The Ultimate Source for Self Understanding

What Is Positioning?

What is the first word that comes to your mind when someone mentions BMW?
Most probably this word will either be luxury, elegance or money.
What is the first word that comes to your mind when someone mentions Volvo?
Most people will think of “safe”.

Why did you think of certain words when you heard these brands mentioned?
This happened because the manufacturers of those brands positioned their brands in a certain part of your mind. For marketing people, positioning is associating a product with a certain image that is printed in the person’s mind.

So you may be wondering, what does this have to do with personal development? There is actually a strong relation between the two. Ever asked yourself: what is the first word that comes to people’s mind when my name is mentioned? Is it “strong”? Is it “confident”? Or is it “loser”?

The word that comes to their minds represents your positioning strategy and how successful you are in positiong yourself.

How to Position Yourself

Now that you know the importance of positioning, let's talk about how you can position yourself in people’s minds:

• First Impression: The first impression you leave on someone is very important. Even before you start talking, people can build an impression about you. There are some very good techniques that you could use to leave a very good first impression, techniques which are covered extensively here.
• Your Hobbies and Interests: What if you meet a person and on your first meeting learned that he has a black belt in kung fu? What will you think of him after he leaves? You will probably build some image of him as a physically strong person. The flip side of that is if you find that someone is interested in the arts and drawing instead of martial arts. You may think of this person as creative or sensitive. So as you can see, your hobbies and interests represent an important part in your positioning. Of course I am not asking you to find a new hobby just to position yourself, but what you should do is select which of your hobbies to talk about depending on the image you want to occupy in people's minds. You may even do this differently (talking about different hobbies with different people) depending on the situation and the people you are dealing with.
• Colour Psychology: Every colour that you wear leaves a certain impression in the viewer’s mind, so wearing dark blue will leave the impression that you are loyal and trustworthy while wearing red may leave the impression that you are confident and energetic. Read more about colour psychology to know how you can use colours to position yourself.
• Body Language: You can let someone build a good impression about you without even speaking to him just by manipulating your body language. See the ultimate guide for body language for more on how to leave the impression that you want.
• Your Tone of Voice: Another important part of body language is the voice tone. Your tone can make you appear wise, confident, sensitive or energetic. Your tone includes the tempo, the time you take between words and phrases and the stops that you make between them. As you can see, most of these factors can be manipluated in order to give the impression that you want about yourself.
• The mystery of the unknown Whatever social skills that you have use them without giving explanation to how can you do them, for example if you read a lot about communication skills don’t let the other person know, just let him feel its effect because in that case he will use his imagination in trying to guess how can you do all of these things and so you will be much better positioned than if he knew how you did it , if that’s not clear check this article about using the unknown in positioning yourself.
• Other Factors: Basically everything you do or use will affect your positioning: the music that you hear, the style of clothes you wear, the car that you drive and even your mobile's ring tone.

Final Words

Your strategy for positioning yourself should depend on how you want people to perceive you. The game is very simple: just decide what is the image you want to associate with yourself then use all of the previous techniques to position yourself in people's minds.

2knowmyself is not a simple article website nor it’s a place where you will find shallow fixes, but it’s a place where you will find effective techniques that are backed by psychology and that are presented in obvious and understandable format. If you think that this is some kind of marketing hype then see what other visitors say about 2knowmyself.The book How to make someone fall in love with you was released by 2knowmyself.com; the book will dramatically increase your chance of letting someone fall in love with you.

Did that help?

Yes, but tell me how to leave a positive first impression.

Yes, but teach me more about body language.

Tell me more about color psychology.