Personal branding is having a moment.
Scroll LinkedIn and you’ll see it everywhere: visibility, thought leadership, positioning, standing out.
For some people it feels energising. For others, uncomfortable. And for many experienced business leaders, it feels faintly disconnected from the reality of how they’ve actually built their careers and companies.
I understand the scepticism because for a long time, I didn’t think personal branding was relevant to me either.
I had credibility. A track record. Senior roles. Work that spoke for itself. People who mattered knew what I could do. That felt sufficient.
Until I reached a point where my experience was no longer being fully understood, even when it was respected.
Personal branding isn’t just about self-promotion.
At its simplest, it’s about how people make sense of you.
It’s shaped by:
And whether we like it or not, your personal brand already exists.
That’s why I often say: you already have a personal brand, the only question is whether it’s accidental or intentional.
Most people operate with an accidental personal brand.
Not because they lack experience, because so much of what shapes them never makes it into language.
This includes:
I see this constantly in the people we work with.
Highly capable individuals who have:
Yet they’re still described as:
All true. Yet still not the full picture.
I recognise this because I lived it myself.
You already have a personal brand, the only question is whether it’s accidental or intentional.
For me, it didn’t happen in a neat career transition. It happened alongside motherhood. Alongside advocating for one of my daughters through her own challenges. Alongside juggling leadership, responsibility, real life and then trying to make sense of what all of that had taught me.
Those experiences fundamentally shaped how I lead. For a long time, they sat outside my professional narrative.
Without language, they stayed invisible.
When your personal brand is accidental:
Intentional personal branding isn’t about becoming louder. It’s about becoming clearer.
When it’s intentional:
This is where lived experience really matters.
You can’t fake it.
You can’t template it convincingly.
And you can’t build trust without substance underneath.
There’s a reason this conversation has accelerated.
Work has changed:
At the same time, trust is increasingly placed in people, not institutions.
Research consistently shows that when uncertainty is high, people rely more on individual experts and peers than on brands alone. In professional services especially, credibility and trust in the person behind the work are often decisive factors in buying decisions.
This doesn’t mean personal branding replaces organisational brand.
It means people carry trust.
When experience isn’t clearly articulated:
Intentional personal branding reduces that friction: not by overselling, but by making sense visible.
There is a framework we use to help people move from accidental to intentional personal branding.
At a high level, it focuses on:
The order matters.
Most people try to work on visibility before they’ve done the deeper sense-making. That’s usually when personal branding starts to feel awkward or inauthentic.
We rarely lead with the framework itself because the framework isn’t the work.
It’s simply a structure that helps people slow down enough to recognise what’s already there.
This work doesn’t start with content or profiles.
It starts with creating enough space to think, something many experienced people rarely have.
A few grounded ways to begin:
For many people, clarity isn’t the problem - time is.
Working with a coach can help you:
Clarity coaching isn’t about inventing anything new.
It’s about naming what’s already there, efficiently and honestly.
Not everyone wants or needs 1:1 support straight away.
Self-managed learning platforms, such as Brand Builders, can be a practical way to:
The key is choosing spaces that prioritise depth over noise.
Many people know who they are and what they stand for.
What they don’t have is the time, or headspace, to translate that into consistent LinkedIn posts or thought leadership.
In those cases, ghost-writing or content support can be invaluable:
Used well, this isn’t outsourcing your identity, it’s protecting your energy.
A simple starting point is to notice:
Your personal brand often lives in these patterns before it ever appears online.
There’s a fine balance between reflection and inertia.
You don’t need the perfect articulation before you say anything.
Sometimes the most helpful thing is to:
Intentional branding isn’t about performance.
It’s about allowing people to see you thinking, in a way that feels human.
Personal branding isn’t about attention.
It’s about being understood.
When your experience, professional and personal, is articulated with clarity:
That’s why so many people are talking about personal branding right now.
Not because they want to be seen more, but because they want their experience, judgement, and perspective to be seen more accurately – for personal and business benefits.