Carol Cox: Your personal brand matters more than ever.
Here's how to connect it to your business
and your thought leadership on this episode
of the Speaking Your Brand podcast.
More and more women are making an impact by
starting businesses, running for office and
speaking up for what matters.
With my background as a political analyst,
entrepreneur and speaker, I interview and
coach purpose driven women to shape their
brands, grow their companies and become
recognized as influencers in their field.
This is Speaking Your Brand, your place to
learn how to persuasively communicate your
message to your audience.
Hi there. Welcome to the podcast.
I'm your host, Carol Cox.
We just finished up our four part series all
around, helping you uplevel your in-person
speaking skills. I know I enjoy those
conversations so much.
They were a lot of fun and I got a lot of
ideas for my own public speaking, especially
in person. So hopefully you did too.
You may remember that back in June we did
another four part series all around personal
branding, and I've been thinking about
personal branding as I have these
conversations with my guests on their
successes as speakers.
Not only is their success about their
content and their delivery, which they do
incredibly well, it's also about who they
are, the messages they share and the
qualities they embody.
So I want to talk today about connecting
your thought leadership with your personal
brand. Now, I know you want to have a
positive impact on the world, and you may
feel like cultivating a personal brand is
unnecessary or self-indulgent or that's what
other people do or that's what influencers
do. Or maybe you just feel like you just
don't have the time for it.
But here's the thing.
You have a personal brand everyone does.
Whether or not you're actively cultivating
it or not. Your personal brand is how other
people would describe you, not just your
qualities and your characteristics.
Like you're smart, you're kind,
professional, but also what matters to you.
And so do people know what matters to you.
The better world that you imagine?
And I think about this because back in July,
I had Tanya Bosa on this podcast.
She's a professor of sociology, now the
executive director of the University of
California's Washington, D.C.
Center. And we worked with her and some
University of California faculty members
earlier this summer to help them create
their TEDx style talks for an event that
Tanya was hosting.
And she said on that podcast episode back in
July that she had found me and found this
podcast in 2020.
And it was my conversations, my topics
around feminism, my background in academia.
When I went to graduate school for history,
my focus on women's voices and women's
issues that really drew her to me and that's
why she ended up enrolling in our Thought
Leader Academy and then having us work with
her and those faculty members on those TEDx
style talks.
My personal brand and my thought leadership
came through partly intentionally because of
the topics that I chose to talk about and
still choose to talk about, but also because
I just really can't help it.
It is so infused with who I am and what I do
that I can't help but talk about these
things. However, I'm going to share with you
in a little bit some pushback I got early on
when I started speaking your brand, the
business about a particular aspect of my
personal brand. Now maybe you have a clear
idea of your personal brand and your thought
leadership, or maybe like many of us, it
feels a bit murky or maybe your ideas are
all over the place, or you feel like you
have so many different threads throughout
your career, you're not sure how to make
sense of all of them.
And I believe that in this age of more and
more content that we're seeing online,
whether human created or increasingly AI
created, your personal brand matters more
than ever. Potential clients and event
organizers can easily find lots of experts
in what you do.
What you want them to realize is what sets
you apart and why they should pick you.
And you need these things for your brand
voice and your personal brand.
Because simply being an expert isn't enough
anymore. You need your personal brand to be
impactful and memorable.
Last year I did an episode on connecting your
business and your thought leadership.
So let me give you a quick recap of that
here, because that's going to be important
for understanding that how your thought
leadership connects to your personal brand.
If we think about what it is that you do in
your business, your business provides
something useful, something specific to your
clients and customers.
Usually that's a tangible outcome.
So your clients come in, they are at
position A, and you're going to help them
get to B or C or D or Z, and they go through
the process that you've created to help them
to get to that endpoint that you that you're
helping them get to.
You could be a web designer, you could be a
coach, you could be a copywriter, you could
be a business strategist, you could be a
financial planner, you could be a scientist,
you could be a physician.
Whatever your industry is, whatever your
area of expertise is you're providing.
Of being useful and specific to help your
clients achieve the goal.
And now if we think about your thought
leadership. Your thought leadership is
separate from your business and your
business. You are marketing and selling to
attract those specific clients, to help them
to get to that end goal through your
process. Now, your thought leadership really
runs as a parallel track to your business.
