What concepts of content and meaning do we assign to “power”?
Power often gets bad press. It is related to objectives of domination, manipulation, discretion, imposition, excessive ambition, aggressiveness, win-lose relationships, impunity, selfishness, economic power, authoritarianism, self-centeredness.
But there is another face of power associated with potency, with the possibility of realization. In this line, we chose it to generate consensus, develop unique talents, coordinate effective actions that necessarily require building relationships, influence with convening proposals, open the possibilities of collaboration..
This approach to power implies the recognition that the exchange of well-founded opinions generates new constructions, also motivating active participation and collaborative power.
We see situations on a daily basis in which standing out in a group is taken as something negative, attributing intentions associated with the desire to exercise power exclusively for one’s own benefit. We do not deny that this often happens; we deny that this characterizes and defines power as such.
We were born different, we are unique beings. Ignoring this fact leads to neutralizing our uniqueness and the resources that make it possible a full deployment of our capabilities.
To deny power is to deny the possibility of expressing ourselves with authenticity, expressing vision, values, talents, capacities, personality, passions that constitute the greatest contribution that we can offer in our spaces of presence. And this limitation is resonant, it does not only affect us as individuals, it has a collective scope when it is installed as a culture.
We are not talking about weighing individualism, we are talking about enriching individuality in harmony with the collective context, upholding the right to fully express ourselves, developing more and not less than who we are.
What does personal branding contribute in this sense? Why did we choose to call it Self Branding?
In the historical process of marketing, very synthetically, communication of product attributes has gone to positioning and consolidating brands and, currently, to generating awareness. In this, Storytelling has gained prominence in direct relation to the search for identification of the «audiences» with the «experience» that is proposed.
As individuals we are no strangers to this process. We have a public identity whether we like it or not: we design it or we let it be designed for us by default.
What do we tell, how do we tell? Thinking about applying tools mechanically is not enough to authentically connect value systems between the parts of the communication process. The mechanical representation is not enduring. This is a fact that has innumerable examples in all human spheres.
The construction of connection and influence requires coherence over time between what I think, feel, say and do, nurturing the assertiveness that is born from the quality of self-knowledge and the manifest commitment to the drift of actions consistent with what has been declared.
On this basis, we should design plans and actions that arise from a «self» that listens, listens to itself, acts, expresses, influences and is influenced by the effective ways of relating as part of its context.
With this approach, the narratives respond to their own values that connect and resonate with the values of others. They are nourished by «Power» of realization intertwined between the individual, and groups.
We live in a present in which the need to find meaning is showing itself in many different ways, most of the time due to its absence.
The reality is that, instead of «finding» it, it is about «building» it from the actions that we choose in consistency day by day, in this lies our «power» of realization in its broadest «sense».
PM
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