Rituparna Ghosh: The Power of Storytelling for Your Personal Brand
Personal branding is no longer a nice-to-have. An essential exercise to advance in your career, it is born out of marketing yourself, networking right, self-improvement and a keen sense of image perception. Personal branding defines who you are and yet it’s not your name, designation, CV or even the stars on your shoulders; it is your legacy. It is the value you bring to the table, what you can do for others, and that by which people remember you.
Rituparna Ghosh, founder of Your Story Bag, a storytelling, consulting and training firm, shares with us eye-opening insights about personal branding, and focuses on why storytelling is a powerful tool to shape it.
Benefits of consciously defining your personal brand
You have a personal brand whether you like it or not. The question is, are you consciously defining it or letting others define it for you? In today’s highly digitised world where more and more people are meeting online before meeting in person, there are two clear benefits of taking ownership of your brand:
> Discovery: From getting to know your work to figuring if you are worth someone’s time, effort and, in some cases, money – people are first familiarising themselves with your brand and credibility before they familiarise themselves with you.
> Networking: In the online world, networking works in sublime ways. Someone may not be interacting with you on a regular basis and yet reach out when an appropriate opportunity turns up, based on their knowledge of you, your work and beliefs from the personal brand that is out there.
Why is storytelling an effective tool for personal branding?
> Ties in your personas: We all have a private, public and social persona for our personal, professional and online interactions respectively. Storytelling aligns those personas together by projecting the same narrative about you and your work across varied audiences.
> Conveys core values: While professional rewards and recognition are easy to list out, core values – values that drive and motivate you – are best shared via storytelling because that instantly humanises your achievements.
> Builds trust: We can all relate to stories. They are a primal way to connect deeply with your audience. When you weave into a story what you do and why you do it, and when that story is consistent with what others say about you and what’s on the web, it builds trust.
Three kinds of stories every woman should have in her bag
> Past: Your background, where you grew up, where you went to school, who your parents and grandparents were, where have you travelled to, what have you read, what kind of people have you met are all experiences that have shaped you. Your past has built your character, taught you lessons and shaped your perceptions about the world and the people in it. You must have the story on what got you to where you are today.
> Present: This is the story that you will share tomorrow. So start looking at it more closely. You should know what you are working on, what drives you, what your roadblocks are and, most importantly, how your past connects to your present and how that will connect to your future.
> Future: Where is your personal and professional journey leading you? Where do you want to be? What is your mission and vision? What is your plan to work towards that mission and vision? These are stories that often spell potential and promise to someone you meet.
You have the power to shape your personal brand at every step of the way in your career. Don’t leave it to others to define it when you can thoughtfully and consciously design it yourself. It will take time and a lot of good work on your part, but the returns are often unfathomable.
About the Expert
A compelling and compulsive storyteller, with over a decade of experience in the field, Rituparna Ghosh is the founder of Your Story Bag, a storytelling, consulting and training firm. She works with children, teachers, parents, professionals, entrepreneurs, and people in businesses and corporations, helping them discover expressions, emotions, and life through stories. In the corporate space, Ghosh has worked on projects involving the use of storytelling for training, company branding, change management, communication, and gender sensitization. She credits her past professions as a journalist and a TV producer for teaching her the power of stories, and is deeply committed to making storytelling a mainstream skill in India.
