Monday Mastery: Your personal brand of trust
Leveraging the written word to build your audience.
Welcome to Monday Mastery, a series designed to shift your perspective, teach you new techniques, and help you become a more effective writer, one tip at a time.
The idea of the personal brand has been getting more airtime than usual lately.
With mass layoffs still rolling through the knowledge work sector 2.5 years after they began in mid-2022 with the “right sizing” movement (let’s call a spade a spade: these were cost-cutting moves for the purpose of shareholder optics), “personal branding” has been dubbed the solution to getting a new job when you’ve been laid off.
Mostly because of those layoffs, I’ve been fielding inquiries from friends and colleagues about how I built my personal brand. So today, I wanted to share something that may be helpful if you’re wondering too:
Who you are is your personal brand.
Anything else is a facade that will eventually crack and crumble.
Is that terrifying?
For many people, it is.
It was for me.
At the time I decided to build a brand for myself apart from my consulting firm, I got some excellent advice from smartypants consultant Sarah Ashman. She took me through some exercises to reveal the thread that weaves through everything I think about, care about, and do in this world.
It was intense. I wasn’t sure what was going to come out of it.
What came out of it, though, changed not only how I was approaching my personal brand and what I wanted to offer the world as an individual, but how I looked at the world itself.
One quick glance at jessicamehring.com and you can probably tell what my thread turned out to be.
My thread is trust.
Finally giving myself permission to lean into that, I put on my scholar’s hat and got to work researching what trust means in a world of AI-generated content and AI-mediated relationships.
What I discovered is the same advice I’m giving to people about building their personal brands:
People have to trust you to follow you and engage with you.
Trust is comprised of three elements: competence, integrity and connection.
Writing is how you can communicate who you are and what you believe, and build that trust.
No matter your reason for building a personal brand — to get a new job, establish yourself as a thought leader, grow a platform, raise funds for your startup, whatever — building trust through written communication will help you get there.
So stop fiddling with logo concepts in Canva. Stop losing sleep over your website design. Stop stressing about how you look on camera …
And put your fingers to your keyboard.