Branding Byte #016

Hello there,

Finding the right positioning for your online branding strategy is hard, isn’t it?

Well, today I'm going to dive deep into how you can apply the ancient Japanese concept of "Ikigai" to finally find a branding positioning that makes sense to you.

Off course you can apply this to your LinkedIn personal brand, making it not only unique but also a true reflection of your inner professional self.

Not yet sure if you want to read this one?

Imagine a world where you can seamlessly blend your purpose, passion, skills, and societal contribution.

It’s time to stop with the ‘Sacrifice’ bullshit. Ikigai will help you build a reality that’s adapted to you.

Unfortunately, even if it’s an ancient concept many people are not using it, they think that it’s too good to be true and that it’s ‘disconnected’ from reality.

I don’t agree and I am going to show you how you can apply my 3-step process to find positioning that suits you the best.

Lack of awareness and understanding of Ikigai.

The term "Ikigai" might sound intriguing, but outside Japan, it's not widely understood.

The main obstacles identified with it are:

• The difficulty to find your core principles, what passion, mission, vocation, and profession?

• No clear guide to align and blend the elements together.

• For the most temerarious that find their unique position, there’s a hesitation to embrace it and use it to stand out of the crowd.

• The challenge of self-exploration and introspection, which Ikigai demands.

That’s what today’s plan will solve for you.

You’ll know exactly how to use it to find your LinkedIn branding strategy.

Step 1: Discern Your Ikigai Elements

The first step is to ask the right questions, to yourself but also to the people that know you the best based on each principle of the Ikigai.

1/ Your mission:

You need to dive into an introspection journey into what drives you. What in this world resonates with you and makes you wanna drop everything and focus on that?

Ask people around you these questions:

• When do you see stars in my eyes?

• What did I tell you about something I love that stayed with you?

Your mission is the superpower you would ask for and use unapologetically to do good.

It’s about the moments when you felt fulfilled and proud.

2/ Your passion:

Passion is what the world needs. I know this might be a bit blurry but here’s the reasoning behind it:

Passion is what you do with intensity, love, and interest. It’s when you lose track of time and become 1 with the actions you're doing.

If everyone was following their passion, we would live in a world of expert and free value.

That’s why it’s what the world needs because interactions and commerce would make more sense and will ultimately end with more value.

Here’s one thing that helped me identify my passions:

• What would I do for people without being paid for?

• What topics consistently pique my interest when i scroll?

• What topics do I always seek to learn more from?

Questions to ask yourself:

• When do I feel most alive and invigorated in my daily life?

• If I had all the time and money in the world, what would I spend my time doing?

• Which activities make me lose track of time and feel most authentic?

Questions to ask your closest friends:

• What strengths and talents do you see in me that I might overlook?

• When do you see me at my happiest and most engaged?

• What kind of work or activities do you believe I would excel at and enjoy?

 3/ Your vocation

What are you naturally good at? That’s the best question I can find to define vocation. It’s about the one or two things you can perform better than the average person without having to do any extra effort.

That’s what you can provide to the world and can be paid for, it’s the first component on which your brand should be based.

We live in a world of eternal competition, the ultimate goal is to find a way to differentiate yourself, and what can be better than something you’re already good at?

What would happen if you invested time to improve yourself?

Here’s how to identify yours if the above description didn’t make something come to mind:

Questions for Self-Reflection:

• What are some tasks or activities that I find easy and enjoyable, while others might struggle with them?

• When have I felt a deep sense of satisfaction and accomplishment from using a particular skill?

• What skills am I using when I am in "the zone," completely absorbed and losing track of time?

Questions to Ask People Close to You:

• What are the skills or talents that you believe I excel in?

• Can you recall a time when I accomplished something that seemed challenging for others, but I did it with relative ease?

• In what areas do you think my abilities naturally shine?

4/ Your Profession

Finally, your profession is a good place to end the reflection. The reason for that is simple.

If you’re being paid to do something, that you spend 8 hours a day doing it, and that you may have studied for it means that it already contains some components of your IKIGAI.

Analyze it carefully and be honest with yourself. If you’re unhappy in your studies or in your profession then that’s where you should focus most of your energy.

IKIGAI is not just about finding a path that resonates with you, it’s also about finding what is missing in your current life.

Here are 4 questions to find out if you're happy with your work:

• Do I feel energized and engaged in my daily work, or do I often feel drained or unmotivated?

• Does my current profession align with my core values and long-term career goals?

• Am I satisfied with the work-life balance that my current profession allows?

• Do I feel valued, respected, and adequately compensated in my current profession?

Leveraging your current skills is a good thing, but if you need to reinvent yourself professionally then be honest with yourself and said it out loud.

Step 2: Find Your Ikigai Intersection

Now that you have identified the main components of your IKIGAI it’s time to find how they overlap and for that, you need to do 2 simple things:

1/ Find the intersections

Take a piece of paper and based on the following image feed each circle with the information you got in Step 1.

The more honest you are, the highest your chances to make sense of your IKIGAI.

Write down everything, and keep nothing back, this exercise has the potential to build the life you want but also the one you need.

2/ Build different path

Making sense of your IKIGAI is the first step but it’s not sufficient. What you also need is an efficient creative way to come up with all the different paths you could take.

For that AI is your best friend. Using GPT in this process was tremendously helpful, here’s the process you can get through:

1. Use all the information you gathered from your introspection and from your friends to build a contextual document.

2. Copy pas the content to ChatGPT and explain why you need it.

3. Ask questions and pushback with the outputs it gives you, challenge them, and explain why you didn’t like one proposition and preferred the other.

AI is the hack to travel in time. What would have taken you a week to do can be done in one 2H-interactive session on ChatGPT.

Now that you’ve built your IKIGAI intersection, it’s time to see how it can become your LinkedIn Personal Brand.

Step 3: Sculpt Your LinkedIn Brand with Your Ikigai

You have identified the most fulfilling elements in your life, you now possess a unique compass to navigate your personal branding journey on LinkedIn.

Why?

Because most people out there are going after the same industry as you do but fail to build a unique spot.

With the IKIGAI you now have a singular LinkedIn positioning that can’t be copied, you are the only you, and there’s no way someone else can take that from you.

That’s how you become memorable and get a real advantage over your competition. That’s how you become the elephant in the room of your industry.

However, I have to address something. The portrait I have painted so far with the IKIGAI for your LinkedIn positioning might not work for everyone. If you struggle to fill all categories with at least a few sentences, then it’s time for you to explore.

Unicity is built through action and experience, you can’t fake it, you need to mean it, to live it, because if you don’t, people will know you’re not what you say you are.

End of the digression, your goal is to feed your LinkedIn narrative with your IKIGAI.

The narrative should invite a specific audience and solve a specific pain they’re experiencing, and your IKIGAI needs to prove that you are the best person in your industry for them.

When you start on Linkedin the goal is not to jump on the hot thing, it’s to differentiate yourself enough that your message resonates instantly with the right audience.

LinkedIn Personal Branding is all about:

• One Unique Reader

• One Core Idea

• One Singular Offer

• One Easy Action

That’s how you should think about your IKIGAI when building its LinkedIn version. While finding it was about you, to use it as a personal branding kit you need to think about the others.

Blend all these elements in your:

• Headline

• About section

• Hashtags used

• Background picture

Nothing beats an authentic and singular positioning, the IKIGAI is the perfect way to find it.

Remember, this journey is about self-discovery. You won’t go far if you’re not honest and intentional at every step of the process.

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If you found that useful, follow me on Linkedin, I help 4700+ people daily leverage growth through content creation.

Till next week for a new Branding Byte!