Earlier this year I found myself thinking about why it was so important for me to come up with my branding framework. It’s a simple enough diagram, but it took me a year to of thinking on it before it came together—why? What issues was I trying to address with it? What did I want it to say? Or perhaps more importantly, what did I want to say?
Truth is, what I learned about branding in school and everywhere around me online doesn’t come close to expressing the meaning that personal branding took on for me once I started working with my clients, people running small service-based businesses who want to show up as honestly as possible in service to their work and the impact they wish to make. Working with my clients, and in following my own journey, I came to see branding in a way I hadn’t expected. I came to see it as a spiritual experience, as a spiritual practice. So much goes into shaping—and living—a personal brand, that I wanted to address the space, that soft, beautiful, and uncomfortable space, where we meet the world, and the world meets us back. The space where personal expression starts to feel weird and strange because we suddenly find ourselves having to take up space and in a position to attract attention, no matter how takes on a different that exists at the intersection of us meeting the world and the world meeting us back.
I’ve worked with clients starting out with their coaching practice who felt overwhelmed and pulled in many directions, not knowing where to start or what to prioritize to get their business off the ground. I’ve had many conversations with both clients and colleagues about the constant pressure to follow “tried-and-true” mainstream marketing methodologies in ways that didn’t feel right, and the stress of uncertainty that comes with desperately wanting to march to the beat of one’s own drum.
I created the framework because every industry expert I sought to learn from, every course I took, every community I joined…took me away from myself. There was great value in those experiences and connections…and I can also easily lose myself in the search for belonging and the quest to keep learning, thinking the answers that really mattered were somewhere out there waiting for me to discover—because it’s often easier to give ourselves a monster to slay than to embrace what we already have and know.
I created it because I still think of my previous mastermind group and how painful it was last summer when Black Lives Matter protests were at their height, sitting there on one of our weekly Zoom calls, listening to a white male member criticize our need to talk about racial injustice because he’s paying to be in a “business support group” and not to be judged, as though the two things could be separated. That hurt—and it pissed me off.
I created it as an anchor during days in stormy seas, when we get pulled into the chaos of everything around us that only fuels our self-doubt. Because there are powerful forces working against us with every step we take—and even when we’re standing still—and it takes all that we can muster to hold onto our voice, our sanity, and our agency.
I created it because, because, because.
The identity-driven brand framework recognizes the interplay between our intrinsic needs for visibility, self-expression, and healing through vulnerable action.
The identity-driven approach prioritizes your innate wisdom when the truths within you are yearning to express themselves. It honours and integrates the complexity of your personal narrative and lived experience, and recognizes the interconnectedness that exists between understanding one’s self and one’s work—to better connect with and serve others, because we are part of a greater whole. The identity-driven brand framework sees that we are not only here to do, but to be and become.
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