Personal Branding through Thought Leadership
How to stop overthinking and start creating content.
You are reading this because something has been ripening inside you for some time and these days you are feeling it more and more — you are ready to publish your thoughts online but you don’t know where to start.
Read on. I wrote this just for you.
In this article, we will be talking about the following questions:
- Why do you want to create content?
- What stops you from writing?
- What to write about?
- How to actually get the writing done?
So let’s start with the first one.
❓ WHY DO YOU WANT TO CREATE CONTENT?
This is the question that I always start with in my coaching sessions.
Why? What is the purpose?
A few things, that we should align on here.
I think you would agree with the following statement:
We find time for everything we think is important.
If you are not doing what you said is important for you, it means two things:
- It is either not important enough (i.e. there are other things that you choose to prioritize)
- OR It is important enough, but you have a mental block that stops you from taking action
If the first one is the case, there is no coach that would help you. Come back when this becomes a priority.
However, if the 2nd one is the case, this is something we can work with 😊
Let’s start with the core motivators behind content creation.
Why do people decide to start writing online at all?
Here are some common drivers for people who want to become content creators:
- Marketing: I want to promote my business and generate awareness
- Growth: I want to create interesting career opportunities for myself
- Revenue: I want to generate leads for my business
- Ego: I want to be recognized as a thought leader in this space
- Mission: My work is important and my content is a vehicle for my mission
- People: I want to facilitate knowledge and help others (e.g. share my map of reality so that they could optimize theirs)
- Curiosity: This is a big experiment and I want to see what happens if I commit
If we spend more time unpacking what truly drives people, we can probably find some more drivers. These are just some examples.
If we come back to a good old Maslow’s pyramid, these drivers are sitting at the top two levels: the level of Esteem needs (the desire to feel recognized, respected, and appreciated) or the Self-actualization level (the desire to realize one’s full potential).
For obvious reasons, if your first 3 levels of needs are not yet actualized, chances are you won’t be thinking about content creation or personal branding. You probably have bigger problems to solve.
So let’s say your Physiological, Safety, Belongingness, and Love needs are closed, and you find yourself in a position where you are seriously considering content creation as an outlet for your creative energy. The question now is:
What is your Ultimate Driver?
The Ultimate Driver for any human is one — to optimize for Ultimate Human Experience.
Now, what does that mean for you? How do you see content creation being integrated into your personal Vision of your Variation of the Ultimate Human Experience? Why do you want to create content?
You have to do this exercise in writing.
In Coaching, I would be using a technique called Chunking up. Basically, it is just continuously asking you the question:
For what Purpose?
Ask yourself this question and dig really deep until you land on your Core Driver.
Some other self-coaching questions will also help you to narrow down on your Purpose for Content Creation:
- What is the change that you want to see in the world?
- Why do you want to be the conduit of this change?
- If there was one problem you could dedicate your life to solving, what would it be?
- What is your vision of the world in which this problem has been resolved?
- Why do you care?
- What makes you the best champion for this message?
- What content do you follow?
- Who do you follow and admire for their thought leadership?
- Who has the courage to speak up that you want to model?
Note. Not everyone is built to have a high purpose to save the world. Your purpose can be personalized and selfish.
E.g. I want to create an Ultimate Reality for my Family and a Dream Lifestyle for myself.
There is nothing wrong with this Purpose.
The Truth is once you get there your Purpose will evolve.
Now let’s switch gears to the very concept of Personal Brand.
What is a Brand?
A Brand is the feelings and the thoughts that you have when you think about something.
For example, Nike. What are the thoughts that come to mind? 💭 Just do it. Bold. Authentic. Personal style. Athletic. Speed. Fast. Etc. You can continue the list yourself.
Now, the Personal Brand is no different. Just, in the world of Humans, we use another word to describe this. We use the word Reputation.
So the question that I have for you is:
What is the Reputation that you want to have?
What should people say when you are not in the room?
What should your online audience feel and say when they consume your content?
