There is a battle brewing between the concepts of Personal Brand and Authentic Voice.
If you’ve been paying attention at all (and I’m sure you have) you’ve seen the articles and the individuals touting personal branding. Everyone from Tom Peters to Seth Godin to Dan Scwabel is online telling you how to create your personal brand so that you can attract customers, jobs, and attention . Some even go so far as to suggest that personal branding can be good for you , that it can help you define who you are and where you are going.
To all of these personal branding proselytizers I say:
Back off.
Back off, because too much attention to “personal branding” will stifle authentic voice.
And none of us should stifle authentic voice, because authentic voice is fundamentally who we are.
What is Authentic voice ?
You may not have heard much about authentic voice lately, unless you have roots in the communities of confident writing and/or liberation studies.
Authentic voice is the expression of self that is created:
— when you speak your truth,
— when you tell what you know about yourself,
— when you argue for what you care about,
— when you tell the world how you see things from your unique perspective,
— when you argue for your own wisdom, in your own unique way.
Authentic voice is about articulating outward as you discover what’s inside you.
- Authentic voice grows from within.
- Authentic voice evolves with you as your learn and grown.
- Authentic voice is liberatory.
- Authentic voice creates authentic relationships.
- Authentic voice is power over how you are positioned in the world.
Above all, voice is a political construct. Voice is about having the means and the ability to speak and have one’s speech heard and be taken into account in social and political life. Voice is about coming out from under subordination, coming out from under the shell of what you have been told to be, what others want(ed) you to be.
And what is Personal Branding?
Personal branding is all about selling.
Personal branding is a strategy for crafting a social persona around characteristics that you think other people will pay attention to. Through personal branding, the projection of ‘who you are’ is shaped from the outside, by nipping and pruning and enhancing characteristics so that “you”/your personal brand fits the ‘niche’ where you want to attract attention.
In contrast to authentic voice, personal branding emphasizes what others want. To establish your personal brand, you are to evaluate what other people are looking for, or what other people need, and craft your self-presentation so that you appear to match this.
If you take a feminist lens to this description, you can see that personal branding is making yourself like what (you think) others want you to be. Personal branding asks you to subordinate who you really are and to prioritize instead how to present yourself as what you think (others think) will be desirable.
This is not the same thing as being real. Not at all.
Personal branding tells you to treat yourself like a product.
- Personal branding comes from a discipline that emphasizes “selling” and “being bought”.
- Personal branding puts satisfying the desires of others ahead of satisfying your own curiosity about who you are.
- Personal branding emphasizes being attractive to others over evoking your innate character.
- Personal branding is steeped in a commercial, mercenary mindset where what is valued is (only) what others will pay for.
There are some folks, bless their hearts, who confuse personal brand and authentic voice. They use the term “personal brand” and the marketing tactics of branding but they enumerate the qualities of authentic voice. They don’t see the gap between the marketing methodology and the demands of genuine personal expression.
I think people miss the contradiction between personal branding and authentic voice because:
(1) They don’t realize that authentic voice is a construct of its own,
(2) They are uncritical or maybe naive about the self-objectifying and self-commercialization of the personal branding conversation, and
(3) They have not yet understood the emancipatory power of discovering and unleashing ones authentic voice.
Whatever the reasons, it’s a shame.
It’s a shame to use the words and tactics of personal branding to frame the challenge of how to present your self socially. The mindset that these branding tactics represent is fundamentally antithetical to the mindset needed for developing an authentic voice. The tactics distort the process of self-discovery and the words diminish both the challenges and the joy of finding ones authentic voice.
Taken to its logical conclusion, personal branding will have you focus on your outside instead of on your inside. It will lead you to emphasize selling yourself, when instead you should be learning to speak for yourself, as yourself.
Personal branding will stifle your authentic voice.
So back off.
Stop telling us how to package and brand ourselves.
Instead , encourage us as we invite each other to speak our own truths.
Boy on guitar by KatieK2 on Flickr