How Do You Want to BE SEEN: A personal brand playbook

By Songy Knox

The ultimate branding playbook for professional women, packed with practical wisdom and hard-earned insights.

You’re the face of your brand.
You’ve worked too hard to be invisible.
You deserve to BE SEEN.

SEEN is the groundbreaking framework that gives you the mindset and methodology to be seen for the expert that you are.

Brand expert and photographer Songy Knox has developed a very successful, tried and tested, playbook for female professionals and SME business owners looking to achieve higher visibility and growth. Through deeply personal stories, case studies and exercises, How Do You Want to BE SEEN helps to quiet your inner critic, define your brand on every level, find your people, and gain a renewed sense of style and confidence. This book is your one-stop-shop for building a personal brand and overcoming roadblocks to professional growth and success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Songy Knox
• Release date: Jun 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9780645046717

Songy Knox

SONGY KNOX is a photographer and Personal Brand Building coach based in Perth, Western Australia.She works with individual clients and SMEs at the intersection of higher education, technology andentrepreneurship, sharing her signature SEEN Framework through coaching, public speaking, webinars and courses.Her superpower is giving women a sustainable and compelling process to build their brand and grow their business, whether they’re shy, introverted professionals or gregarious, outgoing entrepreneurs.You can read more at www.songyknox.com.au

Book preview

Contents

Introduction

Studio day with Songy

PART I SELF-DISCOVERY

1. Brand you

A side hustle becomes a brand

Her story: Jules

Invitation to Play: Find a brand that resonates

2. Your possibilities

Young Songy aims high

The ‘fear of succeeding’ block

Her story: Lauren

Invitation to Play: Ask yourself questions

3. Your past

Corporate Songy breaks down

Silver linings playbook

Her story: Lezly

Invitation to Play: Write yourself a letter

4. Your enough-ness

Brand Songy gets unstuck

The ‘fear of judgement’ block

Her story: Donna

Invitation to Play: Rewrite your internal narrative

PART II EMBRACE YOUR AUDIENCE

5. Your work

A drop of ink

Brand Songy rises up

The ‘not my passion’ block

Her story: Kat

Invitation to Play: IOI process

6. Your niche

Brand Songy finds her niche

The ‘fear of specialising’ block

Her story: Raquel

Invitation to Play: Assert and test

7. Your ideal client

The ‘my audience is everyone’ block

Identifying your people

Her story: Ally

Invitation to Play: Persona mapping

8. Your hello

Your package trip

The ‘I’m bad at introducing myself’ block

Her story: Louise

Invitation to Play: Try on some intros

PART III ENHANCE YOUR BRAND IMAGE

9. Your style

The ‘I’m not stylish’ block

Her story: Sarah

Invitation to Play: One outfit at a time

10. Your colours

The ‘only look good in black’ block

Her story: Kate

Invitation to Play: Find your colours

11. Photogenic YOU

The ‘I’m not photogenic’ block

Her story: Anne-Claude

Invitation to Play: Selfie challenge

PART IV NEW YOU

12. Your ideas

The ‘nobody is interested’ block

Her story: Sandra

Invitation to Play: Gain domain knowledge

13. Your assets

Growing a social media presence

The ‘fancy-pants website’ block

Her story: Caro

Invitation to Play: Learn the ropes

14. Just the beginning

Brand building in a time of disruption

Invitation to play: Your unique keywords

List of Invitations to Play

Acknowledgments

Recommended reading

About the author

Let's connect

To my partner in crime, Stuart

and to all those who want to be seen.

.You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

—Jane Goodall

i found god in myself

and i loved her

i loved her fiercely

—Ntozake Shange

Introduction

The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some it’s a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk.

—Susan Cain

It’s a crisp winter evening and I’m standing on stage in the function room of the Crown Hotel overlooking the Swan River in my hometown of Perth, in Western Australia. Facing me is a small crowd of professional speakers, a mix of both men and women. Any moment they’re expecting a domain knowledge expert in personal branding photography (that would be me) to share specifically how they can prepare for a session.

