What is a personal-professional brand and why is it important?

Whether a leader is making an obvious next step—or playing a complex game of chess between known, nascent, and untapped possibilities—they typically want to make the most of the rarefied air in which they live and work.

At face value, getting “from where they’ve been to where they want to go” should be a fairly straightforward affair.

In reality, leaders who might already be considered classically successful often face unique challenges not faced by the average person when presenting their professional credibility.

Piecing together a personal-professional brand is complicated and the journey there is riddled with complexity and discretion.

This is where many PR agencies and communications teams can struggle to hit the mark because they either miss (or more likely don’t know) the breadth of a leader’s value (because the leader doesn’t know their own brand), or they lean too far into hyperbole.

Create a usable personal-professional brand by stopping time. For just a bit.

Leaders of note, or people who want to be leaders of substance, absolutely must — at least once in their career — take a breather to consider the future and develop a plan. Only then can they create a narrative that’s grounded in reality, reason, and possibility, while being open to possibility and remaining circumspect for their various publics. In my clients’ cases, their publics are colleagues, investors, workforces, teams, regulators, partners, prospects, the press, potential acquirers, and far more.

The stakes, and the rewards, are high, so subtly matters.

People who share rarefied air can smell insincerity, hyperbole, and fakery. Turning that sixth sense into introspection of one’s self, however, can feel impossible.

Nuance is the absolute key to getting one’s personal-professional brand aligned and usable. But it’s tough to do.

That’s where I come in.