Your Personal Brand will Inevitably Change and Honestly, that's OK.

To all intents and purposes, you are ready to go live with the new website. All your links are working, the copy is great, and it portrays what you do. Your product or service page is hooked up and ready for those clients. You’ve worked on this for?months.?Brilliant — ready to launch?

Well maybe…not quite yet.

You tinker with the logo?again, switching to a?serif?font, away from the?san-serif. “Yeah, I like that better, it’s more refined, classic…” and wait, “Maybe that shade of red on the headers is too intense, let’s pull that back a bit, it means danger to some people, I don’t want to give that impression”.

Two whole days later and you are STILL making completely unnecessary changes that nobody else would spot, and more importantly, your website, and hence you, remain hidden.

I know this only too?well.

You see this has been me for the last 5+months. Literally, I have iterated every single aspect of my brand identity, my copy, logo, fonts, so many times I dare not count for fear of embarrassing myself — and of course all of that time, my site has remained hidden,?from the world, from?my prospective audience, because I didn’t think it was good enough. My fear had me believe that I only had one shot at getting this right, so it had better be 100% perfect and on point.

But all the while we stay hidden, our audience misses?out.

Imagine how many prospective clients — Conscious Entrepreneurs?who probably needed coaching support over the last five months, I could have helped if only they’d been able to find me? Quite a few I’d imagine, especially since we’ve just been through an unprecedented time with the pandemic which brought with it fear, confusion, overwhelm and anxiety for so many small business owners.

When you are a Company of One, your brand becomes a very personal?brand.

Your brand is largely an extension of you when you are a Solopreneur, your values and your beliefs are baked into its DNA. And so, of course, it’ll feel incredibly vulnerable as you get closer to the date of your ‘big reveal’ — It certainly did for me. ‘What if nobody gets it? What if my copy confuses people?” Or worse: “What if nobody reaches out because I’ve got it entirely wrong, and they don’t need or want what I’m offering?” Raw, fundamental human fears are brought front and centre, and if we can avoid them for a while, we certainly will.

Your personal brand is in fact an ongoing?culmination?of your experiences.

So as you grow, your brand has to grow, and as a side effect of this, of course, the tone of voice you use will change, how you show up will look different, your thought leadership, services and products may well transition too — and that’s really okay. Your tribe will get it and actually expect it because?you are human and they are human too,?and change is a very natural occurrence.

Just ensure you stay attentive to your tribes understanding of what you do and communicate it to them if there’s going to be a big shift. This ensures a smooth evolution and gives them the opportunity to decide if they still want to hang around. We all appreciate being kept in the loop, right?

What came before in your life was necessary, in order for you to be the magnificent human being you are today. The same is true for your brand. It all counts, each release, launch and pivot is grist for the mill. We can only really grow as a Conscious Entrepreneur through daring to offer up new iterations of our work, and then to listen in close so that we can hear how it lands with our tribe and calibrate accordingly.

Iteration is evolution, so don’t wait for perfection.

So, I’m not going to beat myself up for how I undertook the build and subsequent launch of my new website, but on reflection, I could have saved myself a lot of overthinking and anxiety if I’d have put the?requirements of my tribe before the?requirements of my perfectionist fears.

I would have stuck a metaphorical ‘signpost’ in the ground for my people to find me — an early version of the site which looked and functioned perfectly well and which eventually grew to become the polished shopfront I have today. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and equally, this is all part of my own?cumulative?brand awareness, as mentioned in the previous paragraph.

In closing, what did I discover?

As of today, it’s been two weeks since I launched and announced my site through my social media channels and I have received lots of incredible feedback — real?data?that I can actually do something with. Data that will improve the future audience experience?of my offering and increase my brand loyalty — how do I know that? Because it’s feedback?direct from?my tribe?and surely if we are to make our passion projects and viable ventures sustainable, it’s this information that we must pay close attention to, not the internal chatter that fears rejection.

I invite you to reflect on?this:

You are ready?right now, you know enough?right now, and your tribe are waiting for you,?right now — I hope you can feel some truth in this statement and see it as an encouragement to push the metaphorical button and launch.

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