[Heads up: This post is three times as long as a normal post, but I promise it will be worth the read. If you skip to the end, you will be completely lacking context and it won't make any sense at all, so give yourself a good five minutes to take it all in. If it wasn't worth it, send me a rock in the mail.]

This is a great exercise to do at least once every few years. It’s also a great way to define or redefine your personal brand. Your life experiences shape what you believe in and how you act. This exercise can have a profound effect on how people perceive you, how you think about yourself, and how you market yourself.

How did I get where I am today?

The question presents an opportunity to really reflect on the defining moments of my recent past, the things that have reshaped me as a person, and changed the way I approach both life and business.

How the change began

I was working an average of 80-90 hours per week back in 2003 when a long-time client made some out of the blue bizarrely violent threats on my life. Ironically, I had helped this client increase annual revenues by over $3m and increased advertising response by 700%. By all accounts we were doing great work for them. I considered the client’s comments seriously, and decided the risk wasn’t worth the business. After eleven years of working with the client, I abruptly ended the relationship and instantly lost 60% of our revenues.

The sudden downturn in business provided the perfect opportunity to take a good long break. I traveled some and discovered the art of relaxation. For two years, I took on projects that were more appealing and less profitable, and I worked less.

When I decided to rebuild in 2005, things had changed quite a lot, but I plugged away at building a new network and gaining new clients until the business was again healthy. It took me until 2007 to bring the business back to where it needed to be.

Then a few things happened that really derailed Train of Thought. One large client stiffed us for several months of work, and it was a big hit. We recovered just in time for another client to do the same thing, and that one nearly sank us (these two events caused some major policy changes that have virtually eliminated the possibility of not getting paid). That was 2008. Somehow we made it to 2009, but by the time I got there, the stress caused by fallout of the non-paying clients had taken a huge toll on my immune system.

Then I got sick. Really sick.

It’s just about impossible to explain your levels of physical pain to another person in any sort of comprehensible manner. And before you try, know this: No one wants to know, and in all likelihood, no matter how hard you try to convey your pain, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will “get” what you are saying. Pain is an individual thing that everyone experiences differently, and each person has enough pain of their own.

I hit an all time low in April of 2009 when I got nailed by a stress-induced illness. Shocks of pain racked my body several times per day. After breaking bones and tearing muscles in the past, I thought I had a high pain tolerance. Until this, I didn’t truly know what pain was.

Two weeks in, I honestly thought I wasn’t going to make it, and to be totally honest, at the height of the pain there were a couple of times when I didn’t want to make it. That sounds ominous now, but at the time, it was difficult to think straight. You ever wake up bolting upright from your blissful twenty minutes of sleep, screaming at the top of your lungs from the pain? I hope not. I wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone. It felt like someone had driven railroad spikes right through my body (not that I would know what that actually feels like).

Three weeks into this, an acquaintance saw the anguish on my face, and told me about an herbal remedy that works specifically on virus-related pain. I got some, and to my utter amazement, it worked. Three more weeks of living with the pain at about 20%, and I was healthy again.

With barely enough time to get enough miles on the bike, I picked back up my goal of riding the Seattle to Portland bicycle ride. I made it, completing the 204 mile ride for the third and hardest time. I got to enjoy a special exhausted moment, riding across the line with my good friend Jerry Baker. It was his 30th STP.

Then, the fit hit the shan.

The following week, I needed a root canal. The dentist accidentally poked a hole through the bottom of the root and pushed the infected nerve down to the jaw instead of pulling it out. He left it there and sent me home. I thought I had learned about real pain in April. I was wrong.

The nerve he poked through just happened to extend up the jaw to my right eye, ear, trigeminal nerve, temple, and all the way up to the side and back of my skull. For two months, several times per day, I experienced 6-minute shocks of pain that racked the entire right side of my head. They were completely random, coming on with no warning. I had to take painkillers the entire time just to be able to tolerate the barely dulled pain. I was literally crying or screaming at the top of my lungs every time it happened. At one point, my doctor’s office had me scheduled for an emergency MRI of my brain to rule out the possibility of brain tumors. Even a year later, writing this now is difficult, so fresh are the memories.