Finish this sentence:
{your name} is …
Write through this exercise.
When you finish look at what you have written.
How do you become that kind of person?
The insight that you were looking for is staring right at you.
To be = to do.
What follows is a profound realization:
Your Brand is not what you build. It is what you do.
If you want to be known as the person who does all the things that you have jotted for yourself, if you want to have that reputation, you have to be that, and the only way to being is doing.
Execution begets Identity.
Now, this connects very nicely to your Ultimate Why.
Because getting to the state of Being your Best Version of Self requires Consistency. And in order to execute on your Vision consistently, you need a strong enough driver that would help you to consciously prioritize the activity of execution over every other distraction.
Self-awareness & Self-discipline. Build up these two and you will be unstoppable.
Lastly, you DON’T need to have absolute clarity of purpose at the very beginning of the process. Clarity comes later. You make Step 1 and then you can see Step 2. It’s important to understand that you don’t see Step 2 if you don’t make Step 1. Serendipity is a function of action. In the words of Buddha:
At first, you choose the path. Then the path chooses you.
All you need is to Start.
In the beginning, there is no requirement to publish your thoughts online. Just start documenting them. For yourself.
Begin your content creation journey by understanding the inner workings of your mind — meditate on how exactly you think about things like branding, content, and writing. Write those thoughts down.
This exercise alone will help you to gain awareness of your thinking patterns which you can then use as guiding principles in your first iterations of the content.
Trust the process. Trusting the process is the highest form of confidence.
Now, let’s say you finished everything we talked about so far. You have found your Ultimate Drivers. You understand why content creation is important for you and you have built the resolve to take action. Yet the action is not happening.
What’s the reason?
The reason is you have some sort of mental blocker. A limiting belief.
So let’s look at the potential blockers.
Ask yourself the next question…
❓ WHAT IS STOPPING YOU RIGHT NOW?
Let me share a coaching tool with you — the Pyramid of Logical Levels by Robert Dilts. 👈 Check the link to learn more or listen to this podcast:
Pyramid of Logical Levels — Robert Dilts
How do we apply this tool to personal branding?
- Environment. This is the level where you want to experience the change. The new reality that you want to experience is the reality where you are a recognized thought leader with a strong personal brand and a massive following. Now, what has to change in order for you to get there?
- Behavior. In order for you to get there, you have to exercise a new set of behaviors i.e. you have to start writing, creating, and shipping content. What do you need to develop to get the job done? This is the next level.
- Skills. To write engaging content you need to learn how to write. The good news is — you are already a writer. If you can think, you can write because writing is just thinking on paper, the only crucial difference is that through writing you can come back again and again to your thoughts to polish them. The iterative approach leads you to the best writing you can produce. Also, there is a subset of skills that will make you a better writer: Reading, Storytelling, Copywriting, Content Marketing, Graphic Design or UX Design, etc. Now, logically thinking, you will be acquiring skills that are important to you. So how do you understand what is important? The next level is…👇
- Values. This is why we started our conversation by talking about your core drivers. Your Skill Acquisition Strategy will be defined by your Values. Meaning? You will only fully commit to the deliberate practice of learning content creation skills if this is something that is aligned with your Values and lets you live/actualize your Values. And we touched on that before. You will be living your Values unless you are blocked by your Limiting Beliefs. Beliefs also sit at the same level as Values. We will talk about limiting beliefs soon.
Now, all your Values and Beliefs are making up your Concept of Self. Or in other words, your Identity. And this is Level 5. - Identity. If you do something long enough, your experience will start integrating your new beliefs at the level of identity. For example, follow a regular practice of writing and make it a habit to publish your thoughts online long enough, and you will eventually form and internalize a new identity “I am the person who writes and publishes thoughts online. I guess I AM a writer.” The old identity dies away. The new one “strikes roots” and consolidates.
