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 TV 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.
I wanna talk today about connecting your thought leadership.
With your personal brand, now I know you wanna 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 are 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 of what matters to you, the better world that you imagine?
And I think about this because I had Tanya Gil Bza on this podcast.
She's a professor of sociology now, the executive director of the University
of California's Washington DC Center.
We worked with her and some University of California faculty members to help
them create their TED style talks for an event that Tanya was hosting.
And she said on my podcast episode 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 TED style talks.
My personal brand and my thought leadership came
through partly intentionally.
Because 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 gonna 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 all.
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.
I did an episode on connecting your business and your thought leadership.
So lemme give you a quick recap of that here.
'cause that's gonna be important for understanding then 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 gonna 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 end point
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 something useful
and specific to help your clients.
Achieve the goal, and now we think about your thought leadership.
Your thought leadership is separate from your business.
In 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.
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 TEDx 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 bigger 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 a, is about
the thing that you want to see happen.
So gender equality, making sure women have a voice and important decisions, that's
the the outcome that you're looking for.
That's what thought leadership is driving to.
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 thought leadership
message, you are that embodiment.
You are that messenger.
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 that 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 and when I started
Speaking Your Brand as a business, and several people told me.
That I shouldn't talk much about my background in local politics
and specifically my background as a chairperson of the Democratic Party
in 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, 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.
It's 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 wanna 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 to, as far as what, 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 have founded two technology companies.
I now do Speaking 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 and women's leadership.
I'm always looking for women's voices and whatever it is I'm looking for
their stories, their experiences, 'cause I wanna make sure that women have
these decision making powers as well.
Now with the increase in content online and soon even more content being generated
by ai, it'll be harder for your content to be seen because of all the algorithms
and just the saturation of content.
It's also gonna 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, AI can craft stories.
I've been using chat GPT 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 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.
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 gonna happen, and then
often makes them intriguing.
Of course, AI tools like Chat, GPT.
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 it, 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 of this.
Content that we've accumulated over our careers and we just wanna
push it out to our audiences.
Instead, we wanna 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.
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 and visibility 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, and which ones are the right
ones, and how does it all fit together.
This is the work we do together in our Thought Leader Academy.
We're helping you to connect your thought leadership, your personal brand, your
story, your message, your framework, your ideas all together into your
signature message and signature talk.
So that you have that really solid, clear, and confident foundation that you
can use not only in your presentations and talks, but for all the different
ways that you're sharing your message on your website, in your emails, social
media, podcast interviews, and so on.
If you would like to work with us, go to Speaking Your Brand dot com and
you can explore the different ways that we can work together, including
in our Thought Leader Academy.
And I invite you to schedule a consultation call with us so we can get
to know you, learn about your work and your goals, and how we can work together.
And you can schedule that call by going to Speaking Your Brand dot com slash contact.
Until next time, thanks for listening.