It's why you do the work you do, why you
chose that specific business or that
specific target market, those types of
clients to work with.
It's the why.
If you think about thought leadership,
thought leadership is your point of view on
your area of expertise, your industry, or
even society as a whole.
Let me give you a concrete example here with
my own thought leadership.
My thought leadership is around the
importance of public speaking to advance
women's leadership and gender equality,
making sure women have a voice in important
decisions and a seat at the proverbial
table, whether that's in government and
politics, business, tech, media, AI,
whatever it happens to be.
So my thought leadership is related to what
we do as speaking your brand, because
obviously speaking your brand, our mission
is to champion and advocate for women's
voices. But that thought leadership is not a
marketing and sales message.
A marketing and sales message says you have
a problem or you have a need.
Here's the solution.
So speaking your brand's case, your problem
or your need is that you need help
clarifying your ideas, creating your
signature talk, understanding how to put
together an impactful keynote or a Ted talk.
And the solution is that we have the
experience, the processes, the frameworks,
the coaching and the support to help you do
that. So that's why I see thought leadership
as running as a parallel track to your
business. Is that your why for why this
business matters to you?
Now where does your personal brand fit in?
Is that the same as your thought leadership?
And I don't see them as the same because
your thought leadership is is about the
thing that you want to see happen.
So gender equality, making sure women have a
voice in important decisions, that's the
outcome that you're looking for.
That's what thought leadership is driving to
the your personal brand is the who you are
the embodiment of your thought leadership
message. You are the face and the voice of
your thought leadership message.
Now, of course, you want your thought
leadership to carry through more people, not
just yourself, but right now, as the one
who's creating the thought leadership
message. You are that embodiment.
You are that messenger.
That's the episode I did in August Episode
343. Why You are the messenger for Your idea
and Story. Your personal brand, as I
mentioned earlier, is how others see you and
describe you.
Plus, it's what they see reflected back
that's important to you.
Do people know what's important to you?
Do people know what your mission is?
Your bigger why your thought leadership?
That's how your thought, leadership and
personal brand get integrated?
If we think about my personal brand, it's
around feminism, women's issues.
I have this background in history and
politics and academia.
I like to think about big ideas.
I like to help other people think about
their big ideas and make them concrete
through public speaking.
Now, I mentioned earlier that I got some
advice from when I started speaking to Brand
as a business, and several people told me
that I should not talk much about my
background in local politics and a
specifically my background as a chairperson
of the Democratic Party and the county where
I lived. And as a Democratic political
analyst on TV news, which I've been doing
since 2005.
And so I of course, I took in what they had
suggested to me, but it didn't feel right
because my experience in local politics and
being on the Democratic side, believing in
progressive values is so integral to who I
am. It's so integral to my thought
leadership and to my personal brand that it
wasn't something that I could just discard
or much less hide.
I would never want to do that.
And so instead I found ways to integrate it
into my thought leadership, into my personal
brand that feels authentic and genuine to me
and then hopefully comes across.
If you feel like you have some aspect of
your career or your background where you're
not sure if you should integrate it or not,
it is up to you as far as how you feel about
it. I believe there's a way to find the
thread to connect everything together so
that it feels cohesive and it feels
authentic and genuine to you because you can
shape your personal brand based on what you
choose to talk about and to whom and the
threads that you decide to bring to pull
through. Here's the thing about personal
branding and thought leadership is that
consistency is important.
It really is about finding the thread
through things that seem unconnected.
So if we think about my background, I have a
background in with a graduate degree in
history, I've been involved in politics I've
had founded to. Nology companies I now do.
Speaking in your brand, I'm working on AI
projects. So what is that thread?
They seem like very, very different things,
but the consistent thread all through my
life really from high school and college all
the way through is about women's voices in
women's leadership. I'm always looking for
women's voices in whatever it is.
I'm looking for their stories, their
experiences, because I want to make sure
that women have these decision making powers
as well. And now with the increase in
content online and soon even more content
being generated by AI, it will be harder for
your content to be seen because of all the
algorithms. And just the saturation of
content is also going to be harder for
people to know what to trust, what is real
and who even who is real.
Because the deepfakes and the AI generated,
quote unquote people are getting really
sophisticated. That's why your personal
brand matters more than ever.
It's essential. It's around trust and it's
around authenticity.
