Passions for Image
If you want to turn your reputation into your success driver don’t get obsessed with external attributes. Because you will find out in a while that the artificially designed course of life has lead you to a deadlock.
We are living in the times of a multidimentional civilization break-up, vague values and the ground that is slipping under our foot all the time. In this world, one would like to believe in a fairy tale and, what is more, it is very easy to. That is why in the public consciousness there nestles a myth that a bright image removes all the obstacles on the way to success in life. Allegedly, you need a striking appearance and startling actions and the social lift will open its doors to you. Here roots a mistaken idea that the way to a new life starts on the threshold of an image studio. At the same time, no one takes into consideration the unsteadiness of these superficial dimensions and their ruinous consequences in case of discrepancy between these dimensions and the real personal potential of a person.
I am often turned to for advice on self-promo by people who do not fully understand what they want, why they want it and, all the more, what instruments this or that level of changes is achieved with.
As a rule, asking about a strategy of personal PR, the person who poses the question means a stylist’s work and a media training. That is they make an understandable and a natural mistake. The conceptual framework of the reputation management theory (especially the Slavonic one) is still being formed, that is why it is complex and confusing. An express search for definitions on the Internet has puzzled quite a few undergraduates – postgraduate students – young professionals.
Not to wander all over this labyrinth, in this column we will adopt the functional of image-making in the amount usually offered by image studios, namely: working with the client’s appearance (hairstyle, make-up for women, posture), clothes, voice and manners (eloquence, acting, rhetoric, etiquette and ceremonial as well as less frequent skills of communicating with mass media representatives, dealing with objections, NLP, techniques of seduction of the opposite sex).
All of these skills extremely useful for your private life and your career should not be taken for PR activities because PR does not presuppose floundering passively in the waves of existence but
1. availability of an aim;
2. definite strategies for achieving the set aim;
3. systematic work on realizing a strategy.
That is you work not on a tactic (quite superficial) level of solving everyday problems in your favour but on the level of leaps up and forward.
Correspondingly, personal PR presupposes the process of creating not just an attractive image of a person with a view to facilitate public recognition but active constructing and translating this target image that will help to make new achievements according to the principle “we won’t wait till mother nature has mercy on us”. And you work not with the first circle associations (as in case of somebody’s image) but on modelling real actions – words, acts, behaviour patterns.
The result should consist in forming an integral image that is supported continually and that would gain trust of stakeholders and make their behaviour change regarding the object of PR promotion.
Thus, when ordering self-promo services try to identify your real needs first.
If you want simply to cheer up and breathe new life into your daily routine, image studios will welcome you warmly.
If in addition to the above mentioned you want to optimize (harmonize) relations within your inner circle probably you still do not need PR – a good psychologist-cum-therapist-cum-coach will be enough.
And only if you need to make a breakthrough, think of personal PR. At the same time you should assess objectively (and, if possible, not sparing your feelings):
· the degree of your flexibility/conservatism – that is readiness/unwillingness to change;
· the degree of your laziness/efficiency;
· sincerity of your desire to achieve your aim;
· the strength of will to win.
Because there can be a huge distance between the point you are at now and the point you are longing to find yourself at. And to cover the distance you may have to “to raze to the ground” your current identity (to the greatest degree possible) and to substitute it for a new one cast in the mould of success. It is arduous work on all levels (on an image-making level just as well, by the way) that does not stop for a moment. Are you ready for it, do you aspire to it? An honest answer is very important not only in terms of resources devoted to it – those of energy, time, and money. But primarily in terms of choosing the right way. Because if you masquerade as someone you are not, you may live someone else’s life with strange people around and understand only on your deathbed that you followed the wrong way at the point of bifurcation. And there are no take backs.
http://forbes.net.ua/woman/1358078-strasti-po-imidzhu