15 Career Success Tips for Branding Yourself as a Polished Professional

Creating positive personal impact is one of the seven keys to life and career success that I discuss in my forthcoming book, Climbing the Corporate Ladder.  When you create positive personal impact, you brand yourself as a polished professional.

My career success coach clients and membership site members ask me lots of questions about how to create positive personal impact.  So I decided to take a few minutes and create 15 rules for creating positive personal impact.  Check it out and let me know what you think…

15 Career Success Tips for Creating Powerful Personal Impact

1. Become known as a person of character and high integrity.  Be true yourself.  Your reputation is all you’ve got.

2. Know your values and stick to them.  If you haven’t already articulated your values (what’s important to you in life), take a few minutes, think about them and write them down.  Review them often.  Make sure you’re staying true to yourself.

3. Take responsibility for your life and career.  You are the one who is responsible for making your dreams come true.  Embrace this responsibility.  Do what it takes to succeed.

4. Build your legacy.  Your legacy is how people will remember you when you’re gone.  Think about the memories you are leaving behind every day.  How will people remember you?  Focus on ensuring that people will remember you as someone who did his or her best.

5. Make yourself stand out.  Identify the qualities or characteristics that make you a unique human being.  Develop your unique feature/benefit statement.  Identify what sets you apart (the feature) and how this benefits the people around you?

6. Become widely trusted. Deliver on what you say you’ll do.  If you can’t meet a commitment, let the other person know as soon as you can.  Keep confidences.  Avoid gossip.  It is never good to embarrass others by repeating what they have shared with you – even if it isn’t in confidence.

7. Use the two most important words in the world – “thank you” – often.  People who use these two simple words do well in their life and career.  And they others come to see them as a truly nice person.

8. Treat every social interaction as an opportunity to build and strengthen relationships.  Strong relationships are key to success in business.  When meeting people, make a personal connection.  You’ll generate opportunities for yourself.

9. Stand up straight, smile, look people in the eye.  Shake hands as if you mean it.  Use the other person’s name frequently during conversations.  Be genuinely interested in what other people have to say.

10. Business meals are about business, not the food.  Learn and use simple table manners.  Good table manners make you look polished and poised.

11. Dedicate time and money to your wardrobe.  Purchase your clothing according to a well thought out plan.  Buy the highest quality clothes that you can afford.  This will pay off in the long run.  High quality clothes look better and wear longer.

12. Make sure your clothes fit well are well tailored.  Use the three way mirror when trying on clothes.  Make sure you look good from the front, back and side.  Keep your clothes looking good.

13. Have your hair cut and styled regularly.  Your hair stylist is your friend.  Visit him or her as often as necessary to keep you looking sharp.

14. Become a great communicator.  Learn to write well, handle yourself in conversations and present to a group.

15. Seek out and welcome feedback.  Listen to what people, especially your employees and customers, tell you.  Absorb it, even though it may hurt.  Develop a plan for modifying your behavior.  Work your plan.

The career success coach point here is simple common sense.  You have to brand yourself as a polished professional by creating positive personal impact if you want to create the life and career success you want and deserve.  People who create positive personal impact are in demand.  Others look up to them and want them on their teams.  Their names come up in promotion discussions – and are never mentioned when layoffs threaten.  Follow these 15 common sense tips and you’ll be on your way to not only creating positive personal impact, but to creating the life and career success you want and deserve.

That’s my career advice on creating positive personal impact.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment.  As always, thanks for reading my daily musings on life and career success.  I really value you.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, please download a free copy of my popular career advice book Success Tweets and its companion piece Success Tweets Explained.  The first gives you 140 bits of career success advice tweet style — in 140 characters or less.  The second is a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.

PPS: I opened a membership site last September.  It’s called My Corporate Climb and is devoted to helping people create career success inside large corporations.  You can find out about the membership site by going to http://www.mycorporateclimb.