Stop Building a Persona. Start Building Thought Leadership: Show Notes & Transcript

In this episode of Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business, we’re chatting how to stop building a Persona and start building Thought Leadership. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review!

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Stop Building a Persona. Start Building Thought Leadership.

We just launched our new book! You can grab The Power of Your Personal Brand: A Playbook for Struggling Middle Managers Who Want to Do Big Things on Amazon or at ForthRight-People.com

Today, we’re going to talk about how to stop building a Persona and start building Thought Leadership. Many of you have asked us, “How do I establish reputation and credibility?” Or, more tactically, “How do I show up better on LinkedIn?” Well…it’s all grounded in building Thought Leadership from an authentic place. When we say “authentic place,” you probably know what is coming. Yup, Personal Brand! Become a better Thought Leader in this episode. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

• Embrace your talents (what comes naturally to you that others can’t easily do) as your Center of Expertise
• Consistently practicing personal brand accelerates ability to achieve Big Things
• Tactical tips for showcasing thought leadership on LinkedIn
• Thought Leadership is rooted in characteristics (beliefs, points of view, experiences)
• Identify your Personal Mission Statement: “I want to be a person known for…”

And as always, if you need help in building your Strategic Counsel, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com.

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:

Show Notes

• Stop Building a Persona. Start Building Thought Leadership.
  • [0:29] Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business
  • [00:29] Special episode: Recording of a live LinkedIn event on building thought leadership
  • [01:00] Activate Personal Brand, turn perspective into Thought Leadership, show up with confidence on LinkedIn
  • [01:58] Thought Leadership is a linchpin for achieving big goals and dreams
  • [02:24] You need other people to achieve big things, and their perceptions are their reality
  • [03:24] Overview of the Personal Brand Framework: Characteristics, Appearance, Behaviors & Actions
  • [06:40] Thought Leadership is rooted in Characteristics (beliefs, points of view, experiences)
  • [08:01] Personas are built from outside-in based on what others want vs. personal brand built inside-out
  • [09:54] Anne & April’s stories of being forced to adopt a persona and the pitfalls
  • [12:15] Straying from personal brand leads to imposter syndrome and being seen as inauthentic
  • [14:09] Identify your Personal Mission Statement: “I want to be a person known for…”
  • [15:12] Characteristics become your competitive advantage and filter for thought leadership
  • [16:58] Anne’s mission: Helping leaders reposition for growth; April’s: Training leaders to do more together than individually
  • [18:30] Identify your Center of Expertise
  • [20:49] Embrace your talents (what comes naturally to you that others can’t easily do) as your Center of Expertise
  • [22:37] Anne’s expertise in getting businesses unstuck; April’s in storytelling and tone/personality
  • [24:57] Narrow areas where you want to establish Thought Leadership based on expertise and mission
  • [26:17] April’s thought leadership in org design (objective) and coaching (personal); Anne’s in problem-solving for disproportionate growth
  • [28:43] Activate mission and expertise through Appearance (how you show up) and Behaviors & Actions (what you do)
  • [29:35] Become a teacher, create content, demonstrate successful execution
  • [31:24] Declare and cultivate your thought leadership
  • [32:48] Tactical tips for showcasing thought leadership on LinkedIn
  • [35:31] Anne & April’s attribution goals on LinkedIn
  • [37:13] Consistently practicing personal brand accelerates ability to achieve big things
  • [37:35] Get the book The Power of Your Personal Brand on Amazon + workbook for action; plus a Book club tour offer
  • [38:53] Put insights into action; reach out to Anne & April to customize for your business
  • Make sure to follow Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast spot and leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts
  • Learn more at ForthRight-People.com and connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn

What is Strategic Counsel?

Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Prepare for honest, direct, and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead and operate in business.  Referred to by some listeners as an “MBA in podcast form,” this show is dense with personal stories, proven strategies contextualized by practical steps, and tools to put what you learn into action now.

Your hosts Anne Candido and April Martini are Co-Founders of ForthRight People, a leadership performance company focused on developing leaders from the inside out. They are also Authors of the book: The Power of Your Personal Brand: A Playbook for Struggling Middle Managers Who Want to Do Big Things. They thrive on engagement from listeners and welcome any show topics!  So, reach out and connect!

Thanks for listening Strategic Counsel. Get in touch here to become more strategic. 

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

00:01
Welcome to the Strategic Counsel by Forthright Business podcast. If you’re looking for honest, direct and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead and operate in business, you are in the right place. In our discussions, we push on the status quo and traditional modes of thinking to reveal a fresh perspective. This unlocks opportunity for you, your team and your business. Now let’s get to it. Welcome.

00:29
to the Strategic Counsel podcast. I’m Anne Candido. And I am April Martini. And today we’re going to do something a bit different. OK, so a few weeks ago, we did a live LinkedIn event, which we thought was recording, but didn’t. That was real fun. Yeah. So we found that out at the end. Yeah, so 500 episodes, you guys think we probably would have figured all that out by now, but a little bit of bush leg over here. But we’ve regrouped, and we are going to do the event as a podcast episode.

01:00
Now there were some slides associated with this just to kind of help you follow along. We’ll post those slides to you with the episodes. You’ll have those, but we want you just to hear our lovely voices today. So here we go. So we’re going to talk about today is about stop building a persona and start building thought leadership. That was the title of the event. And the reason why we were doing this is because many of you guys have asked us, how do I establish reputation and credibility? Just, you know, general question overall.

