrably false – and all too often it is. How we are perceived has such a dynamic effect on our success and yet many women don’t realise that they can manage and develop this fundamental principle.
It all starts with self-awareness. When you understand what it is about you that makes you compelling to those who can affect your success, then you also understand how to manage yourself better.
So what makes a successful female lawyer? There are numerous theories, arguments, ideas and experiences out there. Most are related to how to manage men, glass ceilings and working practices. I would like to take you back to basics and inspire you to start where one should start – with the self.
We all know that education, skills, experience, resources and knowledge are the foundations of success. However, without a powerful personal impact and brand your chances of rising above the competition are slight.
So what is personal impact or personal branding and how do we get it? Many years ago, when I owned a firm specialising in executive search, I remember clearly my fascination with what made one person more successful than another. At one point, I was retained to hire seven partners for a firm across Europe and duly presented the client with a shortlist of three ideal candidates for each role. I also threw a wild card into the pot: someone who didn’t quite meet the brief and yet had that special something that made them shine. And statistically, these wild cards would win the role as often as the perfect candidates.
We used to think about this special something as the right combination of emotional intelligence (EI) and intelligence quotient (IQ). Great theory if you want to understand the blueprint of success, however, it doesn’t offer the tools to help people to get there. When I stumbled across personal branding four years ago, I realised that this was the elusive ingredient. And I realised too that we can all learn to understand, develop and manage our personal brands, which leads to how we are perceived.
So I developed four core principles of a personal brand and a step-by-step methodology, which now forms the basis of my one-on-one coaching, consulting with firms, the workshops that I deliver and my e-book.

Four core principles of a personal brand
At the heart of any personal brand is a compelling idea. The X Factor creator Simon Cowell often tells contestants that they are not memorable, interesting, different or unique. For me, all of this adds up to being compelling. We need to want more, much more.
With this in mind, I work with clients to discover what it is about them that is deeply compelling. We do this by exploring their target markets and audience – everyone who can have an effect on their success, and the attributes and qualities that they are looking for from someone in their role. We then talk to a number of people across these markets and ask them what their perception is.
The feedback is invaluable and has a resounding affect – not only do clients learn what it is that others find compelling about them, they are given clear indicators of areas that they can improve. This delivers the vital self-awareness that is necessary to start to build one’s personal brand. If we understand what others want more of, then we are likely to deliver it.
This leads us to the second core principle – authenticity. This compelling idea needs to be authentic - authenticity delivers credibility.
The third principle is consistency – we need to deliver consistently in order to create trust. And trust is everything, without it we stand little chance of progressing.
Last but not least, we need to be well-known for all of this. And often this is a subtle process. The biggest misnomer in personal branding is that it’s all about rebranding and marketing someone – style over substance. And yet, as we can see from the process above, this is the outcome that evolves from the foundations of self-awareness, credibility and trust.

Louise Mowbray is a leadership and personal impact coach and founder of the personal branding consultancy Mowbray by Design. She can be contacted at louise@mowbraybydesign.com