Personal Branding through Thought Leadership for Senior Leaders

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.

Outline for this article:

• Why do you want to create content?
• What stops you from writing
• What to write about
• How to get the writing done

? WHY DO YOU WANT TO CREATE CONTENT?

This is the question I always start my coaching sessions.

Why?

A few things, that we should align on.

Let’s agree:

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:

1. It is not important enough (there are other things that?you choose?to prioritize)
2. 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.

However, if the 2nd 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 ultimate drivers for Senior Leaders:

• Marketing-driven: I want to promote my business and generate awareness
• Growth-driven: I want to generate career opportunities for myself
• Revenue-driven: I want to generate leads and grow my income streams
• Ego-driven: I want to be recognized as a thought leader in this space
• Mission-driven: The work that I do is important and my content would become a support system for my mission
• People-driven: I want to facilitate knowledge and help others (e.g. help them to learn from my experience and get to where I am today faster)
• Curiosity-driven: This is an experiment and I just want to see what happens if I commit

If we spend more time unpacking this, we can probably find more drivers. These are just some examples.

If you look at 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).

Obviously, if your first 3 levels of needs are not fulfilled, chances are you won’t be thinking about content creation/personal branding as much.

So let’s say the first 3 levels of needs are closed, and you are seriously considering content creation as an outlet for your creative energy. The question now is:?what is your Ultimate Driver?

Why do you want to create content? Find the answer and from there you can dig deeper into the driver to understand what lies behind it.

Example:

You want to create purpose-driven content, but you don’t know what your purpose is.

The following self-coaching questions are a good place to start:

• What is the change that you want to see in the world?
• Why do you want to be the conduit of this change?
• What is the problem that you are solving? (If there was one problem you could solve, what would it be?)
• What is your vision of the world in which this problem has been resolved?
• What makes you the best champion for this message?
• Who do you know who lives their purpose and speaks up openly and courageously for the things that are true for them?

I am not saying that having a high purpose to save the world is absolutely necessary. Some people just want to get to the top of the career ladder and maximize their earnings, and that’s totally fine. What is important to understand is this:

Your Brand is what you do.

And to do something consistently, you need a strong enough driver combined with the awareness of that driver that would push you back to exercising the desired behavior — writing.

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 beginning, you can just start establishing some patterns in your psyche — reflect on how you think about branding, content, and writing. Write those thoughts down. This exercise alone will help you to use those thinking patterns as guiding principles in your first iterations of the content. You will have to trust that you will learn in the process. And at the end of the day, this is the highest form of confidence.

Now, let’s say you finished this exercise. You understand what is important for you, yet you are still not taking any action.

What’s the reason? You are blocked by your limiting beliefs.

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.

How do we apply this tool to personal branding/content creation?

1. Environment. This is the level where you want to experience the change. The environment that you want to create for yourself is a strong personal brand with a massive following and a solid reputation as a thought leader.
2. Behavior. In order to get there, you need to have to exercise new behavior i.e. you have to start writing and posting content online.
3. Skills. To write engaging content you need to learn how to write. You are already a writer. If you can think, you can write and writing is thinking on paper, that’s all it is. However, thinking (read: writing) as any skill can be improved by applying certain principles/frameworks (e.g. Storytelling, Copywriting, Content Marketing).
4. Values. This is why we started our conversation by talking about your motivators. Your Skill Acquisition is defined by your Values i.e. you commit to the deliberate practice of learning something only if it is something important to you.
5. Beliefs. Something can be important to you but you would not be pursuing it (read: exercising the desired behavior) because you have internal blockers (i.e. limiting beliefs). We will talk about this part in detail below.
6. Identity. If you do something long enough, your experience will start integrating your new beliefs at the level of identity (e.g. if you write and post online long enough, you will eventually form and internalize a new identity “I am the person who writes and posts thoughts online.”)
7. Mission. We talked about the Ultimate Why — the sense of purpose that drives your content creation. Why are you doing what you are doing? At this level, the sense of Mission is what would dictate the identity.

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 come to the place of realization that building a personal brand and thought leadership is something that you highly value, the only reason why you are not taking action is the mental blocks you have.

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.

“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. (I would even go further by stating that if you are so concerned about it, it is precisely the indicator that you have achieved certain heights in your career and accumulated the necessary expertise).

Lead from where you are. Your target audience could be You 3–5 years ago. Remember yourself? How badly did you want to know then what you know now?

We are all works in progress. Content creation is not about showing expertise, it is about facilitating knowledge.

When you create content, you are sharing the pieces of your map of reality 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. 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 not to 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.

First, we don’t know what will happen. Our recent experiences have clearly taught us a lesson.

Do you want to make God laugh? Tell him about your plans.

