The Personal Unbranding Experiment

Our entire lives are riddled with advice from well-meaning people. Often it’s not until later as we look back at the advice we realize some of it wasn’t helpful, or even worse, harmful. A piece of advice that falls in that category for me is, “just be yourself!” 

How hard can that be? Many seem to say it as if it’s effortless: Be authentic. Be real. Be YOU. Yet,  when someone offered that to me in the past, I’d experience a sense of panic, or confusion, or feeling deflated because everyone else seemed to fully understand “who they really were”.  My sarcastic self wanted to respond, “Oh right, sure! This is who I am and I’ll just be her now. Thank you!”

For a long time I wondered how everyone else seemed to get this concept, and I didn’t, until recently. The entire world was hit with a pandemic that upended lives. Little by little it became apparent that maybe, just maybe, many were not feeling as if their lives were allowing them to “just be themselves.” Millions of people quit their jobs because they caught a glimpse of what they really value and decided to go for what they really wanted. You know what that taught me? They weren’t so effortlessly just being authentic, real, or who they really were - and they got tired of it! (rightfully so).

So, how does this all relate to personal branding? 

Let’s first talk about what I mean by personal branding. It’s a fancy marketing term that, at its simplest form, is all about how you communicate and present your values to those around you. But let’s break that down further. First, remove the idea that this communication has to happen on any platform, or to any person in particular (that’s super overwhelming). Let’s start with simply knowing and living your values (what’s important to you) so people around you know what you are  about. That could be family and friends, coworkers, online followers, or the lady at the checkout counter. 

Here's where I believe personal branding advice feels super easy, and then turns out to be super complicated. A good deal of advice will tell you to take all your experience, expertise, and passion and  wrap it up in a bow and share it with the world. Easy? Except when it’s not. Because, here’s the tricky part: you may have spent the greater part of your life being told by you or others to be more of this, or not to do that (that’s scary), or not to repeat that (that was embarrassing). What happens then?

It gets hard to know what is really you vs. the person simply following the script they’ve been given. Knowing "who you really are" takes a lot of work. It takes breaking down beliefs, stories, and identities you’ve latched onto without realizing it and it takes boldly listening to what comes up for you without being afraid of what it might mean.

So wrapping up all your experiences, expertise, and passion in a bow (called personal branding) and trying to share it with the world can feel uncomfortable, or worse, like a cruel joke. 

Maybe you’ve felt this before. It can show up in different ways. Have you ever:

• Spent hours updating your resume and at the end looked at it and felt like it wasn’t really you?

• Went through a personal branding exercise, and when you started trying to do something with it, you didn’t feel excited about it?

• Tried to start a side hustle, business or passion project, and quickly lost interest?

• Tried to find more meaning in your life and career, but didn’t know where to start?

I’m here to tell you: it’s totally understandable! Most personal branding exercises (or versions of them) have it backwards. The work of understanding who you are is deep, and sometimes hard. It requires breaking down long-held beliefs. It requires bravery and honesty before you can wrap it in a bow and call it “your brand.” Sometimes, it requires some unbranding first. 

Before you can lead effectively, before you can make a transition, before you can just feel comfortable in your own skin, you really need to know yourself first. There’s no easy way around it. 

So, who’s ready for an unbranding experiment? 

P.S. I call it an experiment because that’s what it is. There’s no easy way to do this work. It can be messy and hard. But what’s beneath the messy and hard is beauty. And most importantly, you.