Living your personal brand - start with your Appearance

In Dan Schawbal's personal branding blog (www.personalbrandingblog.com) he mentions his four elements of what constitutes a personal brand. One of those is Appearance. Now whilst my own concept of what constitutes a personal brand extends past Dan's I feel that many of us do not focus on our appearance when it comes to self-branding and indeed have no true idea of the disconnect between how we would want our personal brand to appear and how we actually appear to society.

There are two viewpoints that society has - one side is that appearance is important at all times and the other that appearance is not important if not required for your job. However whatever your perception is of your appearance is of little consequence if your colleagues, clients and friends have a different perception. The objective of Appearance in the context of personal branding is not whether you look stylish or not, wear designer or off the rack, neat or messy, are well-spoken or not etc it's about the message you convey to society about who you are by how you appear. More importantly it's about being in control of the message that you are communicating through your appearance.

Without having clarity around your personal brand ie. what you want it to be, why it should be that way and how you will implement it the message your personal Appearance communicates will not be focused, not aligned with who you are and will thus not be effective in establishing who you are and what you represent.