Pandemics. Wars. Riots. Layoffs. You can have all the perfect plans in the world but it can all go to hell in one day.

Now, think of it from a different perspective. The uncertain times are calling for strong leaders. And if you are developing yourself into one (even if you are being driven by a noble purpose of serving others), aren’t you also selfishly future-proofing yourself?

This is precisely where your confidence stems from — from your ability to deal with the unknown. The ability to harness entropy. The capacity to tame the chaos.

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 disappears.

There is no personal branding, only personal development. Writing online is nothing but documenting your personal development journey.

There is no failure. Only constant experiments and seeing what works and what doesn’t, iteration after iteration — being a startup of one, honing the skill, tinkering, and calibrating your thoughts in constant pursuit of mastery. There is no other concept of success but the concept of craftsmanship.

Ultimately, there are only 3 forms of failure — quitting early, not learning from the process, or not trying at all. Everything else leads to growth.

Fear of Success.

Being afraid to become something that you are not aka “losing yourself” is a good fear. It means you have self-awareness or to be specific the awareness of the concept of self — you are concerned that your identity and the things you love about your identity might change.

If that is the fear, there is nothing to worry about. Partially because what makes you an awesome human being (your spirit) will never change. Partially because change is precisely the reason why you are thinking about content creation so deeply — you want to become a better human — more assertive, more confident, a better writer/speaker/leader, and you understand that content creation 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. But if you look at the data you have (your past) you will see that the future rarely looks like what we had imagined it to become.

Instead, take a Buddhist approach.

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 putting one foot in front of the other. Look back and see how far you have come.

Don’t concern yourself with problems on the path. Problems do not exist. The things that people call problems are all catalysts for growth. Think about it, when you encounter a “problem” you are forced outside of your comfort zone, you learn how to operate in discomfort until uncomfortable becomes comfortable. Unusual becomes habitual. The unconscious becomes conscious. 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.”

And we all know, massive success is a good problem to have. You will harness it when you are there. Until then, just keep walking.

As you can tell by now, all mental blockers can be reframed.

Anything is possible.

Humans are amazing. We are the only living beings on the planet that can do two things:

1. Conceive something in our mind
2. Make it real

However, our mind is also precisely the thing that stops us from the process of manifestation. We are blocked by our fears, worries, 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
• I need to write a business plan

This is just a pile of mental garbage.

You can do anything you set your mind to achieve but to get your mind to work having an effective mindset is not sufficient. Elimination is more important. And this is where coaching can be leveraged.

Yup. It is extremely hard to gain a perspective on your mind, while you are constantly in it. You need a vantage point.

? WHAT DO YOU WANT TO WRITE ABOUT?

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.

Congratulations, you have already separated yourself from the crowd. When you consume content you are feeding other people’s monopolies. When you are a creator you are in the top 1%. And just to remind you, all 100% in this top 1% have started their journey by #doingitscared . So if you are scared but you are doing it, success is inevitable.

This is 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 a term used to describe 5–10 years of work.

Ok, so…

To understand what to write you need to 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 education do you want to be known for?

You have your own map of reality.

When you teach/coach/mentor others, what you do is share your map of reality so that those who are learning from you can take the elements from your map, integrate them into theirs, and navigate life more effectively.

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:

1. Share an observation
2. Share a recent experience
3. Share a life lesson
4. Share an insight
5. Share an unpopular opinion
6. Share an argument you have (compare two ideas)
7. Break down your favorite creators
8. Document what you have learned from others
9. Advice for those who are on the path
10. Share the best advice you got
11. Share the worst advice you got
12. Tips/Tricks/Best Practices in your profession/industry
13. Software Tools that make you more efficient
14. Tools of Thought (your mindsets, guiding principles, codex) that help you to navigate life more effectively
15. Facilitate knowledge — condense what you have learned from a book/podcast/video/career experience
16. Share the top lessons you learned
17. Look into the future — what can you predict based on what you know in your industry (or anything really)
18. Share your life philosophy
19. Share a story — educational/motivational/inspirational/emotional
20. Create a listicle like this

As you can tell, creativity has no boundaries. And there is no blueprint too. Finding your voice is constant experimentation. If you are a marketer A/B test it. If you are a techie, use Agile in your writing.

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:

• An Idea Generation System
• Writing System
• Editing & Actual Publishing

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.
• Your ideas can be organized as a to-do list. You take one, and you write/develop it. 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). Obviously, 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 (i.e. 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 the verbal flow 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, 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 > Perfect. Everything else you need you will learn on the path.

Happy writing!

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p.s. If you enjoyed reading this, consider sharing. Someone out there might need to hear this.

#personalbranding #contentcreation #thoughtleadership #linkedin #writing

Chengeer Lee - Personal Website