01:28
Or more tactically, how do I show up better on LinkedIn? Well, it’s all grounded in building thought leadership from an authentic place. And when we say authentic place, you probably know what is coming up. We’re talking about your personal brand. Shocker, I’m sure. All right. So the objective of this workshop-esque episode, say that five times fast, is to help you do the following things. So first, activate your personal brand.

01:58
quickly and authentically. Turn your perspective then into clear and compelling thought leadership. And then like Anne said, from a more tactical perspective, show up with confidence on LinkedIn or anywhere you’re showing up trying to be a thought leadership, including live settings. So all of what we’ll be talking about today stems from our new book, The Power of Your Personal Brand, a playbook for struggling middle managers who want to do big things. Quick plug that that is available on Amazon and also through

02:27
a link on our website and there’s also an accompanying workbook on our website so you can get that there as well. But whether you consider yourself a middle manager or even whether or not you’re struggling right now really isn’t relevant for this session because we’re gonna talk about a topic that’s relevant for anyone on the journey to achieving their big things. And as a reminder, what are big things? Well, they’re your goals and your dreams that bring you personal fulfillment. And that is the topic for today is

02:57
thought leadership. So when we talk about thought leadership, we really talk about it as a linchpin for any big thing because it establishes your credibility with stakeholders who actually hold the keys to your big things. And I think it’s really important that we stop for a minute and point out two underlying assumptions in the statement I just made that are critical to adopt for this session if it’s going to be useful and you’re going to be able to develop your thought leadership. So the first one is

03:24
you actually do need other people to achieve your big things. You definitely cannot achieve them alone. Now, when we say that, sometimes we get pushed back from folks, but we want you to hear us when we say, think about all the things that you’ve wanted to try to achieve in life, right? We’re all surrounded by other people as part of the things we do. So there are times when we really need their buy-in to help us get where we wanna go. And this is critical when we’re in professional settings, especially.

03:51
The second thing here is other people’s perceptions are their reality. People don’t always like to hear that part of it either. But the truth of the matter is, is that if someone has a perception of you, their perception definitely matters in the pursuit of your big thing because you want them to be on your side, support you, all of those types of things. And so just again, remember that you need others when you’re going after these big things and when you’re trying to show up as a thought leader.

04:22
The good news is if you can accept that as truth, you should then be able to understand why thought leadership matters. So before we go any further though, and then I’ll stop talking and give it back to Anne, because I’m, this is big chunk, bear with me guys, my stuff here. ah We do think it’s important to give a brief overview of our personal brand framework. Hopefully many of you know it, are using it, love it, all of those types of things. you do go, you know, give us a rating review on Amazon if you bought the book. I’m gonna do Anne’s job and do the PR.

04:51
Love it. I love it. But anyway, there are three components that are fundamental for your personal brand. And what we start with here is characteristics. These are your features and attributes. They are the things that make you uniquely you. They are not good or bad. They do, however, guide everything that you do.

05:12
And we often say that these are things that have been ingrained in you for a really long time and therefore they don’t often change, right? So minor things like directness and stubbornness, right? Those are characteristics and things that are just fundamental to who I am as a person. Next is your appearance. This is the combination of your visual and verbal presence. And when we talked about needing people to achieve your big things or to be perceived as a thought leader, all of those things,

05:41
We talked about those people and we talk about them in the book as value evaluators. So what they do is they’re assessing how you show up both visually and verbally through your presence. And that ultimately defines your image or the general impression a person presents to the public. This is again why it’s so important to have those people. But also when we talk about appearance, this is one of the things you can start to manage. So when we say characteristics don’t often change or they’re really hard to change, your appearance is something that you can work on.

06:10
and decide how you wanna show up both visually and verbally. And this is everything from how you sound to how you stand to what you wear to how you look, all of those things make up your visual and verbal presence. The important thing about appearance is if you can bring those things together consistently, then that image is something that you can have control of and that helps people to see you consistently and authentically on a regular basis.

06:40
And then finally, behaviors and actions. This is how you show up and engage with the world around you. We could separate what’s a behavior, what’s an action. That’s not the important part. The important part is these are the manifestations of your characteristics and how your reputation or what people say behind your back is ultimately defined. When we work on the framework, we often start here with people because it can be really hard to jump into identifying your characteristics. But if you can evaluate how you show up through your behaviors and actions,

07:09
You can do work to put the themes together to both identify your characteristics and decide how you want to appear and then manage your behaviors and actions again to show up consistently and authentically. So there you go, that’s the framework. There’s the framework. And so we’re going to layer in thought leadership here now. So that leadership shows up in your behaviors and actions, but it’s rooted in your characteristics and specifically in the culmination of your beliefs, your points of view and experiences because

07:35
That’s what makes you an authority on a topic. And that is what your differentiating factor is. When you can put all those things together, we’re gonna talk about how you put them all together into a recipe. That is your competitive advantage. And that is what you’re gonna leverage in order to be able to show up in the way that you wanna show up through your behaviors and actions in order to achieve your big things. So that’s why we always talk about the fact that thought leadership and your personal brand is built from the inside out.

08:01
because trying to go from the outside in, even though we look at the outside in to some extent, when we look at behaviors and actions and kind of trace it back, we only do that from a diagnostic point of view in order to kind of figure out what’s going on inside that’s then manifesting itself into appearance and into uh your behaviors and actions. So when we think about thought leadership, we want to root it from that core, those characteristics that are gonna help us differentiate. Now, what tends to happen instead is people

08:30
tend to create a persona based on what they think stakeholders want to hear and see. So that is truly from the outside in. That’s not a diagnostic exercise. That is, I want to be more like so-and-so or well-meaning mentors, colleagues, coaches. They tell you, should go act more like so-and-so, especially if you’re struggling. And I’m going to kind of create my appearance, all my behaviors and actions like that. And I’m going to kind of pretend like I’m somebody else.

