Transcript

Gayle Johnson

I first started thinking about my personal brand when I was working at the university in York, so it was a large organisation. I felt as though there were lots of competing demands on my time. There were lots of strategic changes and lots of different change programmes happening. And as a middle manager, I felt like I had lots of pressures from all around, really. And it made me start to think, where do I fit in all of this, because in such a large organisation, you can't control everything. But what you can control is what you stand for.

So I started to be a lot more conscious and a lot more deliberate about how I was showing up at work. And I wanted to do that in a way that felt honest and true to me. So it wasn't as though I was sort of putting on a mask. In fact, that's the opposite of what I wanted to do. What I wanted to get back to was what I really stood for and bring more of that out at work.

So I did. I started to think about what was important to me, what values were important to me, and what that meant for how I worked with people or how I could influence priorities myself. And through that work, I found I got a lot more confidence in myself because I was being myself a lot more. I wasn't trying to please everybody or be the person that I thought I should be because of a particular job title. I was being myself. That gave me a lot of strength and a lot of confidence.

It also meant, I think, that I was more effective because I wasn't wasting all this energy on wearing a mask or any of those sorts of things. I was doing the work. And it also meant that my relationships with particular people at work really strengthened. And I think that's really powerful. For me, having a network of people you really trust and who really click with you is a really powerful way to go through work. And as I say, the most important part of it was that I sort of developed this newfound strength and trust in myself.

That was the first step, I suppose, I took to put towards personal branding. And secondly, through doing all of that sort of work, I realised there wasn't much more I could do with that job. That wasn't going to fulfil me much more than it already did. Doing the personal branding work meant I got a lot more out of my job satisfaction, but there was a limit to it.

So I decided to leave and take a bit of a risk and set up a business on my own. And that's where I really started to be very deliberate about my personal branding because of the work I do now is as a copywriter and a writing mentor. And I'm by far- you know, there are many, many, many of us. There are thousands of us. And I firmly believe that in order to get work, people have to trust you, that people buy people. So I was very deliberate about being myself, about what I wanted to portray to the world and how I wanted to show up. I wanted to let people into my world a little bit.

And that's really worked because I'm now three years into that business, and I only work with people who I really have a connection with. And that means they really value what I do. So we're all happy. I enjoy the work, they enjoy working with me, and we get a good result. So it's really made a difference to me being much more conscious about my brand.