Ep. 328 Getting Clear on Your Personal Brand Message

In this week’s episode, Anna argues for the importance of getting clear on your personal brand message. Are you stuck in an endless loop of tweaking your Instagram bio and refining your message, only to find yourself more confused? Discover actionable strategies to define what you want to be known for and why this clarity is crucial for your business success.

Key moments:

[00:00] Introduction

[01:02] Common struggles with personal brand clarity

[02:02] Key questions to identify your core message

[03:12] Anna’s personal examples and brand journey

[04:28] Distinguishing quitting the 9 to 5 and redefining success

[05:09] Importance of values and context in defining success

[07:15] How to maintain a consistent and authentic message

[09:10] Practical tools for clarifying your message

[12:04] Call to action: Workshop and accelerator programme

Resources mentioned:

• Personal Branding Workshop Series Registration: Sign up here
• The Business Accelerator: Join the waiting list
• Anna’s personal brand website: https://annaselundberg.com/

Personal brand message

Reimagining Success, episode 328. Are you tweaking your Instagram bio for the 3,075th time? Are you constantly thinking, oh, I need to get clear on my message, I need to redefine this, I need to cheque if this resonates, and so on? Well, this episode is for you, because we’re talking about getting clear on your message and really understanding what do you want to be known for. So really, the core of what you and your personal brand are going to stand for. Let’s dive in. Welcome to Reimagining Success, the podcast that helps you build a profitable business as an independent expert, one that works for you and your lifestyle. I’m your host, Anna Lundberg, former corporate insider turned business mentor, executive coach, and mum of two. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a coach, speaker, consultant, I’m here to guide you in creating a business that gives you freedom, flexibility, and the fulfilment you’re looking for. Ready to redefine success and build a business that you love.

Let’s get started. One of the things I see a lot of independent experts and founders struggle with when it comes to building their personal brand is getting that clarity on what exactly they want to stand for. And look, I’ve been there myself. The number of times I’ve tweaked my bio, rethought everything, started from the beginning, looked back over my notes and seen how my message has and hasn’t evolved over the years is embarrassing, to be frank. And yet it’s so, so important to have that clarity. Because if you don’t know what your message is, then how is your audience going to know? Right? Having said that, I think we can also get caught up in procrastinating with getting that clarity. I’ve got to get clear, I’ve got to refine my message, redo this and so on, which then holds us back from actually going out there and testing the message, but posting, talking about things and seeing how that resonates. So we need to get that balance right.

But we do need to work on this idea of what do we actually want to be known for? And that’s the key question, actually. What do we want to be known for? What do we want to stand for? One way to think about it is if I asked you to do a TED Talk this year, maybe you’ve already done one, but if you were to do one that was really going to be at the core of what you believe, what would be the title? What would be the message that you’d be standing up there and talking about if you were to launch a podcast. Mine’s called Reimagining Success. That gives you a little bit of a clue. What would your podcast be called if you were to write a book? Maybe multiple books, but if you only could write one book, what would it be called? This really helps you to refine, distil down what your core message is. And you may not know yet, and that’s perfectly fine. Clarity comes with time, but it’s really a worthwhile exercise to do, asking yourself, look, what would you actually stand up and fight for? What would you debate with a passion? And to give this a tangible context, I use my own example whenever I talk about this. You know, my Facebook group has been called, I believe, Escaping the nine to five.

Right. My brand is called One Step Outside, which is based on a quote, everything you’ve ever wanted is one step outside your comfort zone. So that was my initial kind of coaching growth over comfort message, which is quite general, but it has nicely fit with everything I’ve done. And my podcast, as I said, is called Reimagining Success. My books are called leaving the corporate 9 to 5 outside of the 9 to 5. And if I were to ask myself these questions, what would I fight for? What would I stand up for? Obviously, I can answer the podcast and the book questions. I haven’t got a TED Talk yet, haven’t pursued that yet. But what? Watch this space.

Perhaps then the clarification, the distinction I’ve seen is I would not be the one. And perhaps I’m being a bit, what’s the word? Cowardly about this, but I would say this is true. I wouldn’t argue that you should quit your job, quit your nine to five, escape your job, and so on in the sense of, yes, you should quit your job and be a business owner, an entrepreneur. That’s never my message. There are others who would say that, absolutely. Screw the cubicle, screw the nine to five. I’m unemployable. All this stuff, perhaps because I’m too scared.