So, what sits at the last level? - Mission. This is why we talked about the Ultimate Why in the beginning — the sense of purpose that drives your content creation. Why are you doing what you are doing? Why content creation, thought leadership, and personal branding are so important to you? Develop awareness of your core driver, and you will become unstoppable.
Now, how can you use the Pyramid of Logical Levels? Well, the direct application is that it makes is super clear at which level you are having a challenge.
- Your Environment is not optimized for writing — fix that
- You don’t exercise the Behavior — what is going on?
- You don’t have Skills? Ok, how do we acquire the skills?
- Don’t understand why you need all of this in your life? Gain Clarity on your Values.
- Understand why you need this but still not taking action? Aha! Let’s look at your Beliefs.
So the answer to the question: “What stops you right now?” we need to take a closer look at the level of beliefs.
If you have grounded yourself in your resolve and truth that building a personal brand is something that you must manifest in your life, the only reason why you are not taking action is the mental blocks.
Let’s take a look at the most common ones.
- Impostor syndrome. “I am not good enough.” “I am not an expert”. “Who am I to speak about these things?” “Why would people listen to someone like me?” etc.
- Fear of being judged. “What if people will criticize me?” “What if my boss sees my thoughts and it will hurt my career?” “What would my family and friends say?”
- Fear of the unknown. “What if I say something dumb and it will come back to me 5 years later and ruin my life?”
- Fear of Failure. “What if no one cares about the things I have to say?” “What if no one likes my thoughts?” “What if I am not good enough to be a thought leader?”
- Fear of Success. “What if I will lose myself and become something I am not? A vain being chasing attention…” “What if my content game explodes and sucks me in and it will dilute all my other important work?”
As someone who has been writing online for the past 6 years, 3 of them on LinkedIn, I can share my thought process that can serve as a perspective and additional data point for your reframing.
Impostor Syndrome.
Update Feb 2023: I have just published a new piece of content on Impostor Syndrome. You can also listen to a podcast:
“The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.” ~ Mary Ann Evans
You don’t need to be an expert to do the important work of moving the world forward. I would take it a notch further by assuming that if you are thinking so deeply about thought leadership, you must be someone who achieved certain heights in your career and accumulated the expertise that can serve others and make their life easier.
Lead from where you are. Your target audience is You 3–5 years ago. Remember yourself? How much would you have benefited back then from having someone like your current version of self as a Coach?
We are all works in progress. Content creation is not about showing expertise, it is about facilitating knowledge.
We all have our own maps of reality. Your content is the pieces of your map of reality that you share generously so that others could complete their maps and be more effective in navigating their life.
No one’s map is complete, nobody knows the whole journey. We all are travelers here. Don’t be the traveler who is hoarding knowledge to get ahead in life. (Getting ahead in life doesn’t work that way, anyway). Be the traveler who is documenting the journey so that those who come after you have an easy passage through life. Be the cartographer.
Fear of being judged.
The only way to not get criticized is to do nothing.
Wait. Hold on a sec. Even that is not true!
Even if you do nothing and remain invisible, people will still come and think: “They are not proactive”, “they lack initiative”, “they don’t have confidence”, “they lack a spine.” “They don’t have what it takes to be a leader”.
Something tells me this is not quite the identity you want to engineer for yourself. Exercise Stoicism — Circle of Influence, Circle of Concern.
We do not control our people’s perception of us.
The only thing we can do to influence people’s perception of us is the way we show up in the world. The question is: how do you want to show up in the world? What do you want people to say when you are not in the room?
Fear of the Unknown.
In Russian we say:
Do you want to make God laugh? Tell him about your plans.
So first of all, we don’t know what will happen in the future. Our recent experiences from 2020–2023 have clearly taught us a lesson. Pandemics. Wars. Riots. Layoffs. You can have all the perfect plans in the world but it can all go to hell in one day.
This is not the reason to be negative. Think of it from a different perspective.
Hard times are calling for strong leaders. And if you are developing yourself into one, aren’t you also selfishly future-proofing yourself? The world that is drowning in the noise created by idiots can always use brave leaders, clear thinkers, and intelligent doers.
