28. YES to authenticity, NO to personal branding

The promise of "personal branding" has become gospel in online business circles. Build your brand, they say. Package yourself for maximum market appeal. But what if this entire approach is not just wrong, but actively harmful to both your business and your humanity?

Listen to explore:

• Why personal brands are a less reliable business strategy than you've been told
• The crucial difference between strategic "authenticity" and genuine human expression — and why only one builds sustainable business success
• The case for coherence over "branding"
• A simple but powerful question to ask before sharing anything that will transform how you show up online

Discover why the most sustainable and effective business strategy isn't about crafting the perfect brand image, but about having the courage to be genuinely, inconveniently, beautifully human.

Transcript

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Welcome back to Liberatory Business. I'm Simone Seol, your host, and today we're diving into something that's been on my mind a lot lately and something that I think is fundamentally broken about how people often talk about marketing and showing up online. So you probably heard the advice a million times. If you wanna succeed in online business, you need to build a personal brand. If you're on LinkedIn, you need to build a personal brand. If you're on TikTok, you need to build a personal brand. If you're on Instagram, you need to build a personal brand. Well. Today. I wanna challenge that because I get people getting confused about this a lot'cause especially'cause I talk about the importance of leading with authenticity, being yourself in marketing, right? When I talk about the importance of being yourself, people often think I'm talking about personal branding and I'm not. When I talk about. The importance of authenticity in your marketing. People think I'm talking about personal branding and I am not. I really am not. And in fact, I say, fuck personal branding. A quote unquote personal brand is about packaging yourself in a way that optimizes you for consumption. It's about creating an avatar of yourself that lends itself most efficiently to market demands. It's ultimately a strategy for extraction, extracting people's attention, extracting people's approval, extracting people's money. Genuine authenticity does the opposite. When it comes to genuine authenticity, the ultimate aim is about being known. When you show up authentically, what it says is, please know me and enter into relationship with me. It's an invitation into intimacy, and because of that, it inherently does not give a single fuck about the market. It resists efficiency and palatability because no human being is made to be efficient and palatable. The thing is, there's so many lies out there. In my opinion. People, so many people will tell you that personal branding is the way to go. It's the smartest way to build a strong business, and I entirely disagree. I actually think that personal brands are quite fragile, and here's why I think that. First of all, a brand, a personal brand can fall apart at the first side of evidence of some part of your humanity leaking through. Let me give you a personal example. So I have ADHD, I've always had ADHD, and it's really big, ADHD. It is the kind that, like, you won't miss it if you meet me for 10 seconds, right? And I talk about it a lot because navigating it is a big part of my life. It's a big part of my identity. Um, and it's been that way ever since. Like p it wasn't like a thing in culture that people talked about. It's always been that way since I was a tiny little girl. And let's say I decided that ADHD was a big, is a part of my branding. You know, it's not, I, I, I, I never think in these terms, but let's say I hired a branding consultant and the branding consultant said, Hey, let's make part of your brand identity. You know, this a DHD thing, right? If I'm going with that, if I have to maintain that brand identity, then I would have to hide or downplay significant parts of myself. Because there are also parts of me that are incredibly organized and conscientious and like stable because I am all of those things too. Like, yes. And in some ways I'm like very like scatterbrained and disorganized and like I jump from thing to thing and like all of things that people stereotypically associate A DHD with, those things are very true of me. And the very opposite things are also true of me because I'm a complex human being. Right. But. Because people don't associate like being really organized and stable. Like those qualities with A DHD, if I were to show those things, they, those things would break my brand. A brand cannot contain that much complexity, but a human being can. That's why a brand is fragile. Here's another example. Let's say the same branding consultant that I. It hired hypothetically. Right. Told me that since, oh, Simone, you've been talking about supporting Palestine. You've been talking about decolonization, you know, liberatory business. Oh, your brand should definitely be like, include like being progressive, you know, being a social justice that's part of your brand. Well, okay. If that's part of my branding, then I couldn't share with you certain things about myself that seemingly oppose that. Like from time to time, I love buying bags and makeup from totally problematic luxury brands. And from time to time I support policies that, you know, people think are not progressive at all. Like sometimes I, I support policies that go against like union interest or I vote for, you know. Like robust defense spending in the country that I live in, right? Like these aren't considered like progressive social justice causes by everyone. I don't neatly fit in a political box. A brand cannot contain that complexity, but a human being can, this is why I repeat brands are fragile. And here's the third thing, right? Personal brands are fragile because they can be engineered. There's a whole industry of personal branding consultants because personal branding is something that lends itself to being engineered because it is, um, I mean, there's formulas, templates and strategies for creating a personal brand. And yes, the more sophisticated, uh, brand strategist will tell you that. Good brands should be multidimensional. You know, it shouldn't be flat and one dimensional. They'll talk about how you should be showing vulnerability