Ryan O'Keeffe, Founder of Jago. Jago has helped many leaders raise their profiles to increase their commercial opportunities.
Smiling businesswoman shaking hands with client before meeting
You have a personal brand, whether you know it or not.
Do you have friends? Family? Colleagues? Then, even if you aren’t on social media, you exist as a brand. Because your personal brand is just your reputation, scaled. That’s why at my agency, Jago, we never talk about building personal brands from scratch. You own your personal brand; we just help you maximize it.
We also make sure your personal brand is consistent across mediums. If you aren’t on social media, you need to be if you want to gain traction within your industry. And if you’ve got a reputation for moaning in the office, well, it doesn’t matter how flashy your LinkedIn profile is.
Inconsistency kills personal brands. The best way to avoid inconsistency? Emotional intelligence (EQ).
What Is EQ?
EQ is the ability to monitor your own and others’ emotions and use this information to guide your behavior. This means you remain your authentic self through good times and bad, at work and at home, online and offline.
This leads to a consistent personal brand. As someone we worked with once said, there’s no Jekyll and Hyde with strong EQ.
At my agency, we use the EQ-i 2.0 and EQ 360 frameworks, which offer an assessment of your total EQ, broken into five main components and 15 subscales.
The main components are:
• Self-perception.
• Self-expression.
• Interpersonal.
• Decision making.
• Stress management.
The subscales for each component are emotional behaviors including empathy, self-awareness and self-regard. Through coaching, we help clients enhance their self-awareness, behavior and performance by discussing the occasional “cost” of their high-scoring areas as well as the cost of low-scoring areas. Our more self-aware clients sometimes fall into traps of overanalyzing situations or overthinking problems and interactions. These are common issues, according to a Myers-Briggs survey.
My EQ Story
For me, EQ was a matter of discovery rather than training. I’ve always been able to read a room. I had to; I was a public housing kid looking out for myself. And then I was the poor kid in school, constantly watching to work out how to fit in. Both experiences made me an optimist; they made me good at building trust.
And that trust-building skill meant relationship-building skill too. Once I was out of school and working in sales, I found success quickly. And at some point later I realized why: EQ. When I consciously tuned into it, my performance improved further. My reputation improved further. EQ helped me navigate trauma and find success. It helped me turn both those things, light and dark, into a personal brand.
That’s why I founded my agency and why I trained officially in EQ. I wanted to help others understand that emotions impact actions, and actions affect the world around us.
How You Can Use EQ To Reinforce Your Personal Brand
As I said already, your personal brand is your reputation, scaled. If you are aware of what you are projecting and how people are reacting to it when you are in a room of 12 people, you can be pretty sure how a larger audience will react too.
It’s important to note that power tends to have a negative impact on self-awareness. I think that’s why my EQ was naturally high—I was in very low-power situations for a lot of my life. So I had to know what other people thought and felt about me to get by.
As Tasha Eurich notes in the Harvard Business Review, “Even though most people believe they are self-aware, only 10%–15% of the people we studied actually fit the criteria.” To turn that into actionable advice, I say forget about your assumptions. If everyone believes they are self-aware, but only 15% actually are, what’s the likelihood you’re in that 15%?
You can start to work on your emotional intelligence with a few easy changes:
• Recognize and name your emotions.
• Ask for honest feedback from your team about how you respond to conflict, how well you listen and how empathetic you are.
• Remain calm and make a plan to take action on any points in that feedback that have come up repeatedly.
• Question your own opinions.
• Make space for the opinions of others.
• Celebrate and reflect on positive moments, but don’t ignore the negative.
Final Thoughts
In modern business, it’s crucial to be consistent across platforms. Many of us make connections online now. We might meet someone on LinkedIn, connect in real life at a meet and greet six months later, and then be on a podcast with them a couple of weeks after that. EQ can help you be your best self in all three situations.
When you’re working on your EQ, the most important thing to remember is that you have to let go of some ego to truly explore and build your emotional intelligence. Many people think personal branding is only for the vain. But the fact that EQ is so tied into the process proves that idea wrong.
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