When you’re on painkillers, many things happen, and all of them are bad. The worst side-effect for me was an immediate blurring of my vision. I never needed glasses before this, but I had to get a pair of fairly strong glasses just to be able to work. My vision never recovered.

And what of the dentist who did this? Well, he refused to acknowledge that anything was wrong at all. Nearly every time I called, he told me he didn’t have any appointments available, and said the mysterious comment, “You shouldn’t be in any pain,” whatever that meant. It seems lost on him that his error cost me roughly four months of my life and salary, not to mention the lost marketing time. I found it disturbing that he essentially blew me off after admitting his error.

When I finally emerged from the pain and endured a foggy recovery month, three things happened:
1) I found myself incredibly angry.
2) My financial life was in tatters.
3) I no longer knew what I believed in.

You might think that pain is part of what defines me, but nothing could be further from the truth. I focus on the positive, so it’s the wisdom gained from the experience of being in extreme pain that has reshaped me. Pain itself is not a thing to be defined by. To hell with pain.

The anger

My anger was a natural reaction to an unknown quantity. There was no way to predict this. I felt like I deserved some great reward for surviving, but there wasn’t any apparent reward. There was no one to be angry with (except the dentist), and no way to really address the anger. After about a week, I finally decided that the reward was getting to continue living, fighting and surviving, hopefully with some happiness along the way.

My destroyed financial life

When you get sick, big banks do not care. They treat you like you are scum of the earth. In fact, if they know you are really sick, they come after you like sharks sensing blood, trying to get any last remaining pieces of your money before you croak. It’s a disgusting thing to experience because it shows you how utterly, grotesquely inhumane big banks can really be. In my case, it was Chase Home Finance, holder of my mortgage servicing, who aggressively came after me. So, while I was battling skull-gripping pain, Chase was calling me 5-6 time per day, rudely demanding house payments, which in some cases were not even behind schedule. They called as early as 7:40AM, and as late as 8PM, seven days a week.

I had never learned about the six-month rule that says you should always have six months of salary in the bank to cover expenses in a time of crisis. No one told me about that until after my crisis. (No one to blame of course.)

When I got sick, I pulled back on all marketing because I didn’t know if I could complete the work, and I did not want to disappoint my clients or cause them any delays. As with any business, when you stop marketing, you will inevitably experience a slow-down approximately six months down the road. That is exactly what happened to me.

Additionally, I had to spend about $7k out of pocket to cover medical and dental expenses. I had to literally choose between my health or my house payment and taxes. I chose my health. I’ve been clawing my way out of this situation ever since. A year on, I will be truly lucky if I can manage to keep my house.

My beliefs, rediscovered

Once I got over the anger and shock of my newly destroyed finances and credit rating, I began asking myself what I believed in. This was another natural reaction to the experiences I had gone through. Virtually everything I had been investing my time and energy into before getting sick had abandoned me when I needed it most. So what did I believe in?

The answer did not come quickly. Initially, I told myself I believed in nothing. It’s kind of hard to go anywhere from there though, so I kept asking the question. Eventually, one thing emerged: People. I believe in people.

My belief in people

How did I come to the conclusion that I believed in people? After all, Chase’s people had treated me like crap. The two nonpaying clients and the dentist were clearly looking only to protect their own tails. Still, these particular individuals comprised nothing more than a bank’s staff of underpaid, corporate brainwashed employees, a couple of people with different priorities, and a dentist who should have retired while he could still see straight and had better judgment. These people did not define all of humanity.

It was people who helped me through, helped me survive. You can read about those extraordinary friends in a thank you on my personal blog.

My personal brand, redefined

What does all of this mean in the context of my personal brand? Well, let’s add it up.