08:57
in order to appear more successful, in order to appear like I think that they want me to be in order to achieve what these big things are. Now this can get very, very dangerous because as April said, when we start to do that, we start to break that authenticity piece, that authenticity with the capital A piece, because what that becomes, that authentic piece, that personal brand, characteristics, like I said, are your competitive advantage. So when you start acting in a persona mindset, you’ve now negated

09:26
your competitive advantage. And the reason why this is so difficult and the reason why this is such a popular mantra of building from the outside in is because in my personal point of view, Anne’s going to get on her Tidebox for a second, is celebrities have made an art out of this. So I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but I’m going to talk about it again as I was listening to an episode with Paris Sultan. And she was talking about how she rose to fame for her reality show. that was

09:54
the big way that she really was presented to the public. But she talks about the fact that the producers gave her a part to play and she went and played that part. Now, she says it was exhausting to play that because it wasn’t really who she was. But to her credit, she monetized the heck out of it and really built it into what you see now. Right. And so all the props to Paris. But now what she’s coming back and saying is like, now nobody takes me seriously for being a serious business woman.

10:23
Like I can’t get the credibility. can’t get the, my image is just not solidified around being a credible business woman because the perception that people have is the person that they watch in this reality show for so many years. So you kind of have to ask yourself, all right, it couldn’t give you some short-term gains, but does it give you the long-term goal that you’re actually looking for? So this is why we discourage trying to what April likes to say is I’ll fake it till you make it. I hate that so much. Yeah.

10:51
Or I’m going to try to be like this person because that’s what I think people want to see. And instead, we want you to start to root yourself in your personal brand and then figure out how to modulate your characteristics into your appearance and behaviors and actions in a way that helps you be heard in a way that helps you to forward your goals in a way that helps you to make sure that your agenda, your intentions are being received by the other person.

11:18
And again, this is going to be the root of thought leadership too, which we’re going to get to in a second, but we’re giving you a little context. So in order to kind of bring this to, to some fruition and some tangibility, me and April are going to tell a couple of stories about how we were kind of forced to adopt a persona and how that worked for us. So I’ll start. And we were going to try to use some different examples because we sometimes we use some, some similar, some similar stories and you guys are probably like, yes, I know you’re direct. Oh my God. We’ve told us that like 20 million thousand times.

11:48
All right, so we’re gonna try to use a different uh example. So I know it’s gonna come to a surprise to almost like everybody listening, I kind of my characteristics is candor, right? So I see myself as kind of like a truth teller for right, wrong or a different, from the point of the time when I was like a young executive too now, which is kind of funny, because now I get paid to be a truth teller and people appreciate that, but they didn’t so much, especially when I was a young executive, right?

12:15
And so I would go into meetings and I just kind of caught it as I saw it. You know, I just kind of said, well, I don’t think that’s going to work. I just don’t think that that is the right person. I just think what we’re doing is totally wrong. I mean, I was just kind of like laying it out on the line and I just called everybody out. Right. Or I said like, don’t really like this work or I don’t think this work is going to be, it’s not achieving the goal we have in mind. So the feedback that came back was.

12:41
And you’re a little abrasive in these meetings. You’re not seen as very collaborative. You need to go act more like so-and-so who is a little bit more soft spoken, be a little bit more agreeable, kind of just listen versus always have to have something to say, all of those sorts of things. That’s what I did. I went to the meetings and I was like, just kind of listen. It’s like, oh, huh, okay. Yeah, those are, those are interesting points of view. Didn’t provide my own point of view. Didn’t say anything. Just kind of went in with this, this understanding I was going to be a little bit softer.

13:11
version of myself, which what I thought was my softer version of myself. The feedback that came out of those meetings was then, well, now she’s not saying anything. Now we don’t know what she thinks. Now she’s like a moving target. Now we’re not sure what our direction is. Now I’m like, oh my God, dang if you do and dang if you don’t, right? And so what I learned was very important. And I said this uh a little bit ago is that it’s not just about flipping the switch or flipping the script. It’s about, okay,

13:40
they actually do want the candor. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was how I was delivering the candor, right? And this is going to be so important when you’re going to, when we dial down into your thought leadership, because a lot of times we think thought leadership can come off as being preachy or know it all or judgey and all those sorts of things. So it’s going to be very important that you remember that it’s not the expertise that they are not craving. It’s the way you’re delivering the expertise, the way you’re delivering the points of view, delivering your beliefs. So just keep that in mind. I’m going to let April tell her story.

14:09
Yeah, it’s the modulation. Yes, the modulation for sure. Yeah, I feel like I say all the time to our clients, if you say the right thing, but they can’t hear it, you’re just, there you are. Yeah, you might as well not have said it. Yeah, so on the theme of different stories, so the one I’m going to tell is actually kind of goes back to the Anne’s point about fake it till you make it or trying to modulate yourself in a way that’s inauthentic to you, right? And that’s what we would call a persona.

14:38
I worked for Inner Brand in Cincinnati and I built a lot of credibility around my abilities to build a brand. And so, you know, who’s the consumer? Who’s the target? Are we different from the competition? All these things, the brand became my thing. And so then came up this opportunity where our Dayton office wanted to lean into that expertise and

15:07
learn how to potentially weave it into the work that they did to move some of their projects a little bit more upstream. And at the same time, they had a quantitative group up there. So I wanted to learn enough to be dangerous about quantitative analysis. I think I learned more than enough to be dangerous and was fatigued by the end, but that’s a different story. But the whole point was I was going to learn how to weave in more of that analytical work into brand work. But I was going to come as the thought leader on how you develop a brand.