I’m a bit more vanilla about it, but I’m just very nuanced. It’s not the right decision for everybody to quit their job. Quitting your job is not always the answer. Depends on family, circumstances, etc, etc. What I am passionate about, what I would defend to my grave, is this idea of asking yourself, what does success mean for you? What. What’s important to you? What are your values? What’s your purpose? What are you prioritising Right. Now, if freedom, flexibility, fulfilment, being with your family and so on are important values, then yes, you either need to design and build that business that works around your life or you need to find a very understanding employer with very flexible policies and all sorts of things. Right.

If you want both the financial freedom and security and the, the flexibility, then I do believe that working for yourself obviously is the best, certainly one of the best versions. Now within that there are lots of versions of working for yourself. You can do fractional work, freelancing, contracting, you can have a startup. But that’s not quite where I tend to focus more in the independent expert coaching, consulting, training kind of world, because that’s where you don’t need to invest lots, you don’t need massive teams and so on. It’s a kind of lifestyle business. But enough about me, but I hope you can see in that example that the nuance is that, oh gosh, it’s not about quitting your job, it is about redefining success. Now what that allows me, of course, is to speak to individuals who are unhappy in their jobs, who are unhappy in their business, who are pivoting in their business, who are retiring perhaps, or they’re becoming empty nesters or they have been made redundant or, or their lifestyle, you know, their personal situation has changed in some way. There’s all sorts of moments for individuals when redefining success is really valuable and powerful.

I can also work with redefining success in organisations with teams, with leaders thinking about redefining what specifically productivity looks like, what the 9 to 5 looks like and going beyond the 9 to 5 and so on. So it’s very, very coherent. And as much as I continually tweak and update, as I said, bios and all that kind of superficial stuff, the core message has stayed consistent. And I think that is probably going to be the case for you as well. Even when you are completely up in your head and you’re overthinking everything. Right? So that’s where it’s valuable to have a sounding board, to talk to other people. Sometimes when I have a moment of doubt, I have people and I have a couple of trusted advisors in particular, just friends really, who say, oh my gosh, your message is so consistent. When I, when I get all, oh my gosh, it’s so confusing and I don’t know if it’s, it’s like, yeah, but this is what I’m getting and it’s spot on.

I had a call the other day with a possible client, corporate client, and it was just exactly from start to finish, the kind of things I want to be working on, the kind of work I can do. And so something is clearly very coherent, cohesive and landing and fitting harmoniously. Right? So you can feel like, oh, it doesn’t make sense, but actually sometimes, Ka ching, it all clicks into space, into place. So it is really important to have a clear message, but one that’s authentic to you as well, that really reflects what you believe in, what you stand for, what your values are, your mission. And there’s so much to unpack there. Right. I could mention again, the workshop that’s coming up. In fact, it starts today, if you’re listening to this live.

So, 10th, 11th, 12th, February, 12:00 UK time. If you go to onestepoutside.com/yourpersonalbrand, you’ll be able to sign up and join us live. Even if you can’t join live, you’ll get the recordings and I’ll set it up to watch On Demand afterwards. But we’ll be looking at why it is so important to have a personal brand. Thinking about why you want and need a personal brand to grow your business, really crafting your message, the things we’re talking about today in terms of what do you want to be known for, how can you get that clarity, breaking down your message into content pillars and so on, and then finally, and most importantly, because that’s the theme of the workshop series, how can you translate this into a simple and sustainable system working process that is going to help you reach the people you want to reach in an enjoyable way that doesn’t lead to overwhelm and burnout. So again, that’s one step outside dot com, your personal brand. But thinking about this clarity, you know, if you’re not there, if you’re thinking, oh, my goodness, there’s so many things, why don’t you try something like, like journaling? You can literally just do free writing. Put a timer on 1 minute, 3 minutes, and write all the things that you believe.