Be that.
Get competent, and confidence will follow.
Build your capacity to deal with the unknown. The ability to harness entropy. The skills to tame the chaos. Document how you’ve done it. Do it for yourself. People will call it thought leadership.
Fear of Failure.
Failure doesn’t exist. Only feedback.
Your fear of failure stems from the fact that your concept of content creation is in some way attached to your concept of success.
Treat content creation as a sandbox, as a constant playful experiment, and the pressure to succeed disappears.
There is no such thing as personal branding. Only personal development. You solve the problems for yourself. You show others how you’ve done it. Content creation is simply journaling in public.
Failure doesn’t exist. Only feedback. You run constant experiments to see what works and what doesn’t, iteration after iteration, you are building your startup of one, honing the skill, tinkering, and calibrating your thoughts in restless pursuit of mastery and ruthless elimination of non-important.
For a craftsman, the concept of success doesn’t exist. There is no end goal to reach. For as long as you are alive you can always be better.
Ultimately, there are only 3 forms of failure — not starting, quitting early, or not learning from the process and persevering at a foolish thing. Everything else leads to growth.
Fear of Success.
This one is interesting and very intellectual.
“What if I lose myself in vanity and become something I don’t want to be…?”
Being afraid to become something that you are not aka “losing yourself” is a good fear. It means you have self-awareness and you care about the right things. You are concerned that your identity and the things you love about your identity might change.
If that is your fear, there is nothing to worry about.
Partially because you can be 💯 sure that what makes you an awesome human being (your spirit, if you will) will never change.
Partially because the change is precisely what you are after. You want to become a better human being— more assertive, more confident, a better writer/speaker/leader, and you understand that a strong personal brand is a great vehicle for that transformation.
A Fear of Success is a Fear of a Phantom, an illusion that you have in your mind of what the future might look like.
The only person you are destined to be is the one you choose to become.
Trust yourself and trust the process.
Follow the Buddha’s teaching:
At first you choose the path. Then the the path chooses you.
Commit to one step. One word. One sentence. One post. The path will unfold itself before you. Concern yourself with one thing and one thing only — putting one foot in front of the other. Do this for a year. You won’t notice how the new doing became your new being.
Don’t concern yourself with the problems on the path. Problems do not exist. The things that people call problems are all catalysts for growth. Think about it, every time you have encountered a “problem” in your life you were forced outside of your comfort zone, and you learned how to operate in discomfort until uncomfortable became comfortable. Something you couldn’t deal with became something you can deal with. The unconscious becomes conscious. Unknown becomes the experience.
Marcus Aurelius wrote:
“The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
Calm your concerns. Massive success sounds like a good problem to have. By the time you are there, you will have the tools and resources to harness it. Until then, just keep walking.
As you can tell by now, all mental blocks can be reframed.
Anything is possible.
Humans are amazing. We are the only living beings on the planet that can do two things:
- Conceive something in our mind
- Make it real
We can use our minds to make things happen. However, your thinking mind is also precisely the thing that stops you from executing on the Vision of the Dream Life you want. You are blocked by your fears, worries, and doubts. What’s worse is that the more intellectual you are the more sophisticated your excuses are.
- I am too lazy
- I am too busy
- I prefer to mentor others in person not virtually
- I need to write a business plan
This is just a pile of mental garbage.
Outwork your self-doubt.
You can do anything you set your mind to achieve but adding more to your mind won’t help you. Elimination is more important. And this is where coaching can be leveraged.
As a coach, my job is to uninstall the mindsets that people developed throughout their lives that don’t work for them anymore.
And it is almost impossible to do it by yourself. Why? Because you always live inside your own mind. Your mind is your only home.
But let’s say we worked through the Purpose, Values, and Beliefs. Let’s say you bypassed all your excuses, found the time, and finally told yourself: “You know what? F**k that. I am just gonna do it and see what happens.”
Well, here comes the coolest part.
