Your reputation may be one of your most valuable assets. Long before someone offers you a job, recommends your business, trusts you with leadership, or asks for your advice, they have already formed opinions about who you are. Those opinions are built through hundreds of small interactions that accumulate over time. Most people don’t think much about their reputation until they need it. They assume opportunities will arrive based solely on talent, experience, or credentials. Yet reputation often determines who gets the opportunity in the first place. While companies spend millions of dollars building and protecting their brands, individuals are constantly building reputations whether they realize it or not. The question isn’t whether you have a reputation. The question is whether you’re intentionally shaping it. Understanding how reputations are formed can help you build greater trust, stronger relationships, and more opportunities throughout your career and life.

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What Is a Reputation?

A reputation is the collection of experiences, expectations, and beliefs other people associate with you.

Why Reputation Matters

Reputation impacts all areas of life.

It affects who is recommended for a job, who is promoted, who’s trusted with leadership responsibilities, and even who gets asked for advice.

Reputation is not physical or emotional, yet it is created by physical actions and emotional impacts we leave with other people.

For example: You may be trusted with leading a team not because you’ve led a team before, but because your hard work (physical) and respect for people (emotional) give others confidence you can become a great leader.

A reputation is not just what you see, but what you feel and what you expect.

It transcends the physical and breaches the emotional, mental, and sometimes spiritual.

Everyone Has a Reputation

Like businesses, people also have reputations. Think of your best friend. What are some things that come to mind? Honesty? Work ethic? Loyalty? Compassion? Leadership? Tenacity? Frugality? Selfish? Are they on time or always late?

If you were to ask one of five friends for help…their personal reputation would come into play. If you needed help making it to an important meeting or appointment, you certainly wouldn’t ask the really fun but always late friend. Or if you needed help planning a party, the frugal, too-serious lawyer wouldn’t come to mind. These are their personal brands in action.

Every Interaction Shapes Your Reputation

Have you let your reputation just happen to you rather than cultivating it and telling it what to become?

Illustrator Abi Cushman highlighted her personal branding journey in our interview together. She carefully ensures that how she comes across to people is consistent every time, whether it’s font used on a business card to the way she reaches out to prospective clients.

Her reputation matters to her.

Your reputation should matter to you.

Trust Is Built Through Consistency

Reputations are rarely built through one extraordinary event. They are usually built through hundreds of ordinary interactions.

Showing up on time.

Keeping your word.

Treating people with respect.

Following through when things get difficult.

Over time, consistency becomes trust. And trust becomes reputation.

The negative is also true. People who are consistently building a poor reputation are digging a hole not easily filled back in.

Build the Reputation You Want

Consider these questions and answer them. Don’t answer them with some idealistic answer. Be honest. What is your brand…today.

1. How would friends describe my strengths? My weaknesses?
2. How am I different depending on what social circle I am with?
3. If I bumped into a stranger, how would I come across to them?
4. Do other people talk highly of me in my absence? If so, or if not, what do they say about me?
5. Am I someone that I would call upon for help? For advice?
6. What about my past decisions would cause people to want to team up with me?

And now, here’s your homework. Take a good look at your answers to those questions and decide what you want to be different. What about your brand today is not what you want to be your brand tomorrow. Make a few, simple, goals to create that personal brand for yourself.

The tools to improve your reputation are already available to you.

Look honestly at who you are today.

Decide who you want to become tomorrow.

Then begin aligning your actions with that vision.

Reputation is not built in a day, but it is built every day.