15:37
And so I got up there and different from the Cincinnati office, I mean, we had a lot of healthy debate and push back on each other and creative led the day. So it was always on me as a strategist to try to figure out how to win the battles. Right. And I could do all that stuff. But when I got to Dayton, it was a pretty large team and they really pushed back hard. And it was one of those moments where all of a sudden I started to question

16:07
my level of expertise and therefore I started showing up a little quieter, less of strong point of view, kind of avoiding confrontation, which is very unlike me and to the point that the boss, my boss took me aside and was like, hey, I don’t understand what’s going on here. We’ve seen you present so many times. We brought you up here to help us build this practice. Yes, this team likes to push back, but at the end of the day, you are the expert in this situation. So,

16:36
I need you to stand up and tell us what’s right. And I had very, I don’t even know to this point if I’d ever been told that I was playing too small in a role before, but I was definitely playing too small. And, you know, this went back to the fact that I kind of quieted some of my best characteristics because I wasn’t sure that imposter syndrome kind of came in, right? And I was questioning my expertise. And so just an example there of when

17:06
you don’t actually lean into your personal brand, what can happen? Yeah. And I think you hit the nail on the head, April, is that when we start to stray away from our personal brand, those feelings start to kind of come ingrained with us, which is the imposter syndrome. It’s like, am I really as good as I think I am? Or are they going to find me out? Or you start to stress and anxiety that maybe you just can’t do what you’re being asked to do. And you start to kind of get in your head and it gets very overwhelming.

17:31
And then that translates to other people that you might be a little bit scattered or you might be a bit of a moving target. And it just kind of starts compounding on each other. And that’s why it’s so important to know when you’re fronting a persona, because a persona is just deteriorate your personal brand at the core. But remember, people’s perceptions are the reality. So if you consistently start showing up in this way that is this persona, they’re going to start believing that that is who you are. That is who you are. And then your competitive advantage is useless because you can’t

18:00
create a competitive advantage from trying to be from a persona standpoint, that outside in standpoint. So the whole goal here is to really embrace the fact that your personal brand is the root of your thought leadership and that you need to shed the personas in order for this to truly realize itself through your appearance and your behaviors and actions. All right. So we’re going to do it through a couple of little exercises just to kind of start to like

18:30
knit all this together for you. I mean, I’m sure that’s percolating your head and you’re probably processing. You might need to listen to this episode a couple of times and that’s totally legit because these are deep things. These are things that require some thought and some processing and some practice and some socialization. So don’t feel like you have to get all of this in this 45 minutes to an hour episode. Okay. So the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to ground ourselves and exercise it. We call out in our behaviors and actions section of the book.

18:57
And this is to identify your personal mission statement, because this personal mission statement is going to become the basis by which you filter your behaviors and actions and your parents, frankly. And that mission statement is, I want to be a person who is known for, and then you fill in the blank. Now, this is supposed to be a short statement. It’s supposed to be easy to recall because you’re going to use it to be like, and you’re going to go into these situations like the, you know, the experiences that April and I just described. You’re going to think about that statement and you’re going to be like, okay, how do I need to show up?

19:27
How am I, what characteristics am I going to pull forward? What thought leadership do I need to invoke in order to be able to really truly exemplify the statement? And then after the fact, you’re to look back at that statement and you’re going to be like, okay, did I do right by the statement? It was my behaviors and actions, my appearance. Did my thought leadership showcase itself in a way that really exemplified that statement? So we’re going to tell you our statements and then you can have some time obviously to think about it. And then

19:57
If you get the book and the workbook, it has this exercise in there too. Yep. So my statement, my personal mission statement, I want to be a person who is known for helping leaders, teams and businesses reposition themselves for growth. We’re going to talk a little bit more about how these come to life through thought leadership. So I won’t elaborate beyond that. April, what’s yours? And mine is I want to be a person who is known for training leaders and teams to be able to do far more together than they ever could individually. Awesome.

20:26
So you can start to see how those become like statements of truth about our own personal truth of how we want our characteristics to manifest and become the filtering mechanism by which we really evaluate. I show up in the way that I want to show up? Is my thought leadership being honed in a way that’s going to exemplify that? Now, it can be hard to kind of think about how to connect the two out of the blue. These aren’t easy concepts, people. So.

20:49
We understand that. So we’re doing our best to kind of like walk you through the process. But again, it’s going to take a little bit of time and practice and introspection to really internalize all of this. But we’re going to give you a process that we think is going to be helpful. And this is also in the book. So you can use that in order to really apply it to your thought leadership. So first, the thing that you need to think about and solidify is your center of expertise.

21:15
Now this goes back to your characteristics, specifically your beliefs, your point of views and experiences. And like I said, this is uniquely yours. Nobody else has the same combination of these things that create those centers of expertise that you can then anchor thought leadership around. So consider what perspective, expertise, knowledge, experience or combo thereof can I uniquely bring that others can’t?

21:41
And how can I integrate these into my personal brand to better deliver my personal mission that will put me on my path to my big thing? Now, one thing I want to talk about here, and especially related to this first question, is this whole concept of talent. All right. Now, again, I’m to get on my tide box again for a second because this is one episode. know this has been like something that’s been constantly on my mind. And I talked about this a couple of episodes ago, too. But I mean, the more I can talk about it, hopefully the more people hear it.