And so, and what I stand for and what I think my work is about, and then see what patterns emerge. If you’re more of a visual person than a writer or a combination of the two, really try mind mapping. And I’ve done this often with clients in the past. You just put sort of put your name in the middle and then start doing bubbles and lines coming out, you know, and it’s about this, it’s about this, you know, it’s the 9 to 5, it’s about productivity, it’s about leaders and empathy and it’s about work, life balance and you know, and you begin to see patterns. If you can’t see it, first of all, put it away, put it down for a few hours, for a few days, come back to it. Secondly, show it to someone else and see if somebody can find those patterns. If you do get stuck, do get in touch, we can have a quick conversation about it. If you go to one step outside.com call or you just ping me on, on social, Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever connected, we have that quick review and you can walk me through the ideas that you have, you can share it on video and we can see if we can’t.

And I’m sure we can find a red thread. Again, this is powerful and important. Whether you’re just starting out, whether you’re advanced, whether you’re pivoting, things change. Especially if you feel like you’re sort of coming up against a brick wall and maybe one little tweak of your message that could start resonating better, given the changes that are happening, you know, in society, in the world and politics and your CL mind and business and so on, Right? So having that message that feels authentic to you but also resonates with what’s going on in the world, what people are feeling and hearing and needing is really, really important. Once you have that umbrella message, and even if you have multiple sort of portfolio businesses or services and things underneath, you want that umbrella message to sit above it all to make sense. Let’s imagine you had a personal brand website. Mine’s AnnaSELundberg.com. What are the things that I’d be talking about there? I talk about it’s time to redefine success and then I can go into my personal coaching, business mentoring, organisational leadership development, et cetera. But it all sits under that umbrella.

So really thinking about that, and if it doesn’t, by the way, it is something to think about, because if your messages are so different, that creates double, triple work for you because you might be having to use different platforms, different content, you know, doubling, tripling up everything you’re doing. So I wouldn’t advise that you do that necessarily, unless you have lots of team members and people supporting you. And so again, I’m looking forward to seeing you in the workshop, hopefully today or this week. If you can’t join Again, sign up One Step Outside.com, your personal brand, and you’ll get the recordings and then let me know your specific challenges. That’s, of course the advantage if you join live and you can ask me questions and work through the exercises together. But if not, do just let me know as you go if you get stuck on anything. So looking forward to seeing you there. And we’ll have another episode on your personal brand next week as well.

And a reminder that we’re opening doors to the accelerator. So if you do want to work with me, this is my main business mentoring programme. We’re a small group at the moment looking to grow, but still keeping it small enough to really have the implementation support, the tailored feedback and accountability. We’d love to talk to you if you think it could be something that would help you at this stage of your business. So get in touch with me, you can email podcastonestepasci.com and I can share the details of that. So really looking forward to yeah, seeing you on the workshop, maybe seeing in the accelerator at some point in the year. And I will be back next week with another episode on building your personal brand without burning out, which sounds pretty good to me. I’ll see you then.

Bye for now.

All right, so if any of this resonates and you’re ready to build a business that truly works for you without the overwhelm, without the hustle, all that constant second guessing, then I’d love for you to join us in the Business Accelerator brings together a small group of like minded experts, coaches, consultants, solopreneurs who want that personalised support, clear action steps and above all, real accountability. If you want to get in early, then head on over to onestepoutside.com/accelerate to register your interest or join the waiting list. Let’s create the business and the life that you have always wanted. Can’t wait to see you inside.

WORK WITH ANNA

Let us help you design a business and a life that gives you freedom from the 9 to 5. There are several options for how you can work with us. Choose the programme that’s right for you.

The Outsiders Business Incubator

A year-long business incubator for experienced corporate professionals who want to translate their skills and passions into a profitable and fulfilling business. onestepoutside.com/9to5

The Outsiders Business Accelerator

An ongoing mastermind for service-based business owners, freelancers and online entrepreneurs who are ready to achieve success on their own terms. onestepoutside.com/accelerate

The Outsiders Business Academy

A self-paced course for you to work through in your own time, to learn – and implement – the foundations of building a profitable business that lets you escape the 9 to 5. onestepoutside.com/course

1:1 Coaching & Mentoring

If you’re looking for one-to-one support to help you achieve your specific life and business goals, Anna has a limited number of spots for individual coaching and mentoring. onestepoutside.com/coaching