As I observe the audience of professional speakers, I reflect on the many times people have told me they don’t feel fully represented by their publicity photographs. This is why my theme today is ‘How do you want to be seen?’

The question has many layers to it, because it’s not just talking about the surface appearance. After giving this talk, I hear back from some in my audience that they’d never deeply asked themselves this question.

This book is about asking how you want to be seen. It’s about finding out why you’ve been holding yourself back from becoming more visible even when you know that being more visible will help you find your ideal audience.

This book is for you especially if you had a long-held belief that your work would speak for itself but, in fact, it hasn’t.

Maybe you’re a professional woman trying to launch a brand or an online course, or maybe you’re trying to rebrand your existing business. Or perhaps you’re currently working for someone else but, like many of my clients, you need to rebrand yourself in order to gain a promotion and better distinguish yourself in a crowded space. This book aims to help you shed old beliefs so that you can become the face of your personal brand, with integrity.

Studio day with Songy

I wrote this for women wanting to make a difference in the world but also struggling to become visible in the marketplace.

This book is like spending a day with me in my studio, where together we work on defining your brand on every level, long before anybody points a camera at your face.

Most people want a quick-fix solution to their personal branding problems and how they present on screen and in photographs. And there are indeed many things we can do together to prepare for a photoshoot that will help you to look and feel more photogenic.

While many photographers are technically brilliant, often they don't provide clients with any pre-shoot guidance to help them emotionally prepare for the experience, thus the experience ends up being less than satisfying for the client. That is one of the reasons I wrote this book.

The secret behind your emotional preparation is that once we’ve done some deep work together, your entire expression and body language changes because our work together has revealed one transformative truth: It’s not really about you. Once my clients realise it's about others, namely the people they're serving, there's an almost miraculous shift in mindset.

I’m throwing open the doors and sharing a never-before-seen inside look at the kinds of conversations my clients and I have, the kinds of questions they answer, and the kind of coaching I do to help them integrate all the unique variables of their brand persona, target audience, offerings, and message.

Holistic brand coaching

I’ve worked with hundreds of clients over half a decade since leaving the corporate world and launching my Songy Knox brand. Besides that evening in the Crown Hotel, I’ve spoken to audiences across university campuses, women in tech panels, and Amazon Web Services CloudU programs. Over 2000 professionals have downloaded my personal brand workbook and many have requested 1:1 coaching in my signature Brand Building methods.

This book will be a bit like having a personal, deep-dive coaching session with me. As a bonus, I’m also able to share some personal stories with you—cathartic life experiences that I usually don’t have time to share in my coaching practice. You’ll get a glimpse of real stories, challenges and insights from my childhood and student years (Young Songy), from my professional years (Corporate Songy) as well as my most recent years running a small business (Brand Songy).

It was a long journey to get to this stage. I’ve invested nearly twenty years in print and digital media, marketing, business processes, application design, project management and, of course, photography. After putting nearly fifteen years into corporate and government roles, all my experience coalesced in a body of work that today involves personal brand coaching through workbooks, workshops, lectures and one-on-one sessions.

I wrote this book so that I could share the process that I went through. Although I call it a process now it was not at all a neat step by step process for me because there was nothing out there to help me in one fell swoop—or in one book rather.

There are lots of fabulous, world-renowned authors but none that I know of have tackled these exact issues of personal branding for professional women.

This is the book I wish someone had written for me.

SEEN overview

The parts of this book are laid out in the same order that I usually work through with my 1:1 clients using a framework I developed called SEEN:

Self-discovery

Embrace your audience

Enhance your brand image

New you

Here’s where we’re going:

Part 1 belongs to Self-discovery as we work on the inner self before we polish the outer self. We cover ground on becoming aware of ‘brand you’, embracing your possibilities, healing your past and accepting your enough-ness. In this part we also address possible ‘fear of succeeding’ and ‘fear of judgement’ blocks.

Part 2 covers Embrace your audience as we place a laser focus on finding your work, picking a niche, identifying your ideal client and introducing yourself, all based on your personality traits as well as your strengths. We also explore typical blocks in these areas like ‘not my passion’, ‘fear of specialising’, ‘my audience is everyone’ and ‘I’m bad at introducing myself’.

