Me, My Brand and WHY: Infuse WHO You Are Into What's Most Important

By Marianna Lead and Maureen Miller

Do you want
• to ensure the decisions you make are based on your passions and what’s really important to you?
• to attract like-minded people as friends, business associates, and clients?
• to truly be happy and fulfilled? We determined our own Why’s and repeatedly proved its power through coaching numerous clients.

We hope that this book will enable you to connect with Who you really are, Why you do what you do, and What really matters to you – to create a happy and fulfilled life.

“Marianna Lead and Maureen Miller’s new book is a masterful exploration into self-awareness and a journey of discovery that guides you to a powerful destination — your personal brand.”
—John M. Ward Jr., PCC, Leadership & Life Transitions Coach

“The internal driver exercise [Fuels] outlined in this book was one of the single most meaningful exercises I’ve done in my professional career; providing a baseline for coaching myself and the members of my team!”
—Malissa Mauricio, Regional Vice President, Capital One

“Me, My Brand and WHY is a powerful guide for discovering and utilizing your Personal Brand to achieve the kind of meaningful success that only comes with true self-awareness. It made a real impact on me and my clients.”
—Steven Hollerup, PCC, Head of International Coaching Development for Oxford Global Resources

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781458392534

Book preview

ME, MY BRAND AND WHY

Infuse WHO You Are Into

What’s Most Important

Marianna Lead, MCC

and

Maureen Miller, B.Ed., MCC

Copyright © 2022 Marianna Lead, MCC and Maureen Miller, B.Ed., MCC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or

transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or

electronic—without written permission of the author, except in the case

of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized

reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

Cover design by Marianna Lead

Illustration by Michelle Miller

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author

and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of

the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of

people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

ISBN: 978-1-4583-9254-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4583-9253-4 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or

links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may

no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those

of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher,

and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 04/21/2022

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We’d like to thank Simon Sinek, who inspired millions of people to find their WHY and inspired us to write this book. We’d also like to thank everyone who supported us on our journey, especially those who volunteered to be case studies in our book.

Our special thanks to Peter Einstein for his invaluable insights and feedback which made our book even better.

Marianna would like to thank her daughter, Allexis Tuccio, for her support and for adding her millennial touch to this book. Additionally, Marianna dedicates her work in this book to the loving memory of her fur-baby Prynce.

Maureen thanks her husband Norman for keeping his peace during all the hours we worked on the book, as well as all the thoughtful advice he gave her.

INTRODUCTION

Eric, a 42-year-old manager in the construction industry, was very unhappy with his job and was hoping to find a new career that would suit his values, talents, and personality. He was looking for something that would make his job more fulfilling personally, and not just professionally.

After speaking with him, we suggested he try a new Personal Branding technique we’ve been developing. Eric was not only willing to give it a shot, he looked forward to be a guinea pig if it meant jumpstarting his career and his life in an exciting new direction.

Three months later he had developed a Personal Branding message he felt strongly connected to and posted it on his LinkedIn profile. Then we all waited to see what would happen.

Within a week, we received an excited call from Eric. I’ve got two job interviews! They contacted me out of the blue. He asked the recruiters what led them to contact him. Both said they were attracted by the message he posted on his LinkedIn profile. Two days later, he landed a job with the company of his choice.

Once on the job, he asked his new boss what it was about his resume that sealed the deal for him. The response was surprising, Um, I’m embarrassed to admit I didn’t look at your resume at all. I was so impressed with that statement of yours on LinkedIn, I knew you were the right person for the job. You have many of the qualities we aspire to in our company.

5 years later, Eric is still with the same company and is thriving.

In that time, we’ve refined, analyzed, tested, and improved our technique — so we can share it with you. But before we go any further, let’s rewind to the beginning of our story.

While browsing through TED Talk videos, we came across Simon Sinek’s presentation based on his best-selling book Start with WHY ¹. He made the incredibly insightful observation that people don’t buy WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it. This concept was our starting point to a 4-year-long collaboration that is now this book.

