Today, everybody sells.

You might not think you do. But you probably are.

You might be:

• an entrepreneur promoting your service or product

• a VP looking to get buy-in on your strategy to drive your department forward

• an intern trying to highlight everything you’ve achieved and learned to secure getting hired

Whatever you do professionally it certainly involves some sort of persuasion, convincing, and influencing.

I’m reading Daniel Pink’s “To sell is human” (an absolute must-read if you ask me), and to write this book he conducted an amazing study dubbed What Do You Do at Work? with which he gathered data from more than 9,000 respondents around the world.

Two main findings emerged:

1. People are now spending about 40 percent of their time at work engaged in non-sales selling — persuading, influencing, and convincing others in ways that don’t involve anyone making a purchase.

2. People consider this aspect of their work crucial to their professional success.

Does this sound familiar?

How much you are able to persuade, convince, and influence others is directly related to the strength of your brand.

Your brand exists regardless of how much attention you pay to it.

Because anybody you engage with will form an opinion about you.

A brand lives at the intersection of intention and perception.

Chances are you already intentionally engage in branding, even if you don’t call it that.

For example, when you get dressed for a certain occasion, you are hoping to be perceived a certain way in a certain context.

We do this in many different ways in many different areas of our lives.

And still, somehow, people are still taken aback by the concept of working on their personal brands.

I understand why.

Branding as a discipline has been abused by corporations (and individuals) for years to deceive buyers.

But it doesn’t have to.

If you really think about it, branding can be an amazing tool to intentionally align ourselves with who we are, where we want to go, and how we want to get there.

So the question is not if you need a brand. You have one.

The question is;

How are you building your brand in a way that it truly aligns with who you are and who you want to become?

How are you bridging the gap between your intention (or lack thereof) and the outer perception so that you can create the trusted brand that will allow you to persuade, convince, and influence people so you can achieve the success you’re after?

I’ll leave you with this question.