• I’m an experienced businessman who has enjoyed the highs of success and the lows of hard times. I enjoy working hard to exceed my clients’ expectations. I enjoy a mutually respectful working relationship. I can solve my clients problems, and they pay me well for my expertise.

• I’ve lived through health hell, and I’m aware that it can get worse, which helps keep my priorities in order.

• I’m a fighter and a survivor.

• I believe in people.

• I no longer sweat the small stuff, and most stuff is small. In other words, I have a good perspective and objectivity.

Why is this valuable for personal branding?

Try thinking about your personal brand this way:
When you know what drives you, you have goals and purpose. When you know what you believe in, you have self-confidence and trust in others. When you have wisdom, you can better prepare for whatever may come your way. When all of these elements are present, you have the clarity needed to focus and succeed.

SO: Goals, purpose, beliefs, self-confidence, trust, wisdom, focus, clarity, and preparedness. These are all essential building blocks for personal and business success. We all have our strengths and defining experiences. Reflecting on them can show you insights into how you see yourself, and how others know you. Those insights can provide the fuel you need to increase your confidence, communicate your brand value in a more compelling manner, and reach greater success.

The number one thing my clients get in working with me is broad-perspective strategy and creative, that can only come from a wealth of life experience. Before I lived through this, I did not describe my work this way. I was one creative among many. Now I know beyond doubt that I’m unusual. This inevitably effects my marketing.

This changes my brand positioning, my personal brand, and my prospective clients’ perception of me. In short, these experiences have reshaped me as a person and a professional, making me even more valuable to (and appreciative of) my clients.

To apply this lesson to your own personal brand, check out my next (much shorter) post.

Did you find this helpful? Share you own experiences in comments below, or feel free to share your story privately on the contact page.

You may be scratching your head about my babies to branding analogy, or you might just think I’m nuts for making this connection, but this is important because it drives home the very reason why branding is so critical to business success – why it is so important to undertake the process of branding right from the moment of immaculate business conception.

See, we humans have an innate need to categorize and label durn near everything. We start labeling and categorizing from the very moment we become conscious, out-of-the-womb babies. Actually, strike the ‘durn near,’ and just keep the ‘everything.’ We label EVERYTHING. Every single thought, emotion, person, thing, and action we come into contact with gets labeled in our brains. This is how we identify with literally everything in our lives.

Brand Context

Think about your day. You wake up, possibly naked, completely unlabeled. You look over at your significant other (if you have one), and your mind calls up the label you have for that person, whether it is ‘wife’, ‘boyfriend,’ ‘Julie’, ‘Pat,’ ‘Robert’, or whomever. You get up, stumble into where? The ‘bathroom.’ You pick up what? ‘Toothbrush.’ To brush what? ‘Teeth.’ Next, you walk to ‘kitchen’, where you eat ‘cereal.’ These are basic labels. Without them, you would have no way to relate to or describe the things you desire and need every day.

Add some more detailed labels to the above items, and your labeled day starts looking like this relationship:
Wake, think about Julie, walk to bathroom, brush teeth with Sonicare and Colgate, walk to kitchen, eat Healthy Valley brand cereal, grind Victrola organic coffee beans in Braun grinder, put on your Lucky brand jeans, Banana Republic shirt, and Nine West shoes or Nike sneakers, read the Wall Street Journal while drinking Victrola coffee, find your keys, and drive your Honda on I-5 to work at (insert company name here), go to lunch with Bob at Cafe Lulu, drive his Prius back to work, punch the clock, and head home to your house in the Ravenna neighborhood of Seattle.

There are over twenty-five labels in the above paragraph. 25 labels! In the span of what? Half an hour of your day?! Without them, the paragraph could not possibly exist because there would be no description, no language.

Now, this is the cool part, the part where it all comes together, where you see that you absolutely must brand your business right from the very start if you want people to know, buy, love, and talk about you.

The moment you’ve been branding for

Remember those 25 or so labels I just mentioned two paragraphs up? They make your day describable. Without them, there would be no way to describe your daily thoughts, emotions, and interactions. You would have no way to relate to the things you buy. No way to relate to the people you know. No way to even describe what happens after the moment of waking.