22:09
When we talking about talents, you guys, we’re not talking about like how many times you can hula hoop, you know, in a minute. What we’re talking about is the fact that we all have something inside of us that’s been cultivated through our characteristics that again, only we uniquely have. Okay. And every successful leader is able to embrace that by acknowledging it and then owning it and then being able to translate that into other work that they do.

22:37
don’t believe anybody who says all I did was work my butt off and you know, and I just, you know, and put my nose to the grindstone and I didn’t do, they might’ve done all that, but they did it with intent in mind. They just didn’t randomly work on something. They just didn’t really work hard on something. Even they talk about Kobe Bryant and, you know, the thousand baskets he shot before practice, he’s actually shooting baskets. His intent is to get that, that muscle memory to the point where

23:04
It’s just automatic, right? So there’s always an intent and there’s always something that you’re practicing in order to make sure that that talent is something that you can draw upon and that your talent is your center of expertise. All right, guys. So don’t sit there and say, I don’t really have any talents. mean, anybody who’s been alive on this planet has something that they can cultivate that they’re good at, that other people may not be as good at. if soon as you think the way that you kind of identify this is by saying, everybody can do that, right?

23:33
As soon as you think that everybody can do that or everybody knows that or does nothing special, that’s probably your talent because probably the opposite is not true. Probably not everybody can do that. Not everybody has experienced that. Not everybody knows that. So that’s the place to start. So we’re to tell stories again, but you know what? I’m going to flip it because I’ve been talking a lot and I need a break from talking. So I’m to make April tell her story first and then I’ll come in and tell my story. Okay, so.

24:00
My story here, and when I think about the things that I have expertise in or have experienced or the combo that Anne mentioned, I said before that I was known for building brands, but the piece I love about building brands truly is the building of the brand character and then telling stories through that tone, right? And when you’re working for an agency, this is completely imperative.

24:30
And so it was one of those things that, like Ann said, there are things within you that you do uniquely have and are good at. And I think this lived within me, right? And then it was cultivated throughout my years of having to do this consistently for clients at the agency. And so what it has translated to since then is that I am really good at, well,

24:57
and I’ll say it’s the only time I can ever be funny. I’m really good at telling, weaving together stories. I love, love vocabulary to the point where sometimes my family and friends find it obnoxious. And I’m not doing it in a way that I want to appear high brow or smarter than everybody else. But when I get going, all my favorite words fly out of my mouth, right?

25:18
And so what this has translated to is, you know, years and years of the agency, I would write the decks, I would stand up and give the presentations, tell the stories. Now with LinkedIn, I really leaned into leveraging the storytelling to build my thought leadership to a broader audience on a bigger platform. And I honestly will say that I did resist this for a while, or I kind of maybe did it absent of my personality, if I’m being really honest, and those things that I’m good at, like, you know, the

25:47
characteristics who I am. But now I’ve really started to weave stories in and use my original tone of voice and my experiences to create an experience for other people of me on that platform. And it feels and sounds as though it’s me speaking, right? And so right now where we have all these things going on with AI and everyone’s got the tools in their hands and they’re telling it to do things and then publishing it like it is, I’m starting to get feedback and connections from people of

26:17
Hey, I read your post on, you know, whatever the other day, I can tell you’re writing that. And I really appreciate that. And I felt like I connected with you on my side. takes vulnerability and the being okay with sharing personal anecdotes or more about me or that sort of thing to build those connections. But when I think about my center of expertise, this is one that I think, again, I naturally had some of this tendency in me. Then all my experience in agency led me.

26:48
to the work and now I’m doing it both for myself but also with clients and showing up on that platform to show them ways to do it, right? Yeah, I mean, 1000%. So for me, I I have a multitude of experience from my 20 years of PNG all the way through my own, I think I called it brand manager on loan to the point of me and April’s forthright people and building that and pulling that together.

27:17
to real estate investing, to you guys know I own a tent world car stylizing franchise. So I have a vast experience and plethora of experiences to pull from. And I’ve seen business in a multitude of different fashions. I mean, across categories, upstream, downstream, I mean, you name it. And so what I’ve been able to do and I’ve had to do in all of these situations is I’ve had to figure out how to become unstuck.

27:47
multitudes of different ways through multitudes of different journeys that I’ve been on. And there’s always been an instance and most of the time frequent instances where I have to get unstuck. That has become my center of expertise. I am an expert at helping businesses get unstuck because I’ve seen it, I’ve lived it, I’ve done it and they’re universal truths. And I practice them and I put them into practice for others.

28:13
And I’ve seen them come to fruition. And I know through strategic action planning, which is what I really enjoy, that these things work. And so I’m able to come in and I’m to help businesses really uncover what is getting them stuck and help them to get unstuck, which goes back then to my personal mission statement of wanting to be a person who’s known for helping leaders, teams, and businesses reposition themselves for growth. Cause it’s ultimately what I’m trying to do as a result of this center of expertise. So what you’ll see,

28:43
as we kind of go on here is that we build upon that. We use that as the core of then how do we show up in a way that exemplifies that center of expertise as well as starts to reinforce that mission statement. So I’m gonna turn it back over to April in order to take you through the rest of the process. Yes, so once you have a semblance of your center of expertise and your personal mission statement and Ann just did a good job of connecting all those dots again for us.

