As part of a project that I am, conducting with an important business partner I had to become proficient on personal branding. How do you promote yourself instead of you business? Personal branding is a kind of a lost art that is regaining ground every day with the development of social media sites and with the greater attention that customers now place on people as opposed to products.

In the last months I have met several people who were trying to develop their own job, they had been laid out by some other company or they simply wanted to add another stream of income to the one they already had. They all promoted themselves and their own expertise and were willing to pretty much do anything that could bring them business in their field of action.

It is fairly normal, at the beginning of a career, to test many avenues and several different customers until you find the main vein which is going to become your special field. For quite a while the new born entrepreneur or professional looks pretty much like anybody else: she is willing to perform work for anybody asking for it and she doesn’t really bother giving herself a precise positioning, a unique image.

By doing so she eventually hit something that she finds very successful and that customers like. It’s like magic, things start to flow much more easily and they all tend to go into the direction of building this peculiar specialization. It’s like an inverted pyramid: initially you go wide and look for your path to go down and become more focused, and when you really find it, the pyramid flips and now you begin to rise to a single focal point where you can stand out.

Unfortunately the search process and the subsequent flip are difficult and tend to confuse, that’s why you need somebody who can watch over your shoulders and that keeps you on the path until you really begin ascending. We can call it mentor or coach. My own mentor is my wife Maria who has been standing on my side during this wild adventure in the US and who has watched over my shoulder, tapping on them every time I felt like spinning on my wheels.

Roberto Mazzoni