The creation.
And that brings the next question:
❓ SO WHAT DO YOU WANT TO WRITE ABOUT?
James Clear writes:
Congratulations! You have already separated yourself from the crowd. You have made a choice to become powerful.
When you consume other people’s content you are feeding their monopolies with the energy of your attention. (And Yes, I am aware and very grateful that you have chosen to give me the energy of your attention here and now). When you are a creator you are in the top 1%. Keep in mind, that everyone in this top 1% has started their journey by #doingitscared. They battled Impostor Syndrome. They had doubts. They did it anyway. So if you are scared but you are doing it, congrats! Success is just a matter of time.
This is the reason why we have started with the Ultimate Why. Your purpose will be driving your content every single day. Your purpose will hold you accountable. Your purpose will help you to persevere in the dark times when you would want to give up seeing no result from your effort. Remember:
Overnight Success is something people call 5–10 years of grind.
So if you are ready to grind, let’s reflect on the following questions:
- Who are you writing to? (you in the past)
- What is the problem that you are solving?
- What do you want to teach the world?
- What kind of educator do you want to be?
We talked about it. You have your own map of reality.
Your content is the pieces of the map.
Now, what are the pieces that you want to share with the world?
Here are some things that you can write about:
- Share an observation
- Share a recent experience
- Share a life lesson
- Share an insight
- Share an unpopular opinion
- Share an argument you have (compare two ideas)
- Break down your favorite creators
- Document what you have learned from others
- Advice for those who are on the path
- Share the best advice you got
- Share the worst advice you got
- Tips/Tricks/Best Practices in your profession/industry
- Software Tools that make you more efficient
- Tools of Thought (your mindsets, guiding principles, codex) that help you to navigate life more effectively
- Facilitate knowledge — condense what you have learned from a book/podcast/video/career experience
- Share the top lessons you learned
- Look into the future — what can you predict based on what you know in your industry (or anything really)
- Share your life philosophy
- Share a story — educational/motivational/inspirational/emotional
- Create a listicle like this
As you can tell, creativity has no boundaries. And there is no blueprint too. Finding your voice is a process of constant experimentation. If you are a marketer A/B test it. If you are a techie, use Agile methodology in your writing. Plan sprints. Test. Learn. Iterate.
If you are writing short form (i.e. LinkedIn posts), this simple structure never gets old:
- Hook
- Value
- Conclusion
Hook
- you need to make them stop scrolling
- you need to make them click “read more”
- you need to validate that they did the right thing when they stopped scrolling to read more
Value
- this is the meat of the post. What kind of food is your reader hungry for?
- the reader needs to leave enriched (they need to get the piece of your map that would enable/empower them).
- it should be easily readable. White space. Short punchy sentences. Write as you speak. Spice up with emojis. Exercise the Rule of 3 (3 main bullets — 3 main ideas).
Conclusion
What do you want your reader to do in the end?
- learn something
- share thoughts
- argue with you
- agree with you
- react to call-to-action
So if you do this exercise you are already ready to start writing.
Now let’s take a look at the tactical part.
❓HOW TO CREATE CONTENT CONSISTENTLY?
First, let’s understand this — writing consists of 3 distinct phases.
- Ideation
- Writing itself
- Editing
That implies building three systems:
- An Idea Generation System
- Writing System
- Editing System
And then actually hitting that Publish button.
Let’s look at them one by one.
Step 1. Ideation.
- Create a buffer for ideas. Good ideas come when you least expect them (shower, subway, 3 am in the night, or meditating sitting on top of the 🚽). Make sure you have a simple system of capturing your ideas (voice notes, apple notes, little notepad, whatever works for you).
- Your ideas can be organized as a to-do list. You take one idea, and you write/develop it. You create an article. You scratch it off the list. You repurpose the content after 3 months.
- I wish I started a system to capture my finished posts earlier (all your content can be repurposed). I am a big fan of Notion — you can date your posts, tag them, search them, etc. but choose what works for you.