29:11
you can start to narrow in on the areas where you want to establish thought leadership. So for me, and it’s not going to be a surprise for those of you that know me, organizational development is really one of the places that I love to do the work, which is a nice compliment to Anne’s love of strategic action planning because

29:35
One of the things that I see businesses do again and again, and this is one of those things that for a long time I didn’t realize I had a natural skill in, right, is being able to see where a team is not set up to serve the business or people are in the wrong seats or there’s too many people, wrong leaders, right, all different symptoms that come up. But I remember from a very early age speaking to just kind of natural inclination, being the young one in the room and seeing these things overtly.

30:03
and then going and asking the questions and people will be like, person’s been here for years, they’re great. Right? And so I can look back on that as the foundation of fast forward to today. And I look at it truly as a puzzle. So I make it really objective with the people that I’m working with. We talk about the right decisions for the business. Hopefully we have Anne’s strategic action plan to start from.

30:28
But the idea is to take all the people off by name and rebuild the team that is needed without any names on it, then assess the people you have, and then decide who stays, who goes, and who might we need now that we don’t have. And so while I love everything about working with people, this is one of those places where I believe that it is really important to get very objective about what’s right and needs to happen in the business.

30:57
absent of who you have in those seats. so hopefully you can hear this is the place where I’ve spent a lot of time establishing thought leadership and leading leaders through this process of what their organization needs to look like. On the other side of this, and the interesting thing is the non-objective side of what I do is coaching. And this is the other side of the people. So when I think about my centers of expertise, I think about them kind of as uniquely to

31:24
things that fit together and are needed for leaders, but kind of live in separate camps. And so from a coaching perspective, I’m all in on who the person or the team is sitting in front of me, what they do well, what they might need to work on, what their blind spots on, and how I can, at the end of the day, assist them to achieve whatever big things they’re after in life. Because in those instances, my success is tied directly to whether they can go and do what they’re after in business.

31:53
And I think, you know, kind of pull a thread between the two of those two is that, you know, it’s just not being your center of expertise, just being like organizational development or mine being strategic action planning. It’s doing those things with an intent. So uh generally, April and I come in and this is again where we really excel, where our personal brand really resides is when there’s something that’s not going right. uh April’s not coming in just like, oh, I have like a new like

32:22
person, where does the person fit within my organization? That’s not what April does. April comes in when people are like, I have a fire going, I do not know how to fix it. Can you help me fix it? That’s where we really, really thrive. Can we do the other part? Yes. Would we do the other part? Maybe it just all the way, place that we really are trying to develop thought leadership is around those that problem state. in trying like for mine, it’s like the getting unstuck.

32:48
I’m looking for people who are looking for disproportionate growth, who are looking to pivot, who are looking to build incremental revenue, maybe just don’t know how to go do that. So those are like the things that I get that I’m really good at where my personal brand recipe, my experiences, my beliefs, my points of view, and everything that I have seen comes together really nicely to really be able to help people in exponential ways. Again, can I do like regular strategic action planning where we’re just kind of refreshing a pen on the page?

33:17
Yes, do I want to do that? No, that’s not best utilizing my personal brand and really to be able to translate that into the results that people want to see. And normally people don’t want to pay for what we cost in that capacity to refresh a plan on a page, right? So just being totally honest about where the value fits the compensation.

33:42
Now, I mean, I too do coaching, but my coaching is aligned with again, that problem solution statement. I’m looking for leaders who are like, I need help. There’s something that’s not quite right. I need to grow. I need to overcome something. And that’s where my personal brand of can’t like that candor, that the transparency, the directness really pays off. I’m not really good for a little young execs who are trying to figure out their way in the world because I just don’t have any patience for that. Right. So, I mean, I can.

34:10
workshop personal brand from today to tomorrow and help them with that. But that’s just not my skill set when it comes to executive coaching. So it also helps you to kind of figure out who you’re for. So that’s why I’m saying like, who are you for? Why should people choose you? That’s all about your personal brand and then develop your thought leadership around that. So people are very clear about what they contribute to you. And we’re going to talk about that in a second, but April, you continue on the process.

34:36
Okay, so once you have clarity here, you actually activate your personal mission statement and your center of expertise through your appearance and behaviors and actions. So remember when we said at the beginning, characteristics are ingrained, they are who you are, they don’t change very often. What you can manage and modulate and all of the things, to all the points we made today are your appearance and your behaviors and actions. And we say there are three ways of doing this. So first is become a teacher.

35:05
Second is to create content, and third is to demonstrate successful execution. So when we talk about becoming a teacher, it’s really a mindset. It shifts from a position of maybe you get defensive sometimes when people don’t get what you’re up to, to one of inviting them into your world to learn about more of what you do, how you do it, why you do it, why it’s important, all of those types of things. And we go into this more in the book.

35:31
um for sure if you need this. Creating content is just what it sounds, right? Developing your thought leadership by getting content out there. I gave the LinkedIn example before. We also talked in the beginning about that can be in person, standing up, giving a presentation, right? Making sure that you have a unique point of view and you are creating content in support of that to support your overall thought leadership and what you want to become. And then finally,

35:58
The successful execution is exactly what it implies. You put your center of expertise into practice and then you demonstrate the value and the validity. And again, we go into these in more detail in the book and said you’re not going to be able to get it all in 45 minutes to an hour, but it is important that we, to continue the process to get you through all the way to how does this come to life through execution? Right. And I think it’s really important to say once you want to be a thought leader in something, you are a thought leader in something. Yeah. Right. Good point.

36:28
It’s not like a mastery of it or it doesn’t even have to be like a long like experience of it. It’s declaring it and then cultivating it and building it. And that’s why these mindset shifts are so important, especially about becoming a teacher, because that’s where a lot of people get stuck is like, why don’t they understand that Mr. Teach Action Planning is the right way to go? Well, you have to kind of teach them. You kind of have to invite them into your world and explain where it’s been helpful, where it’s not been helpful.