alongside strength, and you should be weaving in multiple interests, multiple facets of your personality. They'll, they'll tell you that that's what makes a dynamic and compelling and resilient brand. Okay? But here's the thing, even multidimensional personal branding is still curated performative. Dimensionality. It's a calculated decision about which three or four or five carefully selected aspects of yourself to highlight how to balance them for maximum market impact and which stories to tell to highlight each dimension. The vulnerability is strategic, calculated vulnerability. The authenticity is performed the very. Fact of like that, you have to ask, how do I brand myself as multidimensional? That in itself reveals the irony, reveals the limitation. True genuine multidi multidimensionality is what you already are. The the messy, paradoxical, evolving nature of being human. Does not worry about whether like showing your obsession with reality TV undermines your thought leadership, like the, you already are all of it, right? Your genuine, the authenticity of your existing self doesn't worry whether your political views align with your target audience's expectations, like your being does not worry about those things. Because your being is already whole. It's only when you try to manipulate the audience's perceptions that those worries creep in. This engineering approach to personal branding creates an even deeper problem, right? Of practical, uh, business practicality, I think is, which is that I think that it makes branded personal branding, uh, personal branded businesses. Increasingly fragile in a marketplace that is about to be absolutely flooded if it's not already flooded with formulaic AI generated marketing content. When your brand is built on templates and strategies, and I don't care how sophisticated, how multidimensional your templates and strategies are, you are competing in the same narrow lane as every AI tool that's been trained on those same templates and strategies, which by the way, AI tools are getting more sophisticated by the day. AI can already produce sophisticated, multidimensional personal brands on demand, the calculated vulnerability, the strategic storytelling, the carefully balanced, professional, yet relatable tone. And if you think AI is still not good enough at doing that, you just wait, probably not even years. You just wait months. It can generate months of quote unquote authentic quote unquote vulnerable posts. Videos even, right? It can craft quote unquote personal email sequences. And it can even simulate the kind of like curated, you know, contradictory, paradoxical, like nuanced like content that like branding consultants teach as advanced psychological marketing technique. But here's what AI will never be able to replicate. The genuine unpredictability of an actual human. Human. What's that? Human. Human. See, that was genuine unpredictability. I didn't know I was gonna say human. The genuine unpredictability of an actual human who isn't performing the person who shares something because something is arising inside of them in the moment. Not because it fits their content strategy. The business owner whose real personality, whose genuine inner makeup creates these unexpected connections in the moment that an algorithm can't predict. The inconsistencies in their personality and the contradictions and their preferences, all the things, all the wonky weird things, inconvenient things that make humans fascinating and sometimes infuriating. All those things that AI can learn from. Ai can learn how to mimic, but cannot actually be. As AI generated content increasingly becomes, you know, almost indistinguishable from human generated branded content. I think the only real substantive differentiation is going to be actual, genuine humanity, the kind that can't be templated, strategized, branded, because. It emerges from who you actually are rather than who you've decided to appear to be. So I've talked a little bit about why I actually think that this whole business of personal branding isn't as good of a business, um, strategy that people think it is. But I don't think this is just a business problem. I also think that this. When we brand ourselves as people, I think something happens to our humanity that is also pretty dangerous because I think when you brand, when you turn yourself into a brand, I think what also happens is that you necessarily also have to fragment yourself. You take parts of yourself that are marketable, and then you amplify those parts of yourself, and then you take the other parts of yourself that are inconvenient, inefficient. Or complex, too hairy, too non-conforming. And then you hide them away. You edit them and you buff them out. And what happens when you consistently do that is that you end up really dehumanizing yourself. You dehumanize both yourself and the people who. Are trying to connect with you and you reduce yourself to a commodity, and then you reduce other people to consumers. You can't turn yourself into a brand without turning other human beings into a market to be captured. And this constant normalization of. Dehumanization of the self and others is exactly the reason. Your feed is full of tantalizing content that is maximized to capture your attention for hours and hours. But spending all that time scrolling doesn't leave you feeling full of connection and nourishment. It leaves you feeling empty and a little queasy that that is what accounts for that is. The profound dehumanization that feeds this attention machine. And I think there's something to be said about the fact that quote unquote personal branding sounds so innocuous, right? Like it doesn't sound like it's in the same league as like overtly predatory marketing that we all recognize as gross. Like it doesn't feel like something as problematic. But I still think this innocent sounding, personal branding still makes the world a less safe place for everyone because when we are all performing these curated, packaged, and branded up versions of ourselves, we're all, what we're doing is we're collectively creating a culture where being human feels like a problem to be fixed. And when we see ourselves as a problem to be fixed and we feel insecure enough about it, we feel scared enough about it. Soon enough, someone's gonna sell us a solution for it. And then round and round we go, and this consumerist dystopia. This isn't just about marketing strategy, it's