Step 2. Writing itself
Here are some thoughts on the topic:
- People ask me how to build a habit of writing. You can’t. Habit by definition is a semi-automatic behavior, like brushing teeth for example 🦷🪥. You are doing the action but your mind is wandering elsewhere. Writing, on the other hand, is as cognitively-demanding activity as it possibly can be. You have to be 100% present in the moment and 100% focused. Writing cannot be automated.
- However, what can be automated is the behavior that would lead to writing. Example: making yourself a cup of tea, every day at 7 am in the morning, sitting and drinking tea for 5 min, having your laptop open, ready for the writing ritual. You prime yourself to writing, you think about your ideas while sipping the tea.
- The same works with meditation. Meditation is not something that can be automated as itself it is a practice of non-practice. Being still in the moment. Staying as Awareness. However, taking shower, wearing clean clothes, and sitting on the same sofa in the same place at the same time — all these are a stack of habits that build up to meditation as a lifestyle.
- Block the time on your calendar for writing practice. The idea of consistency in writing is cleverly captured in one of my favorite quotes by Tom Robbins:
“I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 A.M. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse sees fit to join me there and sometimes she doesn’t, but she always knows where I’ll be. She doesn’t need to go hunting in the taverns or on the beach or drag the boulevard looking for me.”
- As you can tell, writing is not so much a product of inspiration, as it is a product of discipline.
You can build writing as a lifestyle not just by writing for posting your thoughts online but by using writing in ways that will help you design your life and manifest your desired reality:
- Writing as a Life Design Tool. Planning, writing your life strategy, writing letters to Future Self.
- Writing as Meditation (aka Monkey Mind journal). You sit and write until there is nothing to write. No order, no agenda, just a stream of consciousness on paper you are empty.
- Writing as Therapy. Writing to analyze your past. Compartmentalizing on paper. Processing trauma. Writing letters to your inner child. Writing letters to those you hurt and those who hurt you.
- Writing as Gratitude Practice. Daily Gratitude Journal. 3 things I am grateful for today. Nurturing abundance mindset. Rich is not the one who has a lot, but the one who has enough.
- Writing as Creativity Trainer. The more you ideate, the more ideas will come to you. The more you create, the more creative you become.
- Writing as Self-Coaching. Google the self-coaching questions. Write answers. What’s written is WHAT YOU THINK is true/untrue for you. Re-assess. Calibrate. Connect with people who have different belief systems (who have the results that you want). How can you model their thinking to get the results they got?
Writing is thinking. And for thinking there are countless applications that can be discovered.
Step 3. Editing.
I am gonna finish writing this already 3k+ words article. I will let it marinate for a while. And then I will come back to it to re-read it with a fresh rested eye. And this is the secret of good writing.
Good writing is elimination.
Your writing should be crisp and clean, and it should cut like a katana slices bamboo. The bamboo (your reader), should still stand intact for 2 seconds after being cut thinking “wtf just happened”. If they feel this you know, this is powerful writing.
Good writing is rewriting.
What’s been said in verbal communication can always be formulated better. This is why quotes are your best teachers. For a famous quote to stand the test of time, it had to be crystallized as a product of countless thought iterations. This is why reading quotes (and just reading great writers in general) is a foundational exercise for a writer.
Reading is seating in the backseat of the thought vehicle of someone who has mastered driving is now taking you for a ride along their dark alleys of thought. Writing is learning how to drive for yourself.
LAST WORDS
I hope this article will be a piece of the map 🧩 that you needed to start moving towards your goal of building your personal brand through thought leadership.
The future belongs to those who can claim the mental estate in people’s minds. This can be you. The world needs more facilitators, coaches, and mentors. Live a life of service to others, we won’t be here for long.
If you go through all the steps above, and you have the piece that is ready to be shipped just ship it.
Shipped is better than Perfect.
Everything you need, all the tools, resources, and people you will find on the path.
Words and ideas can change the world.
Believe in it and you will.
