A maverick amongst a sea of personal brands. This is me.

Last night, I got into a conversation with my friend Ali of The Kissing Lessons about personal branding. I’m surrounded by social media experts in my work and personal life, so I hear the word “brand” bandied about almost daily. And it rankles me.

Before branding ascended to the throne of advertising, and before companies spent countless hours and billions of dollars defending their brand, their public image, the term referred to the practice of searing a symbol into the flesh of one’s livestock – especially cattle – to mark ownership. And when we see a shiny silvery apple on the back of a Mac, when we see the world-famous Coca-Cola logo affixed to a can, this is branding in the same sense as the days of cattle and cowboys.

But when people talk about personal branding, do they understand the history of the word? Are they truly affixing a label to their words and their online presence to say ‘this is mine; this is me?’ Like today’s corporate giants, how much energy do they expend crafting their image and then defending it from attack?

And once they’ve established a personal brand, must they then be careful to limit the public exposure of their actions to fit the brand of their own creation?

For a long time – before the idea of personal branding became so popular – I selectively chose my words and actions depending on my audience: potential employers, my family, my loved ones, my college friends, my work friends — they all saw much different sides of me. And when one of them crossed from one sphere to another, the stark differences often surprised them.

We all react to the different people in our lives in different ways, so some variance in how we appear to one person versus another must be expected. We might like to hang out in bars with one set of friends while we spend time sitting in meditation with others. This is natural, the organic flow of personality… each environment teases out nuances that others don’t.

That’s what I think bothers me about the term “branding” when it’s applied to people. Although we use it almost interchangeably with “personality,” that original definition still colours its effect on our lives. A personal brand requires effort to maintain, and rests on the fallacy that we can fully control how others see us. And that’s why defending a brand takes so much effort, whether you’re a corporation or a single person… what we think of as a personality, a brand, or an image is a contract between two people, subject and observer.

I once read an article that advised jobseekers to take down or hide any controversial aspects of their online presence – anything that indicated beliefs or actions that might alienate potential employers. But what does that accomplish? If you get hired as a cleaned-up, polished, censored version of yourself, you either have to stay that way, limit yourself to this new, smaller persona, or you let the truth come out and risk losing your job because you didn’t share these parts of yourself in the first place.

I’d much rather work for an employer who really has an idea of who I am, so that I can continue to be myself and not worry about my skeletons in the closet.

In that same vein, I gave up trying to maintain different images to different groups, partially because the internet (especially after Facebook) broke down the walls that separated them, and partially because maintaining and defending these differing concepts of myself took a lot of effort. I was tired. I just wanted to be me. And I really didn’t care who knew what.

Why spend our time crafting a personal brand when that energy could be much better spent becoming the person we want to be, changing ourselves within so that our actions and our expressions need no sculpting and finessing, nothing swept under the rug, nothing run up the flagpole for all to see, because it’s all there?

My Twitter friends sometimes think I’m a little kooky. When I want to say something, I say it, without wondering if it fits in with the rest of my ouvre. When I feel something, I often express it, even when it might make people wonder. It’s just a passing thing, but in that moment, it’s me.

And it feels really good to know that there are people out there who read this blog, follow me on Twitter, see my updates on Facebook… and with all that, they enjoy and appreciate who I am. Unplugged.

I’ve read Tom Peters’ Brand You and understand the idea, but personal branding’s not for me. I don’t want to spend the time and energy honing myself into a perfected image, and I want to be able to be myself when I’m around friends and colleagues. The best personal brands most closely reflect this, thankfully, but I wonder if we might benefit from stepping away from branding ourselves, and started calling it what it is: our personality. Our quirks. Our interests. Our temperament.

Ranchers call unbranded calfs “mavericks” after Sam Maverick decided to differentiate his cattle from all the other branded cattle by leaving them unmarked.

So that’s what I’m going to call myself. A maverick amongst a sea of personal brands. This is me. I own my words and my actions; they’re uniquely mine without any extra effort on my part. My image doesn’t need special care and protection. And I rest in the knowledge that the people who like me appreciate all my quirks and oddities; and those who don’t? I need spend no time winning them over to my side.

Maverick: the anti-brand.