IF THE SHOE FITS: AN ESSAY

I used to think branding was just a fancy word created to open spaces for new job opportunities, but it turns out that it’s something we should all be paying attention to. Branding and reputation are inextricably linked together, but they are not the same thing. Branding is important because it’s the reason people take you seriously or not, the reason people listen when you speak, the reason people treat you the way you like to be treated or don’t treat you that way. If you have not cultivated that brand, you’ll only be frustrated. We all have a brand, however poorly managed it may be. The earlier you wake up to that fact and make it work for you, the better. The thing about branding is that it is linked with our identity. When you think of yourself, what do you see? Are you funny, easily angered, intelligent, athletic, have insane stamina, very knowledgeable at something most people around you aren’t, slow to learn, fast to learn, a person that thrives with physical work, or a person that hates working with his hands? What you think about yourself is your brand. However, what people think of you is also important. If the idea you have about yourself is different from what the majority have about you, then it’s either you are misrepresenting yourself or lying to yourself. Before you say, "I don’t care what people think about me", listen up. People may not know us more than we know ourselves, but they can see things we are not able to due to blind spots caused by biases in our self-perception. It’s like reading a story written in the first person. The reader can never know the whole story, just the part the narrator tells. It’s the same thing when it comes to the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Hasn’t someone said something about yourself that surprised you? And upon reflection it turned out to be true? It is worth saying that our belief about our identity is not inherently erroneous. We are correct about what we know about ourselves, but we are not correct about everything we know about ourselves, and often we don’t know all there is to know. This is where people come in. We need to know the validity of our claims about ourselves. Our biases are counterbalanced by others and their biases(since they don’t know you as you do) would be counterbalanced by our self-knowledge. Again, I have to say that people can also be wrong about us so we have to be careful. Some people think ill of us, misjudge or project things on us, so whatever input we get must be cross-referenced with our own thoughts. Most importantly, for this to work, we have to stop lying to ourselves. We have to drop those praises and good things that our parents or teachers or friends said about us in Nursery school or whenever it was. Or, to put it more accurately, we have to revisit those things and check if we fit into those shoes or if the accolades were merely a prophetic and/or hopeful statement. If the shoe fits, if we really are smart as evidenced by this and that, congratulations. But if not, that has to be accepted as well. A lot of us, and I’m not excluded, have been prancing about with past glory. You were the best in your set in Creche, what about now? Good in Mathematics in SS3, but currently can you convert complex expressions from the time domain to the frequency domain? Hopefully you can see where I’m going with this. We need to redefine who we are right now, not who we were. Does it hurt? Most likely. But let’s get to the good part. After going over your idea about yourself and checking to see that it matches with reality, and after getting people close to you(it’s important that you question people who know you, not people who have just heard of you and only know you by your reputation or hearsay) to tell you what they think about who you are as a person and you verify that and close off some of those blind spots, now think about who you want to be, your self-ideal. Who you want to be may turn out to be the things you think you were, which is okay, because sometimes we tend to think highly of ourselves even when we’ve not landed yet. In light of this, when we know the truth about our identity, we can effectively rebrand ourselves and represent those qualities we want people to associate with us when they think about us. It’s often the reason why we are recommended for this job, this gig, or this project. It’s the reason why people say this person can’t be guilty of this or that. So while the popular phrase is that we shouldn’t care about what people think about us, we should have it at the back of our minds that we should care about what certain people know about us. And it’s our job to find those people.

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