You discover your authentic leadership brand by asking the individuals who know you best, across different parts of your life, to describe you in one word. Your leadership brand already exists as the collective perception others hold of you based on your decisions, words, and actions, so the work isn’t inventing it. The work is finding out what it says.
I Didn’t Wait for the Presentation To End
Jeff Hoffman was on stage talking about marketing, and he gave us an assignment: Reach out to the individuals who know you best and ask them to describe you in one word.
I didn’t wait. I started texting from my seat.
I sent it to everyone, including friends who knew me as a child, classmates from university, and colleagues from teams and departments across decades of work. I sent it to board members, fellow volunteers, entrepreneurs, and corporate executives, as well as to my Miami Dolphins Cheerleader sisters, my Miami HEAT Dancer sisters, my University of Miami cheer and dance teammates, speakers, mentors, and sponsors. I left no stone unturned, reaching people from different decades and industries who knew me as different versions of myself throughout time.
All responses said basically the same thing: warm; kind; authentic; great energy; genuine; compassionate; approachable; ray of sunshine; big, beautiful smile. Two of them, independently and from completely different corners of my life, used the exact same phrase: “mental cheerleader.” And two others, who have never met, described the same experience of being around me: “constantly relaxed the moment you talk.”
As I sat there reading, I realized something that reorganized how I understood my own career. My brand already existed. I had simply never read it. I encourage you to try it. It’s both enlightening and transformative.
Your Brand Isn’t a Project
Most of us approach professional branding like a task we haven’t started yet. We think we need to sit down, do the work, and produce something.
But here’s what I wrote in The Joyful Leader®: Leadership brands are the collective perception others have of us based on our decisions, words, and actions.
Read that again. The perception belongs to other leaders. We don’t get to author it. What we author is the decisions, the words, and the actions. The perception is what those produce.
That means your brand has been under construction this whole time, built by every colleague who watched how you handled a bad quarter, every direct report who noticed whether you said the same thing in the room and out of it, every friend who has known you since before any of this. The construction crew has been working for years. You just haven’t asked to see the plans.
Don’t Brand Yourself as Something Smaller Than You Are
When I finally sat down to design my brand statement, I started with what felt the safest. I made a list of my former leadership titles: Supplier Development Leader. Healthcare Senior Manager. Professional Speaker. Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Board Member.
Every one of those was accurate. Every one of those was also the smallest true description available.
So I reframed them: Strategic Healthcare Executive. Procurement and Supplier Expert. Champion of Movement and Mindset. Inspirational Speaker and Connector. Licensed Mental Health Therapist. Active Board Member. Advisor. Mentor.
Nothing on that second list is invented. I had been doing all of it. I had just been describing myself in the narrowest accurate terms I could find, which is a habit so common among accomplished leaders that I now watch for it in every room I speak in.
Leadership branding is about championing resiliency through determining your brand goals, specifying your brand values, and positioning your brand for greater impact. This requires shifting from a limited mindset to a limitless mindset, a reframing that lets us position our brands as those that empower others to find resilience and joy and to navigate challenges.
John Register, a Paralympic silver medalist and one of my mentors in the speaking industry, said the thing that makes this land in my body every time I think about it: “I did not overcome the loss of my limb. To overcome the loss would mean I’d have to grow it back. What I overcame were the limits I placed on myself and that others placed on me.”
The limits we place on ourselves. That’s the limited mindset. And John’s whole point is that those limits are the thing that can actually be moved, because they were never structural to begin with.
Why This Is a Resilience Strategy, Not a Marketing One
Here’s the part that matters most, and it’s the part branding conversations usually skip:
A brand you invented is exhausting to maintain.
If we’ve built a professional identity around a version of ourselves that isn’t quite true, we pay for that identity daily. We pay in the small corrections, the monitoring, the low-grade effort of making sure the seams don’t show. On a good day, that cost is invisible. Under real pressure, it becomes the difference between holding steady and coming apart.
Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence puts self-awareness first for exactly this reason. Self-awareness isn’t one competency among several. Self-awareness is the floor everything else stands on, because we cannot regulate what we haven’t noticed and we cannot lead others through what we’re still hiding from ourselves.
A brand that’s actually you costs nothing to sustain. That’s not a feel-good observation. That’s capacity you get to keep, and capacity is what resilience is made of.
Authenticity Is What Makes Support Real
Lizza Rossi, founder of the Ekukhanyeni Relief Project, said something about community that changed how I think about the Sphere of Influence:
“In my experience, communal resilience is most important because it’s not just about tangible support; it’s about a deeper, spiritual buy-in. When people truly understand the energy and authenticity behind what you do, their support becomes more meaningful and impactful.”
Read that closely, because it’s a claim about mechanism, not sentiment. Lizza isn’t saying authenticity is nice; she’s saying authenticity is the thing that converts polite support into real support. She goes further: “When people feel the joy and passion behind your work, it influences their decision-making in powerful ways.”
Our networks don’t advocate for a version of us they can’t feel. They advocate for the one they believe.
This is also why mentors and sponsors matter so much here. We develop our brands effectively by seeking out mentors and sponsors who can provide guidance and advocate for us. Mentors offer counsel. Sponsors use their influence in rooms we’re not in, which means they’re speaking our brand aloud when we can’t correct it. Mentors and sponsors are essential to building a strong, impactful personal brand, and the accuracy of what they say about us depends entirely on whether we’ve let them see who we actually are.
Courage and the Small Things
Pedrya Seymour, a two-time Olympian for the Bahamas, chose the word courage when I asked her to describe resilience in one word:
“It takes courage to pick yourself up time and time again. For me as an athlete, it takes courage to have a short-term memory; for instance, at the last meet you may have come in last place or had a bad race, but on Monday at practice you have to forget about that race. And it takes courage to do that.”
Pedrya also told me about writing down the small things that make her happy: Trying a new coffee shop. Trying a new restaurant. A slow morning. The beach. Then she built them back into her days, because she understood that track was her job and she still needed something outside of it.
Both of those are brand work, though neither sounds like it. The first is the courage to keep showing up as yourself after a bad result. The second is the practice of staying connected to what’s actually true about you so that there’s a self to show up as.
Where to Start This Week
The Set stage of Ready, Set, Go® is where we design the landscape, and our brands are part of that landscape.
So here’s the assignment, the same one I got in that room.
Text 10 individuals who know you from different parts of your life. Not 10 colleagues from one job but 10 across the range: work, school, family, volunteering, an old team, a board. Ask each of them for one word.
Then read what comes back and look for the repeats. The repeats are your brand.
Some of what arrives will surprise you. Some of it will be more generous than the story you tell about yourself. It’s okay to be open and vulnerable with ourselves so that we can then emerge full of hope and joy, with the energy to be our professionally authentic selves.
And once you know what the words say, only one more step remains: Align your offerings with the needs and values of your potential partners or clients. That alignment requires active listening and a deep understanding of their objectives, because a brand only creates impact where it meets a real need.
Your brand is already written. Go find out what it says.
