Everyday I speak to women and men who sell themselves and their gifts short. We’re often hardworking and talented, but for some reason we still develop a need to over complicate the path to offering and profiting from our gifts. 
We think we have to be exhaustively perfect and over prepare our gifts to justify them, but that’s not true. Instead, all we really need to do is show up and get out of our own way. 
In today’s episode, Amanda Miller Littlejohn and I will dive deeper into the topic of personal branding and visibility. We’ll cover everything from Amanda’s personal story to finding your purpose and packaging your genius.
Join us as Amanda reveals the importance of your message and how your visibility isn’t about you, but about the difference it makes to someone else.
This episode is brought to you by my free LIVE Master Class training, How to Chase Purpose: 5 Shifts to Help You Acknowledge Your God-Given Gifts, Align with Your Passion and Powerfully Answer the Call on Your Life. To REGISTER, become a  Purpose Chaser at iamaPurposeChaser.com 
About Amanda Miller Littlejohn
Amanda Miller Littlejohn is a nationally-recognized top expert in personal branding. The author of her personal branding playbook, Package Your Genius, she is an idea maven, brand problem solver and creative powerhouse working at the intersection of public relations, journalism, marketing and social media.
As a former print journalist, along with her training and passion as a writer,  Amanda uses her unique storytelling lens and reporting skills to help her clients uncover and subsequently share better brand stories.  
A highly sought-after speaker, trainer and writer, Amanda regularly speaks to groups of business owners, students and women on personal branding, public relations and social media. She regularly shares her expertise with media outlets like the Washington Post, Forbes, Huffington Post and Sirius XM.
She can be reached at http://www.amandamillerlittlejohn.com/.
A Pivot from Journalism to Entrepreneurship
Amanda and I found ourselves in a similar place during the Great Recession. We were both unemployed with newborns. I asked her to share about her experience and how it led to her pivoting from a career in journalism to starting her own business.
She’d been thinking about transitioning from the journalism space into something else and at the time and knew writing was her gift and strength, as well as, something people needed and something that they’d pay for.
She started out with writing by approaching small public relations firms and small businesses she thought might need help with writing proposals or with client work, but that didn’t need a full-time, in-house writer.
Essentially, she cold called to the top by contacting everyone she knew to see if they needed a writer or if they knew someone who did. 
And I did the same to jumpstart my speaking career years ago.
“Your purpose found you as you were in action.” So many people think there’s a magic formula, but Amanda I agree there’s not. It takes knocking on doors, making phone calls and sending emails that get no response.
Package Your Genius
In Amanda’s book, Package Your Genius, there’s a place where she says her dad was the smartest person she’d ever met and the smartest person you’d never heard of.
That is what planted the seed for Amanda to do this work called personal branding or visibility. She didn’t think it was fair that someone who had so many gifts and talents wasn’t able to flip those gifts and talents when he needed to flip them.
In other words, he had a job and that job got plenty out of him, but when it came time for him to take the next step and leverage all he knew and had learned through decades of work, he didn’t understand how to put himself out there. 
“When you work for years to become good at something, the inability to market yourself shouldn’t be the thing between you and success.” 
Amanda found her gift in helping people like her dad who were really great at w