For the longest time, we were both rebelling against the prescription that in order to get more clients we MUST determine our niche — the narrower, the better. However, we found Sinek’s concept introduced in his TED Talk ² (focusing on your WHY instead of your WHAT) provided a whole other way to succeed while going against almost every marketing expert’s recommendation for coaches and service providers in general.

That’s when we decided to roll up our sleeves and write our book. One problem — we both got stuck. The process of getting to WHY seemed to be the missing link. We realized that defining a unique WHY was the most challenging thing with which people needed guidance. We had to identify the common threads that showed up as we worked with different clients to define a process that anyone could follow. We also discovered that even though a unique WHY was a prominent part of one’s Personal Brand, there were other integral parts that were necessary to make your Personal Brand successful and fulfilling.

After having invested years figuring out the importance of WHY and its connection to creating a strong Personal Brand — by using these concepts ourselves and with our coaching clients — we are sharing with you the process of getting the idea of your Personal Brand from fuzzy and unfocussed to crystal clear.

This book gives you the keys to your Personal Branding and offers a process for utilizing all of its elements. It will help you uncover WHO you truly are, define your WHY, identify WHAT you want to do, and HOW to make it all happen. The result of this process is the full package of your Personal Brand.

Please connect with us through our websites and social media platforms to share your insights, successes and challenges as you create your Personal Brand. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Please reference the links at the end of our book.

Chapter 1

What is Personal Branding?

As we were trying to help our clients to find their WHY, we discovered that, as important as WHY is, it’s only one element of Personal Branding.

So, what exactly is Personal Branding?

Since Personal Branding is a concept, it wasn’t in the Oxford dictionary. Instead, we used Wikipedia and it’s defined this way:

"Personal branding is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands.³ While previous self-help management techniques were about self-improvement, the personal-branding concept suggests instead that success comes from self-packaging. Personal Branding also involves creating an asset by defining an individual’s body, clothing, physical appearance, digital and online presence and areas of knowledge in a way leading to a uniquely distinguishable, and ideally memorable, impression. The term is thought to have been first used and discussed in a 1997 article by Tom Peters.⁴ Personal Branding is essentially the ongoing process of establishing a prescribed image or impression in the mind of others about an individual, group or organization.⁵ Personal Branding often involves the application of one’s name to various products."⁶

This totally lined up with our thinking. It meant that self-improvement wasn’t enough. Neither was knowing who you were and what you believed. It meant that who you were, what you believed, the services you offered and how you went about offering them, were all parts of the package of your own Personal Brand. In other words, your Personal Brand is not an isolated business tactic but a powerfully influential framework that permeates all aspects of your life.

Chapter 2

Your WHY Starts with

WHO You Are

When we shifted our focus to help our clients find their WHY, we began to realize it wasn’t as easy as we had expected. We found that all our clients consistently struggled through this process.

For most clients, it was challenging to get to the truth of their WHY. No pun intended; they weren’t exactly sure why. There were exceptions. Some clients seemed to be able to identify their WHY pretty quickly.

However, the more we worked with our clients on creating their Personal Branding, the more we saw the importance of knowing WHO they were before addressing their WHY.

Even those who arrived to their WHY quickly enough still had to go back to discover WHO they were, because they realized there were places in their lives where their WHY was ineffective. It was like having a leak in the boat that had to be fixed.

One of Marianna’s case studies in this book is an excellent illustration of this. Carol was a 38-year-old college professor who came to us believing she already discovered her WHY. However, she didn’t feel very passionate about it. As we often see with our clients, one or two pieces of the puzzle were missing in order to create a powerful Personal Branding message. In Carol’s case, the missing pieces were parts of WHO she was that needed to be discovered at a deeper level.

As Marianna worked with Carol, she was able to develop her Personal Brand with a powerful WHY that gave her a sense of excitement that had been previously missing from her life: "I believe creating deep connections with people and places generate freedom, awareness, and aliveness."

Due to that discovery, as well as gaining other important insights during the process of building her Personal Brand, Carol implemented a lot of positive changes in her life and obtained happiness she was searching for. (See the entire Marianna’s Case Study: Carol in Appendix B.)

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Chapter 3

Two Elements of WHO

and New Terminology

Once we started to work with people on a deeper understanding