Your next level is ready — your personal brand is what's holding you back

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If there’s one thing I’ve learned about our shared humanity, it’s that we’re constantly in the pursuit of what’s next. Whether that NEXT for you is your next promotion, your next vacation, or the next version of you – it’s just what we do. At our core, we’re seekers and explorers who are yearning. What that yearning is differs, but it’s what moves us to actually pursue it.

When it comes to the pursuit of our next promotion, or the next level of our leadership, I cannot overstate the importance of managing your personal brand. By that I mean telling the most empowered version of your narrative that speaks to the version of you that you are, and perhaps even, are becoming. The nuance is in doing so in such a way that it can be received by your intended audiences.

I say this, and I can already guess that shoulders just got tense and overwhelm is starting to build. And let me tell you, I GET IT. I get it because telling our brand narrative in a world with too many communication channels to keep track of feels daunting. The other consequence of this is that the comparison is almost IMPOSSIBLE to avoid. But figuring out where and how to get your brand out there is a step that comes further down the line. First we have to understand ourselves from the tip of our toes to the top of our head.

Above all else, this truth remains; the importance on more clearly, credibly, and authentically differentiating ourselves has become paramount. We’ve got bots, AI, automation and fake everything as major barriers to being seen, let alone appreciated by a human.

How We Diminish What We Have To Offer

Understanding your personal brand is too important to leave to a chat bot. But if left to our own insecurities, we might just be diminishing ourselves before we even get started.

I'll use myself as an example here, I talk extensively about inner critics – but of course, I’m not the only one. On my bad days I can question if it makes sense for me to try to breakthrough the noise with my inner critic content. On my best days, I wonder how the heck I can make a real difference by talking about inner critics for ONLY 7 minutes. I’m used to having much more time to go into detail on the subject because I take my audiences on a whole arc of an experience and deep understanding of this work over the course of an hour or more (depending on the format). However, a 7-minute talk is exactly what I was tasked with last month. I had 7 minutes to help an audience of 50+ people awaken to how inner critics were holding them back in their businesses and how to start to do something about it.

I questioned if what I had to say in 7 minutes could move a mountain for someone. Correction: my inner critic questioned this.

But I did. I did make an impact.

Among other feedback, I received a LinkedIn message from a skeptical audience member that same night. He said he “didn’t think he would learn a thing at that gathering, but he was humbled that he did”.

Dear inner critic: put that in your pipe and smoke it! ;)

This brings me to the point of my story. Your inner critic will tell you every which way that ‘it doesn’t matter’.

· It doesn’t matter if you speak up in that meeting

· It doesn’t matter if you’re only posting once a week on LinkedIn

· It doesn’t matter if you tell your boss about that win you had behind the scenes

· It doesn’t matter if you write that book

· It doesn’t matter if you tweak your resume

We can’t take our perspective or our wisdom for granted. We can’t forget our knowledge has been hard fought. We can’t forget that every seed we plant is a seed that has the power to influence – even if it’s not on our desired timeline.

It matters that we share our wisdom and truly own that not only is it valuable, but that how we came to that knowledge is VIABLE.

YEEASSSSSSS you heard me, your source of wisdom is VIABLE however you came to learn it. Now you know this is gonna be a long love letter to you today because I have to talk about this point. When we don’t think our journey is valuable or viable to get to where we want to be, or talk about what we want to talk about, or be in the kinds of rooms that we dream of then well, we are gonna be stuck in the mud until we own our personal brand journey.

How We Diminish Our Path

Your inner critic can get very loud on this point, and this is what it can sound like when it comes to questioning your credibility and expertise.

· “You didn’t go to a ‘good enough’ school”

· “You didn’t get proper training”

· “You don’t have enough certifications to prove your knowledge”

· “You don’t have a degree in that”

· “You need more experience first”

We have been conditioned about what legitimate pathways are for EVERYTHING. Think about it. What’s the ‘approved’ pathway for a chef? For someone in marketing? For your profession? For that thing you've always wanted to do?

This conditioning implants limiting beliefs about what pathways are legitimate and viable. I am not immune to any of this bullS%iT. My inner critic knows right where (and when) to get me. Case in point...

I'm often asked in one way, shape or another what makes me credible in my field as a transformational speaker and coach on human skills. I've come to expect it, and to be honest I don’t blame people for asking.