Part 3 belongs to Enhance your brand image and this is where we cover styling ‘up’, experimenting with colour and discovering your ‘photogenic’. You’ll learn a reassuring secret I discovered from taking more than half a million photos of fashion models. In this part we also cover typical blocks like ‘I’m not stylish’, ‘I only look good in black’ and ‘I’m not photogenic’.

Part 4 is about celebrating the New you. After you’ve done that deep inner work and gained a new level of con­fidence, you’re ready to build your assets, share your ideas and truly be seen. We learn that your brand is about what others say about you and that this can only happen by showing up with your message and continually talking about what you stand for. Your branding is also about your assets, specifically what you use to represent your brand. These include photos, a website, and your social media presence. In this final part we zero in on possible ‘fancy-pants website’ blocks and ‘nobody is interested’ blocks.

Each chapter shares a personal story drawn from my own experiences, highlights a true story drawn from my client vault and offers you an ‘Invitation to Play’ so that you can begin taking immediate action. For your convenience, these Invitation to Play action items can also be downloaded at <https://www.songyknox.com.au/beseen>.[1]

When my clients work with me, they see their brand clarified as part of our strategy sessions. Video conferencing tools such as Zoom allow me to help local clients as well as national and international entrepreneurs. To date I’ve worked with individuals and groups throughout Australia as well as New Zealand, South East Asia, the UK, the USA and Canada.

And now, through this book, I’m with you wherever you are.

You might have earned double degrees but still need help to crack your personal brand challenges. However, once you learn these things, there will be no stopping you. I’ve seen clients change jobs, get promoted and rapidly grow their businesses—more energised than ever.

That’s why I can tell you with confidence: Brand building is learnable, transformation is possible, and you can learn to love being seen.

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[1] There are many resources and other goodies mentioned throughout the book, and along with the Invitations to Play, you can find the most current list in one handy spot at < https://www.songyknox.com.au/beseen > .

PART I

SELF-DISCOVERY

Working on the inner before we work on the outer

1. Brand you

Any proper noun is a brand. You are a brand. (And if you want to be truly successful in life, you should consider yourself a brand and act accordingly.)

—Al and Laura Ries

I’ve found that some people feel uncomfortable with the concept of embodying a brand in themselves. There’s some resistance. And because there’s resistance, there’s also denial about what kind of efforts are needed to become more visible to those we seek to serve—our ideal target audiences.

I can understand that resistance, because I’ve been there.

A side hustle becomes a brand

After graduating university, I spent fifteen years in corporate and government roles as a hotshot project/account manager, business analyst, UX analyst and all around effective trou­bleshooter. Let’s call the Songy of that era Corporate Songy.

Seven years in, Corporate Songy was working as a project manager at a prestigious university in the city where I live right now. It was a tenured position which, way back then, meant job security (for real), flexible hours, fantastic benefits, professional development opportunities and great superannuation.

Why am I telling you all this? Just to make you jealous? Nah. You know where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Corporate Songy was bored out of her mind.

I was bored with the speed at which things were progressing. I have always been a ‘getting things done’ kind of chick. Not the kind to cruise and coast doing barely what’s needed. I wanted to see the results. I wanted to complete things, deliver something useful and see the fruits of my labour.

I worked efficiently and I expected things to turn out that way in return, in a speedy fashion. Of course, they didn’t. Everything moved so slowly.

When I prepared a strategy paper, what I got from my direct manager were spelling corrections rather than any feedback on actual strategy.

When I took the initiative to do something, I was bogged down by minutiae which was the cultural norm. That meant I had to practice being patient. I’m not talking about a few months of being patient. Here we are talking years of patience which I simply didn’t have at the time. I don’t even have it now, to be honest with you. I’m generalising here, but universities move very slowly as I was finding out at the time.

Because I was so bored at work, I picked up blogging, started using my Nikon D50 seriously and began writing more regularly.

I begged the PR company that looked after public rela­tions for the local fashion festival to add me to their list of media. While the concept of