What Standing for (and Losing) an Election Taught Me About Personal Branding
By: Kriti Krishan
Tags: Branding, Elections, UX, Personal Development, Success

Learnings

“You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.” -Benjamin Mee, We Bought a Zoo

Standing for an election is an experience that not many of us are fortunate (or unfortunate) to experience. For most of us, our experiences around elections come from being voters in our country / state elections. Some of us, though, have stood for elections — college / school positions, maybe a community election or something, and to you guys I just want to say — My empathies.

It’s hard, guys. It’s hard to be so visible to the point that any criticism of you is fair game. People feel entitled and free to attack you for every word you utter, and that’s not something most of us are used to. Of course, questioning and calling out representatives is an important part of an election, but it’s hard nonetheless for the people standing for it.

Here are some things I came to realise during this campaign experience:

Trust is so important

When I reached out to people to ask them to campaign for me, or get voter confirmation, there was no way for me to know if the person would actually vote for me on the final day or not. All I could do was take a leap of faith and accept their responses at face value. At the end of the day, it came down to me trusting their word that they would do what they said they would. And this trust is important — to keep you from micromanaging and to keep people feeling independent.

You need a tribe

In election campaigning (as well as life) you need a group of people around you that truly believe in you enough to get others to believe in you. At the end of the day, you will not be able to reach out to everyone you want to vote for you by yourself, and you need a tribe to campaign for you. And believe in you when you don’t.

Assume the best

When I started out, I felt that I was not popular enough amongst my peers to win this election. And while I didn’t actually win, the number of votes I ultimately got were quite high up and I just missed the mark by a smidge. I realised that all the time I spent negatively portraying my own popularity and likeability to myself was doing a lot of harm (and were false). What I learnt here was to believe and trust that people are really rooting for me.

Being seen is hard

A book I read recently (Maybe you should talk to someone by Lori Gottlieb) spoke about the fear of being seen, much like the fear of success. This fear, counter-intuitively, comes up when a basic human need (being seen, heard or valued) has not been met, and so when this need is met, the unfamiliarity causes a fear response. On some level — being seen causes discomfort for a lot of people. And part of winning an election is being visible all the time. This proved to be highly exhausting after a while (Although I remain glad that I pushed myself out of my comfort zone to do this.)

How do I stand out?

How will I be memorable or different? What I learned here was that authenticity in itself is unique — because every person is different. What makes me memorable is… me. And so, I infused my campaign with a lot of my own personality — colours, design style, my background, fun puns — and this made me quite memorable, even to people who didn’t know me.

Politics are fickle

Very, very, very few people vote on merit. What works is representation, remembrance, relatability, gimmicks and a hate-campaign. I know, I know, I sound really jaded about the whole thing, and I don’t have a full picture of the entire industry — but this is how I feel right now, having gone through this experience. We live in an echo chamber where a representative’s political stance matters, what she says / believes in makes a difference to who we vote for — but not everyone thinks this way. There are different reasons people vote and aligning mindsets is a minority within those reasons.

A lot of things in life are an exercise in personal branding

And learning this art sooner rather than later is an important thing to do. I’m a UX designer, and recently I started working on my own portfolio and this skill came in very handy for me.

You can’t please everyone

No matter what you do, people will hate you for things you can’t even control like the colour of your skin, your gender (or in the case of this election, the program you graduated from). And that’s okay.