36:57
And the same thing about demonstrating successful execution. It’s about showing, yeah, this stuff works. And so yes, you should believe me because this stuff works. Okay. So I say that as a segue into this next section, cause I promised that we would go into creating content. Yep. Like a lot of you guys are listening, attending an original session for was like to understand how do I show up better on LinkedIn or whatever your, social format of choice, but that’s usually the primary because

37:25
The primary question we get is how do I have a better presence, a stronger presence, a more reputable presence on LinkedIn? Now, if you want to know more about how to market your personal brand and professional context, we go into that a lot in the book. So you can go into the book and get more examples here. But I’m just going to go really tactical for a second about how maybe a few minutes about how you need to show up in order to showcase your thought leadership on LinkedIn. So first.

37:54
You go and you build your connections and you’re following. This is what we call priming your LinkedIn profile. OK, every day going to my network tab and click on the connects that it suggests or whatever we want to go peruse. But if you want something that’s very efficient, it recommends people according to different categories. Look at those kind of assess them just briefly and just decide to connect with them. OK, you know, you can do one hundred and fifty a week.

38:23
We highly suggest that because what it starts doing is starts building your, your followership and that’s the people who are going to see your content. The algorithms are very stingy for LinkedIn. So if you don’t have a big following and that following isn’t engaging in your content, it doesn’t really showcase your content to a lot of different people. So the bigger the following, the more chance you have for your content to be seen. Now, again, I say, don’t overthink this. If you think they’re maybe in the right industry,

38:50
or the right leadership role, or maybe there’s something interesting, just connect with them. Also, have a profile that incorporates your thought leadership focus areas that you want attributed to you. All so this is like in your bio piece. I can’t tell you how many people do not even have a bio piece or their bio piece just kind of says what they do. Incorporate what you want to be known for, right? Why should people choose you? Why should people even think you’re credible? Start establishing that thought leadership through those statements in your bio.

39:20
So that people can start saying, yeah, April, she seems to be really in organizational development. That’s interesting. I’ll have to keep that in mind, right? That’s what you want people to start to think about you in the context of what you’re bringing to life through your content. Next, post no less than two times a week on topics that are reinforced where you want to build thought leadership. Now, a lot of people say, try to post every day. I mean, I don’t have any scientific or like any kind of insider knowledge on this. No data. No data.

39:49
But I do believe if you post more than once a day or even once every other day or a couple of days, it tends to dilute your exposure. I have no data on that. just have like just anecdotal data based on some of the little experiments we’ve done. So, and also, mean, unless you have people who are building your content for you, you have a lot of time in order to go do this. mean, who has time to really like thoughtfully put together more than like a two posts a week? If you can do more, great.

40:18
I mean, do it, just kind of keep that in mind. Now, again, you’re going to hear me say this a lot, and we’re going to give examples here in a second about you want attributions to the things that you want to be established as thought leadership. So you’re going to be very intentional about the content you’re going to create, which always begs the question. And what do I say? This is where I go back to what do you do in order to be a teacher? What do you do in order to demonstrate successful execution? These are really two key areas where you can start to

40:47
to reinforce your thought leadership. So share insights or learnings you’ve had through the week and with respect to the thought leadership areas. Maybe something you saw that you read, you have an interesting take on. So those are all really important in order to establish that, oh, Ann writes a lot about personal brand. She probably knows a lot about personal brand, right? So you’re gonna see that a lot. Write a lot about personal brand, write a lot about strategic action planning.

41:17
And then when I am sharing back or resharing other people’s content, I reinforce that through my comments on their content. I just don’t reshare their content just to reshare it unless it’s something that we’re just driving awareness of. But most of the time I’ll have a comment in there that really angles my commentary around why I think what they’re doing is so important in the context of what I’m trying to build thought leadership on. So it just makes it work double duty for you.

41:46
and usually invites engagement. Sometimes for the, well, times for the better. Sometimes as April can attest, sometimes not. So sometimes you can pay controversy. But when you’re, when you’re doing your own content, keep the posts on the shorter side and then have a telegraphic picture. You guys, the best thing is in some of these cases, AI, I forgot to mention when you’re doing your profile, have AI help you with that. Put what you think it should be. And then to ask AI to be like,

42:14
Hey, can you stylize this for a LinkedIn bio? And I’ll give you some options and you can then make sure it’s in your voice and you can use that. It’s the same thing here. You can use it to help you to refine. But again, as April said, just be careful that it doesn’t start sounding like a bot because then you’re losing the personal brand aspect of your thought leadership. And it just starts to become like it’s curated content from somebody that’s generic and not necessarily you. But the other way, if you just, if you buy the

42:44
The chat GPT subscription, it also will do images for you. So it’s a great way of being able to have some higher quality posts and kind of take a little bit of the pressure off of you. But if it’s too long, people are just going to skim it. You’re going to lose the impact. If you have a lot more to say, just put it in a blog and then you can link to your blog. And when you can have a call to action, like what do want them to do? Do you want them to engage? You want them to answer a question? You want them to go to your website? Do you want like, what do you want them to do as a result of the content that you’re putting out?

43:14
Not that everything has to have a call to action, but it does invite engagement. So consider that. Be careful too, that you’re just not being a curator of your business content. So this is what a lot of people will do is they’ll just reshare their business content. And they think that their role or their level is enough to kind of carry that content. But really what people are wondering is, well, if you’re sharing it, what was your contribution to that? Why do you, why are you even sharing that? Why did, what makes this important? Why is your business even doing that?

