A marketing rule I’ve become familiar with over the years is this: In order to effectively promote your brand to the outside world, you must first understand it from the inside. What makes your company tick? What ticks your company off? Why are you around? Who do you serve? Where are your pain points? You can’t effectively promote your brand if you don’t become familiar with and accept its internal world. Sure, you can tactically promote it if you don’t do the dirty work, but the effectively part is where it’ll get tricky. I’d like the call this brand grounding: finding what keeps you stable before spreading your branches out too far.

Personal Grounding

I’d like to extend this idea to my internal experience as well. Until I became familiar with and accepting of my internal world, it was nearly impossible to effectively comprehend the external world. Sure, I was able to survive – tactically facing life as it came. But I couldn’t navigate my life in a way that fully satisfied and strengthened me. The meaning would get lost.

To ground myself personally, I had to ask and answer some painful questions. Why are you like this? What makes you happy? Where do you want to be in life? How can you get there? What makes you angry? What needs to change? And it turns out when you go through this process, you learn how to effectively navigate your external world. The inevitable bumps in life feel less dramatic. The anger-inducing moments pass with greater ease. And the happiness and joy seem to hover longer, all because the external world can be easy to navigate once the internal world is understood.

As author Steve Goodier is quoted as saying, “Get yourself grounded and you can navigate even the stormiest roads in peace.”

Let’s define our brands and ourselves. Let’s dig deep and do the hard work, so we can be effective and purposeful with our external experiences. So, even when the storms come – and they will – we can face them with peace and tranquility. And when the sun shines, we can bask in it and truly appreciate its warmth.