Think about it another way: If you asked a brand-spankin’ new, freshly born baby to describe the birth process, they couldn’t do it! A baby has no categorizations, no labels, no relationships, no language, nothing, nada, zip, zilch. Babies can’t speak right away. They have to learn the language.

Now, try asking a baby to describe your company. You know they can’t do it because they can’t speak your language. Asking your customers to remember your company without first branding it is precisely the same thing. Without knowing your business language – your brand – they cannot do it. And you will not become a compelling part of their dialog.

Brand = Business Language

Your brand is the language of your business. People have to learn your language to be able to speak it. The more articulate your business language – or brand – the more useful and memorable your business becomes.

Your brand positioning tells people how to categorize you. Your logo and identity give them the easiest of ways to remember and relate to you. Your tag line helps them further categorize you. Your website is the place where they can connect with your brand. Your marketing increases awareness of your brand.

Your customers rely on your brand to be able to categorize and label you so that when they need you, they know exactly which thought to recall, which logo identifies you, what you do, what you provide to their day, why they need you.

If you rely on word of mouth for much of your marketing, you can see that without developing your business language – your brand – right from the start, people won’t know how to talk about you. If you develop your brand, people will learn your business language, and an important part of your marketing will suddenly have a powerful dialog, a way to exist, be remembered, and remain in people’s thoughts and conversations.

I gave a talk on branding last Friday at the beautiful new Bellevue City Hall. One topic that spurred many questions was Brand Positioning. It is difficult to explain such an important step of the branding process in roughly ten minutes, so here’s a little more detail. I’ll be visiting this topic often.

Brand positioning is perhaps the most shunned part of branding that exists, especially for small businesses. Creative professionals don’t like it because it is quite involved and less on the creative side. Clients don’t like it because it costs money, and it can reveal that your golden egg is perhaps a little more on the silver side.

We all like to believe that our ideas are completely original, and often times they are. But – and this is a big but – sometimes your original ideas are not so original.

Brand positioning brings to light the viability of your product or service. It can also show alternate paths, and even reveal new opportunities.

Brand Positioning is a difficult task which can rarely be completed by one person alone. Good brand positioning is a question and answer proposition, requiring hours and days of intense research, along with a nearly inhuman amount of objectivity.

Combined with brand strategy, positioning is a potent step in brand development. Brand positioning and strategy will provide you with a clear direction and a wide-angle view of the future for your marketing. It will also give your graphic designer exactly what they need to be able to design your corporate identity with purpose and meaning.

Brand positioning clearly defines the following crucial things, before you invest time, money, hopes, and energy in realizing your vision:

Originality – Is your idea unique? You may think it is, but now is the time to do some intensive research to discover whether or not other companies are marketing the same product or service.

Establish your unique position in your chosen market - If your product is totally unique, you may have hit a home run. If there are other products just like it, you may have to position yours as being different in one important way, which can capture the attention of your audience, and can garner enough sales to justify the effort.

Identify competitors - Everyone has competition. Everyone. I once had a boss who liked to tell his employees that the company had no competition. He wanted them to think only about their own success. There is wisdom in that approach, because it can help people focus, however, a strong competitor is a valuable asset. It gives you a peer, a potential equal whom you can rise above, or set incremental goals against, to capture a market. All great athletes have competitors. Businesses do too.

Determine required budget to compete - Do you have the needed budget? You may have the drive and determination, but if a larger competitor has the marketing budget to outgun you at every crucial step, you are going to need to change your strategy, and you may need to consider a different position in the market.

This is often a hard process. When you’re excited about getting your business started or launching a new brand, objectivity is usually the one key ingredient most people lack, and often in a big way. I highly recommend pairing with a brand consultant or graphic designer who truly understands branding.

At the end of the process, you should have a brand position summary that clearly states your market position, and can guide your product development, brand development, and marketing planning.