Now I can craft stories.
I've been using ChatGPT and I can feed it
prompts and it can do a pretty good job of
using story structure and writing stories.
But the thing that it can't do, even though
it can try to mimic it, but it can't do it.
Obviously the way that we can do it is
provide the depth and the nuance that come
with genuine human experiences.
That's what makes us relatable to other
people. Our stories is how we connect with
others. So an AI might be able to craft a
story, but it's probably less likely to
strike a chord, hopefully with the audience
than our own true stories are.
The other thing that I think about is that
real life stories are human, embodied
stories are kind of unpredictable.
We don't know necessarily what's going to
happen, and that often makes them
intriguing. Of course, AI tools like
ChatGPT, they are built on patterns and
predictability, so sometimes their stories
can can follow that set path and seem less
less engaging or less captivating.
And that's why I emphasize so much on this
podcast. When we think about our thought
leadership and our signature talks and our
presentations is making sure we put
ourselves into our own experiences, our own
stories, our own journeys, not getting stuck
in that expert trap where we're just
teaching and training based on all this
content that we've accumulated over our
careers, and we just want to push it out to
our audiences. Instead, we want to make sure
that we're putting ourselves our thought
leadership, our personal brand and our
stories into the content and presentations
that we're creating.
And really, your signature talk integrates
all three aspects of what I've been talking
about in this episode your business, your
thought leadership and your personal brand.
And this is why I also love public speaking,
especially in person, public speaking, but
even live virtual public speaking on Zoom or
on a webinar platform is because you know
the person is real, you know, especially in
person. You know that the speaker who is
standing in front of you delivering that
talk is real.
We don't have to worry about whether or not
the person is real or not.
So, yes, doubling down on public speaking as
a marketing invisibility strategy.
Now, I know that building your personal
brand and cultivating your personal brand
can feel messy and you know what stories to
include and which ones are the right ones
and how does it all fit together.
So we are doing a workshop series this fall,
three separate workshops, one in October,
one in November, and one in December that
you're invited to register for.
The one in October is on building your
personal brand plan and defining your brand
voice. The one in November is around
storytelling for presentations and content
marketing, and the one in December is on
using AI tools like ChatGPT for speaking
from helping you create outlines for
presentations and speaking proposals to
actually creating images, music and
multimedia elements for your slides.
That one's going to be a lot of fun.
So we're doing this workshop series one per
month, The first one is on building your
personal brand plan and defining your brand
voice. That happens October 26th.
These are three hour long workshops.
Each of them, they happen on Zoom.
They're live with us.
So we're there. We're providing you some
some instruction, some training, lots of
exercises, a PDF workbook, lots of
resources, but then actual time to work on
it during your workshop.
I'm a big believer in having you do the work
in the workshop because I know we all have a
lot of things going on.
Don't want to give you a bunch of of
training and then have you have to have you
go off on your own time to do what?
I really want you to do it in the workshop.
So also you can practice and get our
feedback. You can get all of the details for
all three workshops as speaking your
brand.com/workshops. Again, that's speaking
your brand.com/workshops plural.
All three workshops go together.
It's ideal really to do all three of them
because they all integrate together and they
all work really well together.
But you can do them individually as well.
You can just. Register for 1 or 2 or all
three. If you do decide to sign up for all
three, there is a bundle price where you get
a significant discount if you purchase all
three together in the first workshop coming
up October 26th.
You're going to identify how you want to be
seen in position in your industry and
community. Understand what makes your voice
unique and how to start talking about what
matters to you and your audience.
You're going to fill out the brand voice
canvas framework that we created so you can
define your meme and you'll find out what
meme means. You're going to develop the
eight pillars of your personal brand plan.
You got to practice talking about your brand
in small breakout rooms.
Get personalized feedback from us.
We'll be providing the training and
instruction time for you to work on your
brand voice and personal brand plan, and you
can ask questions and get feedback.
You also get the recording of the workshop.
So for all three of these workshops, they
will be recorded and for the ones you sign
up for, you will get the recording as well
as the PDF workbook and a copy of the
slides. It really is going to be so much
fun. You're going to get so much out of it
and I really hope that you can join us for
at least one of the workshop, if not all
three. Again, you can get all the details at
speaking your brand.com/workshops.
Until next time, thanks for listening.