I was asked for my credentials recently and even after years of answering, my response still felt incomplete . So much so that I had to sit with why I continue to feel like my narrative falls short. Of course, it all goes back to my inner critic that tells me I don’t have the ‘legitimate’ pathway of credibility that people can swallow.

F*&K that! Life is too short for me to continue to buy that crap, and diminish how I earned my expertise.

I decided to write out my credentials and path yet again. I have done this many times in the past, but it was clearly time to gain another view of it, and be my own best friend in the process. I’m sharing a snippet of what my path has been in hopes that it helps you to see the credibility in your own lived and learned experience, whatever those may be.

Re-Writing Our Narrative

How did I come to be a transformation and human skills expert? How can I claim that I am? Understanding my personal brand means I have to start from the very beginning.

In my youth, I had to navigate a world that wanted to shame me for just being me, simply because I didn't have a ‘socially acceptable appearance’. I navigated the harshness of other peoples’ perspectives while keeping my heart open, which was even harder than going through a dozen surgeries. I chose to move in the world not thinking the worst of humanity – but rather did the opposite, and looked for the potential in people. I paid attention to human behavior. At first I did this for my own survival (my need for love and acceptance), but then I did so to understand why and how people move in the world the way they do. Later in life I used these same skills as a marketer where my job was to lead teams and shift consumer behaviors.

In my 20’s, after months of denying my own physical reality, I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes that requires 24/7 management without a support system to lean on. Not just physically, but mentally or emotionally. I had more reasons to beat myself up, and to wonder ‘why me’, but through it I found my way in accepting that which I cannot control, and trusting in something bigger than myself.

I brought all my unresolved baggage, as well as my optimistic nature in earning my MBA and then in the corporate world, where I navigated power dynamics that put me near the bottom of the chain. I honed my craft and climbed the ladder in the most competitive city and in the most competitive international companies not by wearing PRADA, but by being generous, strategic and flexing my communication and self-advocacy muscles without losing who I was in the process.

Never feeling truly fulfilled despite my every win, I decided I deserved more in my life. I got on my own transformation path to change my relationship with myself to love and acceptance. I learned to find more peace and ease in my own heart, and in complicated relationships, through trial and error. I explored multiple modalities and overcame my resistance to so much, including receiving support along the way. I took careful note of the results in my life and the world around me with every rung I climbed to my own higher vibration.

In pursuit of new possibilities and without understanding what those really were, or what I wanted, I decided to quit the marketing path I worked so hard to travel. This led me to enter completely unchartered territory of entrepreneurship as a speaker and coach. Little did I know this is a path of constant uncertainty, without a roadmap to success, and where you live and die by how you show up in the world. This required years of doing the deepest self-introspection of my life to strengthen my self-trust ,and see what remained of my wound-created patterns. All the while holding myself through it as I evolved into the next versions of me I couldn't wait to meet.

This is a FRACTION of my path to deeply understanding transformation and what it takes to hone our human skills of being our own best friend, while honoring those around us with integrity. This hard-fought wisdom earned me the right to claim my expertise. Simplifying this to a sentence or two? Determining how to build a brand around it? Well, those are the next steps, but we must deeply understand the long version first and believe it and embrace it in our bones.

It All Adds Up – Own the Math of Your Life

So....forget the path that your inner critic thinks you SHOULD HAVE TAKEN to pursue what’s next.

I hope you do this exercise for yourself. I hope you do it so you can see why you are the PERFECT person for the promotion, for the lateral move, for the expanded leadership role, for the big career change, for the podcast interview, for the FILL IN THE BLANK.

The world has expanded and been disrupted in every way imaginable. Pathways have grown exponentially in how we gain our stripes, master our expertise, and build our leadership.

I hope you decide to share your wisdom – whether it’s a 7 minute presentation, 7 page article, or 7 second provocative question. Keeping it to yourself isn’t protecting self-interest, it’s crushing your soul one pebble at a time. The seeds you plant matter. Your ideas matter.

Don’t let your inner critic be so loud that when someone asks you ‘why you’, you can’t hear the truth of your unique, beautiful and valid journey to who and where you are right now.

If you're having a hard time taking back control from your inner critic, well you know who to contact. In the meantime, if you want to see which inner critic is running your life, check out my Inner Critic Compass survey.

Cheers to what's next,

Tosca