Twice a month I sing at a bar in Southeast Portland with a floor that grips the bottom of your shoe. The host calls everyone baby. In December I put in for a Bonnie Tyler song and performed it badly, at volume, in front of forty strangers and two people from my old agency.
The singing is not the brave part. Writing my actual name on the slip is.
I have been thinking about that since a friend asked me, in the tone people reserve for confessing a crime, whether she should start writing about her work in public. She said the words personal brand and physically winced.
I understand the wince. The phrase has been thoroughly contaminated. It sounds like a man in a rented sports car explaining his morning routine. Nobody wants to be that. So instead we do nothing, and call the nothing humility.
You already have a personal brand. The only question is whether you wrote it or whether it got written for you by whoever happened to be in the room.
Three reframes that got me past it.
One. Reputation is a fact, not a project. When you leave a meeting, someone describes you in a single sentence. That sentence exists whether or not you participate in it. Refusing to shape it does not make you modest, it makes you absent from the one conversation about you that has consequences.
Two. It is not self-promotion, it is legibility. When a role opens up, or a client is choosing between three strategists, they are not selecting the best person. They cannot see the best person. They are selecting the most specific one. The strategist known for retail positioning gets the retail work. The generalist gets a polite reply.
Three. The cringe is just the feeling of being perceived on purpose. We are all perfectly comfortable being perceived by accident. Deliberate is what stings, because deliberate can fail, and a failed attempt at being seen is the most exposed thing there is.
The singing is not the brave part. Writing my actual name on the slip is.
I started this blog two years ago and told myself it was purely for my own thinking. That was about half true. The other half was that I wanted the people who hire brand strategists to know what I actually believe about brand strategy before we get on a call. Two years in, that has worked more often than any resume line ever has.
So my friend is going to start writing. She will hate the first four. Everybody hates the first four.
And I will keep signing my real name on the slip at a sticky bar in Southeast, singing a power ballad in a key that does not exist, with total commitment. Baby, the host says, and hands me the microphone.