43:43
So take that as an opportunity to really meld what your business is doing and how you are impacting the business in order to be able to showcase your thought leadership there. Now, many have also asked, what’s the best way to use LinkedIn messaging? And really there’s no server bullet, but if you want good instruction here, check out our strategic council podcast episode with Gabe Lulow. He also provides some additional perspective on what we have shared here that can help you or help you successfully grow in your business. mean, just some really great insights about how to use LinkedIn to

44:13
prospect and all those sorts of really fabulous things for Legion that a lot of people get wrong on LinkedIn. And if you want examples for how this content looks, obviously it’s an audio, so we can’t really show you, but me and April are really intentional in this. So you can look at our posts and you can see what we’re putting out there and how we’ve intentionally constructed those posts in order to be able to really focus on our centers of expertise.

44:40
be the teacher, demonstrate successful execution, all of those things that we’ve been preaching in order to get to those attributions. Now for me, I want people to know that I am a really good strategic action planner, especially when it comes to the tough, like gritty, like hard things to have to overcome in businesses and when they want to grow in scale as my, as I’ve talked about before and as my personal mission statement reinforces.

45:07
Also that we have, you know, we’re experts in personal brand and we have a really interesting take on that. We have a book that we just launched and that we have a podcast that is people are gonna wanna listen to. So you’ll see all my content is really centered around that. Cause I want people to attribute the strategic way that we bring all of these things forward to us. April, what’s your attribution goals? Yes. So obviously mine, if you’ve.

45:31
haven’t picked up on by now are all around organizational development and coaching expertise. So really having people understand that this is where my expertise lies. It’s where I put a lot of thought leadership content based on that. And then obviously the same is in our book and our podcast are always things that we feature to make sure that people understand that we are also content creators. We do practice what we preach.

45:57
and that these are two channels that we have collectively together built our thought leadership and brought together what we’re uniquely good at. And then from a really tactical specific example, using that whole idea of connecting with 150 new people a week, I’ve been doing that since Gabe was on our podcast, which has been, I don’t know, a couple of months now. And one of the new metrics that I have…

46:23
established for myself is to create three new human connections on LinkedIn a week, meaning someone reaching out to me to grab coffee or someone reaching out to me to chat more about our book, those types of things. And I will say a lot of them have been coming to me. Some of it’s like reinvigorated network from a long time ago. Some are like brand new, never met before in my life. Last week I had three of those. And just to

46:47
push on how successful this can be if you’re diligent and you consistently are putting things out there and connecting with new people. I mean, one of my 150 people, I guess it’s been a week and a half ago or two weeks ago now, reached out to me the morning after we connected, saw all of our content around personal brands, saw the book, and just so happened that they were responsible for hosting a session later that week.

47:13
And their moderator who had done it for the past couple of years ended up sickened in the hospital and they had a half day open where they needed to fill on personal brand. So I couldn’t make it, unfortunately, due to other things, but Anne was able to go and facilitate that session. And that’s a perfect example of if I hadn’t connected and the timing hadn’t been exactly right and she hadn’t accepted and looked at our content, we never would have run that session. Right. So just an anecdotal example of when you put these goals in place and you work toward them.

47:43
what comes to fruition. And that can be live as well. So we mentioned that happened through LinkedIn and by intentionally putting content out there that attracted people’s attention, but it attention, but it’s the same thing when you are trying to build your thought leadership and your advocacy one-on-one or live where you are continually talking about things that are important to the business in the context of what you really know something about.

48:09
I mean, I’ll talk about it all the time when I’m like, when people are like, oh, we’re having this like really tough problem. We don’t know how to grow revenue. I was like, oh, that’s, you know, very common among businesses at your, at your stage with your kind of organization. What you really could use as a strategic action plan in order to rethink your current decisions, your current choices and think about where you want to go. I’m really, you know, great at doing that, but helping businesses do it for a long time.

48:36
So you can start to like kind of resume yourself a little bit, like, you know, be your own personal resume without it sounding like that judgy, like I’m, you know, full of myself kind of person. You’re just, you’re basically just telling people how you can help them. So you think about it in that way too, is that that is the, what you’re trying to do here. This is not about like, Oh, look at me and how, you know, great I am. And that’s fine if that’s what you want it to be about. But really at the end of the day, you’re putting all this out because you think you can help people and you think it could be of service to people. Really good.

49:06
to put a bow around all of this. We want you to hear. When you consistently practice making your personal brand the basis for your thought leadership, you then accelerate your ability to achieve your big things. So with that, I will one final time here say, please go buy the book, again, Amazon, or you can get a link from our website. Also reminder on the accompanying workbook on our site so that you can be directly putting what you’re reading and experiencing the book into action.

49:35
And one final thing is we are offering a limited number of what we’re calling book club tours where all you have to do is buy a book for every person that’s going to participate. We have purposely priced low on Amazon for the time being to make this very accessible to lots of folks. And if you buy those books, and I will come in and facilitate an hour session with as many people as you want to bring in order to jumpstart each of their personal brand journeys and hopefully help

50:04
your organization, your teams, and every individual in that room. Awesome. All right. And with that, we encourage you to take at least one powerful insight you heard and put it into practice. Because remember, strategic counsel is only effective if you put it into action. Did we spark something with this episode that you want to talk about further? Reach out to us through our website, ForthRight-People.com. We can help you customize what you have heard to move your business. And make sure to follow or subscribe to Strategic counsel on your favorite podcast platform.