about what kind of world we're creating. When we agree to participate in systems that require us to fragment ourselves and each other to make systems that are engineered for profit to perpetuate themselves, I think the business world. Has it totally fucking backwards. Personal branding does not build strong businesses. It creates weak ones. Personal brands are brittle. They shatter easily under pressure, but you know what creates strong businesses? Businesses that are based on your coherence. Here's what I mean by that. When I talk about this with people, right, like personal branding is not the answer. The feedback that I, that I often get is, you know, it's not that I try to present myself as a brand, but I just show up as myself over time and it just kind of turned into a brand. I, I get people telling me that a lot, and I think what people confuse is that when you consistently show up as yourself over time. Consistent themes tend to come up and people mistake that for a brand, but that's not branding, that's coherence. And it's really important that people don't confuse branding and coherence because branding comes from profit oriented strategy and coherence comes from your soul. Your soul from your soul emanates a coherent set of values from your, your values emanate a set of practices and commitments that evolve around those values. And from that emanates a culture of doing and being that supports those practices and commitments. And from that, you get a community that gathers around who you are being and what you are doing. So this is ongoing cultural decolonization work, my friends. We resist the same extractive logic that turns land into private property that turns a community of human beings into a market. And the same logic turns humans into brands. We divest from the belief that everything, including our very selves. Must be made into something that can be extracted from something profitable and consumable. The alternative is to be whole. Humans and whole humans by nature are inconvenient. We are. Inefficient. We are complicated and we show up in all of our inconvenient, inefficient complexity. We resist the urge to make ourselves palatable to everyone. We build relationships instead of audiences. We give pe, we give um, people an opportunity to get to know us. We invite people into intimacy instead of. Targeting people for engagement. And look, I'm not saying this is necessarily easy'cause I do acknowledge we live in a system that rewards packaging ourselves for consumption. The algorithms reward it. The entire world tells you that this is the thing to do and the whole infrastructure is set up for it. But just because something is rewarded and normalized does not make it right, and just because something goes against the grain. Doesn't, does not mean that it's worth do. It's not, does not mean that it's not worth doing. We can do better and in making different choices, we can create a, a new culture. We can create business ecosystems. We can create a different business culture that honor our full humanity and therefore create a world where. There's greater safety for humans to be human. We can build communities where there is more room for genuine relationships and not just engagement. We can build communities where there's actual intimacy and not just exchanges based on profit. I guess those are called transactions. And it starts with refusing to fragment ourselves for attention and profit. It starts with showing up as exactly who you are and here's how. How you can start before you share anything, whether it's a post or a story or an opinion or whatever, pause for a second and ask yourself this question. Does this come from something that is true and alive inside of me today, or am I trying to. Manipulate other people's perception of me. That's it. That's the practice. And, and look, if you are trying to manipulate other people's perception of me, that's not something that's necessarily evil. Like manipulate other people's perception of me can mean something like I want people to like me. I want people to think that I'm a good person. Like that's not an evil thing to think. I think that all the time. Like I want you to, like me, I want you to think that I'm smart. I want you to think that my stuff is useful. Like I, that's very normal. I think those are very normal, understandable human impulses. They don't mean anything about me except that I'm a pretty average human being, right? But when that desire to be liked and accepted and be thought of as useful, whatever becomes the main driver behind what you share, you, what happens is you start performing a version of yourself rather than truly being yourself. And the more you perform, the more you drift away from what makes you distinctive and compelling and magnetic. The irony is that the manipulated version of you, the one that you are crafting to be likable, often ends up being far less interesting and far less trustworthy than the real version of you. And believe me, people can sense the difference even if they can't always articulate what feels a little bit off. When you consistently choose the truth over trying to manage your image, something. Shifts, I promise you what you share starts carrying a different energy frequency. Your business relationships start becoming more solid, more deeply rooted because they're built on who you actually are. And if you. Have any idea what I mean when I talk about kind of low level anxiety that come, comes from constantly trying to manage and monitor whether you're staying on brand and what people think about you, that melts away too, and that is an incredible feeling. The goal isn't to be liked by everyone. That's impossible. The goal is to be genuinely known by the people. Who are truly meant to be impacted by your work and your voice. Believe me, this is so much easier, such an easier way to do work, far more sustainable. And paradoxically, it is a far more effective business strategy than anything else. So remember that's the question before you share anything. Is this, am I sharing this because it comes from a place of truth inside of me? Is this coming from a place of aliveness with, uh, from inside of me? Or am I trying to manage external circumstances? Am I trying to manipulate other people's perception? That's, that's it. Everything else flows from there. No two personal branding, yes to the human being that you are. That's all for today and I'll talk to you next time. Bye.