Article Overview
In this week's Leadership Refresher, executive coach and guest velocity guru Cherie Healey offers her sage advice on how to grow your personal branding and achieve happiness with three essential actions.
1. Build Your Own Branding
Everyone understands why businesses need a solid brand — it distinguishes the company and conveys its essence. But brands are not just for big companies. The people who take the time to build their personal brand stand out in a crowd of talent. What really differentiates you is not your title, your credentials or your resume, it’s the experience of YOU.
If you are consistent in the way you deliver that experience, you build equity, and as you build equity, everyone is going to want to work with you and connect with the YOU brand.
Like any big brand, consciously decide:
What you do for your customers:
Your boss, your employees and clients.
How you do it:
What kind of consistent experience do you give them? Be innovative. Get creative. This is how you build trust and big relationships.
Why you do it:
What drives you? What do you stand for? This is critical and what will make people follow you, talk about you and repeatedly “buy” you.
Distill this all into 1-3 lines that capture YOU. Like a powerful tagline or an elevator pitch, own the way you communicate your value.
Next steps:
- Forget the resume for a minute.
- Build a compelling deck for yourself that captures What You Do, How You Do It and Why You Do It. With big attention to the Why, tell your story. Think Apple. Steve Jobs had a way of communicating to people’s souls. Create an emotional connection. When people can feel your passion and connect to the real you, they will choose YOU.
2. Get in Alignment
When you feel “off”, “overwhelmed” and “not yourself,” you are out of alignment. Many will just call it stress, and will attempt to power through and ignore what’s going on within — all of which will simply deplete you and make your greatest work impossible.
A better strategy is to learn how to stay in alignment so you can tap into your highest potential and stay turned on for good. There are several principles of alignment that will bring out the powerful leader in all of us. For this week, let’s focus on the first one:
Feel good in your skin.
If you want to get ahead, advance your career and have a bigger impact, it all starts with the body. If you’ve got low energy, will your personal branding truly stand out? If you put your workouts, great food and sleep on the back burner, how will you do your best work?
Think about any great leader, they’ve got x factor — that magnetism, that energy that just makes us want to follow them. You can’t fake that. It can only come through when you feel good in your skin.
Next steps:
- Block time to get sweaty every day. Don't say you don't have time.
- Moving your body will allow you to process stress and what overwhelms you — obstacles you do not have time for. When was the last time you had a big idea? Sitting at your desk? Doubt it.
3. Choose to Partner
Being in business can bring out the worst in us — or the best. It’s a choice. Hierarchy, competition, pressure, poor communication, deadlines, lack of financing or budget and more can all create a feeling of scarcity, adversary and fight or flight. No one gets ahead in fight or flight; most of us operate as our worst selves when we operate from a sense of scarcity or high adversity. The blame game, politicking, punitive management, paralysis, and backlashing are symptoms you may recognize.
True leaders get wildly creative in the face of challenges. They commit to genuinely partnering with their teams every day and to find ways through adversity — rather than devolve to fight or flight and operate overpowered by their own reactions. A master of partnership sees anyone as an equal and aligns on a shared outcome that makes everyone a winner.
That mastery gets recognized as nothing short of a genius. You have it in you. We all do. But it takes making the choice to rise above the reaction, operate from authentic power and choose to partner.
Next steps:
- Make the choice to bring your best.
- Declare that you are done with the hassles and inefficiencies of duking it out with your team.
- Start being sincere and generous with appreciation. Ask people how they’d like to be appreciated for their contributions.
Now go blow their minds AND grow your branding.
—Cherie Healey, velocity guru for WorkBoard, Game Changer and Leadership Coach
Help your teams and leaders
Great leadership is not an abstract skill set. It shows up in how consistently people experience you, how aligned you are with yourself, and how you choose to show up with others when things get hard. Personal branding, alignment, and partnership are not separate ideas. Together, they determine whether people trust you, want to work with you, and do their best work alongside you. When you are clear on who you are, take care of your energy, and choose partnership over reaction, your impact compounds quickly.
Leaders who are intentional about clarity, alignment, and partnership create teams that move faster and with less friction. When priorities are visible, commitments are shared, and progress is reflected honestly, people operate from purpose instead of pressure. That is how strong individual leadership scales into strong organizational execution — not through force, but through consistency, trust, and shared focus on what truly matters.
If you’re looking for more clarity and honesty with your team on what the goals and priorities are and the status of important work, try WorkBoardAI. It makes it easier for high velocity teams and leaders to work smarter, not harder.
