Essay on Evaluation on Personal Branding and Self-Development

Developing the perfect personal brand requires practice and dedication. Genuine expertise can only be achieved by hard work, sacrifice, and an honest, sometimes painful self-evaluation. It will take at least a decade to acquire expertise. One will need to make the most of their time by participating in “deliberate” practice, which focuses on activities above one’s present level of skill and comfort (S4 E8). One will need the assistance of a knowledgeable coach not just to lead them through intentional practice but also to assist one in learning how to coach oneself.

Core Themes

Practice

Genuine professionals not only practice carefully, but they also think deliberately. Practice includes two types of learning: strengthening one’s current talents and broadening the scope and range of their abilities (Rosalsky, 2016). The intense focus needed to do these two activities severely restricts one’s time to devote to them. Doing anything for an extended period is probably associated with being good at it, but that is not the objective. A person’s capacity to make a long-term commitment in advance is crucial.

There is a significant difference in performance across groups with the same practice in Rosalsky’s (2016) study. The group with a long-term commitment improves more quickly than the one with a short-term commitment, despite only training for an hour and a half each week. When experts achieve a certain degree of proficiency, they frequently discover that they react instinctively to certain circumstances and may begin to depend solely on their intuition. As long as there is no consequence for making a regular reaction fail or even cause harm, experts may fail to detect this growing intuitive bias. More experienced individuals, especially those in their fifties and sixties, have a higher risk of slipping into this trap.

Personal Branding

Job market specialists and career counselors often cite personal brand performance genres as providing semiotic methods that would allegedly give the coherence necessary for individuals to aim for an idealized neoliberal version of work flexibility (Whitmer, 2019). This paradoxical and recursive nature of branding has led marketers to endow objects with personalities, apparently modeled after human ones. However, the process of translating personalities associated with people to those that can be seen as emanating from objects has resulted in a change in the objects’ personalities (Whitmer, 2019).

Neoliberal Self

Personal branding is a type of performance that uses various semiotic methods to address a difficulty that arises when employees try to position themselves as allies in the context of current neoliberal ideas about the ideal working self (Whitmer, 2019). In the view of many neoliberal opponents, the ideal neoliberal self is flexible to changing working conditions and continually increasing its ability to meet market demands. However, in the real world, a lack of rigidity may be detrimental when it comes to recruiting. Job seekers who have had a history of changing professions and demonstrating flexibility may find it challenging to portray themselves as cogent and marketable individuals while putting together interviews and business cards needed to apply for a position (Whitmer, 2019). Neoliberalism holds that the greatest way to guarantee human well-being is to promote private business, individual accountability, and competitive markets to motivate and coordinate the activities of entrepreneurs.

Conclusion

Becoming an expert takes time and effort. It takes at least ten years of intensive preparation for even the most talented performers to win international contests. Coaches who can provide constructive, even unpleasant, criticism are essential for expertise growth. Students that actively seek out criticism on their work are the true experts. Moreover, they are adept at identifying when and why a coach’s suggestions don’t work for them. The greatest trainers also point out areas where one may enhance their performance as one advances their ability.

References

Rosalsky, G. (2016). How to Become Great at Just About Anything. Freakinomics Radio from WNYC Studios. 49 min podcast on practice vs talent.

S4 E8: The Second Redemption. The scene on Radio from the Center for Documentary Studies. A 63 min podcast on Neoliberalism and how it shapes our understanding of the world. http://www.sceneonradio.org/s4-e8-the-second-redemption/

Whitmer, J. M. (2019). You are your brand: Self‐branding and the marketization of self. Sociology Compass, 13(3), e12662.