Offering Value and Investing in yourself
When we think of business development, we often think of re-investing back into the business to help it grow faster even if that means we won’t see the profits for quite a while. But this is also true when it comes to personal branding. If there’s anything that I’ve realized over the years of growing my personal brand and my online presence, it’s that you need to keep investing in yourself if you’re planning to offer any significant value to your audience in the long run. Here’s why.
The first reason is quite simple. It’s because, if you stop investing in yourself, then that will mean that we will stop growing, and if we stop growing, that’ll mean that we won’t be able to offer any significant value to our audience and when that happens, it doesn’t matter how many hours we’ve put into growing our business and our presence, the lack of growth on our side will mean a lack of growth on our audience’s side and that will lead them to flock to other pages which can offer them the growth that they desire, making our page outdated and insignificant in the process. It’s a tough reality, but it’s an important one to keep in mind if we want to keep growing our brand in the long run.
The second reason is that you’ll have more to offer. It’s no big secret that the whole point of self-growth and investing in yourself is not only so that you can keep growing as a person and a brand, but also because when you invest in your own growth, you will have more to offer to your audience. You can read books, take courses, find a mentor, anything that will help you grow, gain knowledge, and develop your mindset will help you discover new things and help you offer more value to your audience, and in turn, help them grow through the content and the value that you’re sharing on your social media page.
Another great reason for you to invest in yourself is the people that you’ll get to connect with. I’ve done interviews with some of the best people at the top of their personal branding and personal development game, but none of that would’ve happened if I didn’t invest in myself first. Nothing great comes overnight. To speak from my experience, for example, it took me years to connect with all these people and get to know them personally before I could even interview them in the first place. My first interview was hard. I was still learning, my English wasn’t very good, and I was having a very hard time speaking in front of the camera, but I learned and I trained myself to face those challenges instead of letting them be the things that hold me back. And even though I had slowly gotten over those obstacles, it still took me something like 5 years before I could connect with someone like Eric Meades.
The next reason is so that you can get to know who you are. Often times we forget to try and figure out who we are as a person simply because we’ve been focusing on learning about the things that we’re interested in. Now, that’s all well and good, but if you don’t know who you are, if you haven’t taken that journey inside of yourself, there’s no way that you can help spread value to your audience, no matter how much knowledge you’ve acquired. Get to know yourself, find out what your goals are, and find if you have invisible anchors that you still haven’t broken down. That’s really why Joel was the first speaker in our Grow Summit. It’s because if you haven’t broken that anchor that ties you down to the past, there’s no way that you can walk forward and step into the present, let alone the future, and the only way for us to truly know if we have invisible anchors or not, is to find out who we are inside. Get to know yourself, and in doing so, you’ll finally get to cut the chains that bind you to your past and let you float to where you need to be.
Doing this will also help you to get over the stumbling block of not knowing what value to offer. Let’s be honest here, this is one of the biggest reasons why we’re not actively posting on our social media page; because we don’t know what we can offer and we don’t know if anyone’s even interested. This might be because we’re exposed to so many different things every single day in the age of the internet. I remember when I was growing up, getting information isn’t as easy as just going on google and typing out what we want to know, nor is it as easy as going to an Instagram page where all the information has been curated. Back then, you need to know people or read the news religiously to really get a hang of things and to really know what’s going on. But the world today is different. Very different. We’re bombarded with information from the moment we wake up to the moment right before we go to sleep, and that can be overwhelming. But here’s the thing, where that value comes from matters more than you think it does. Sure, you can find that on google if you really want, but the fact that your audience is getting that value straight from you, and assuming it’s genuine, then it’s going to make that value all the more valuable and more unique. Make sure that whatever you’re sharing is authentic and genuine, and you’ll have nothing to worry about in terms of being confused as to what value that you need to be sharing with your audience.
