Say it out loud… personal branding… and notice what happens in your body. It’s like something tightens slightly. There’s a faint whiff of LinkedIn hustle, performative authenticity, or someone telling you to just ‘show up consistently’ without ever explaining who you’re supposed to be showing up as. It conjures AI headshots and content calendars and an exhausting project of turning yourself into a product.
No wonder people are resistant, it’s like the term itself has become a the problem.
Personally, I believe the thing that personal branding is trying to do is real, necessary, and genuinely transformative when it’s done right. I just think it needs a completely different language around it.
Where the terminology goes wrong
The word branding carries decades of corporate baggage. It implies something applied from the outside… a logo slapped on, a colour palette chosen from a trending chart, a tone of voice document produced by a committee. Something that is done TO you rather than something that is discovered and excavated FROM you.
Then there’s the word personal… a word so overloaded it barely means anything anymore. Personal brand. Personal development. Personal growth. The word had been stretched so thin it’s almost translucent.
Put them together and you get a phrase that simultaneously suggests you should be marketing yourself like a product AND doing it in an authentic, human vulnerable way, which seems like an instant contradiction and an impossible brief. It’s no surprise that most people either lean so far into the performance that they lose themselves, or resist the whole concept so completely that their brand ends up saying nothing at all.
Neither of those is the answer, both are symptoms of a misaligned framework.
What I think it actually is
When I work with a founder or a small business owner, I’m not building them a brand. I’m not applying something to them from the outside. I’m not telling them who to be or what to say or how to show up.
What I’m doing is standing far enough outside of them to see what they can’t see from where they’re standing, and then reflecting it back in a language they can actually use.
You cannot see yourself clearly from inside yourself. It’s not really a flaw, it’s physics. When you’ve been living inside your own perspective, your specific and particular way of seeing the world becomes invisible to you. It’s the water you swim in. At the same time, our eyes point outwards so we judge every thought and idea based on the outside world, making our own unique point of view even harder to pin down amongst the noise.
The distance required to name it, to make it legible to other people, is almost impossible to generate alone. That’s why I think of what I do less as branding and more as archeology. Or, on the days when I want to be more precise about it: being a mirror.
A creative director working with a brand doesn’t invent the brand’s personality, they excavate it, name it, and build a visual and verbal language around it that other people can read. They translate something that exists into something that communicates. That’s exactly what this work is. The difference with HIYA VIBES is that instead of doing it for a product or a company, I’m doing it for a person.
The language problem is the whole problem
Most people who struggle with their visuals aren’t struggling because they don’t know who they are, but because they don’t yet have the language for who they are. They have feelings, instincts, references, a very strong sense of what they don’t want, but no clear way to articulate the thing they’re actually trying to express. So they look at other people’s brands and try to reverse-engineer something that feels adjacent. They collect moodboards that don’t quite fit. They brief designers using words like ‘clean but warm’ and ‘professional but fun’, which are less a direction than an absence of it.
What changes things, with every single client I’ve worked with, is the moment you find the language. Not just a tagline. Not just a mission statement. The actual, specific, only-them words for what they do and who they are and why it matters. Once that exists, everything else follows naturally. The visual direction, the colour story, the images, the tone… it all has somewhere to come from.
Kara described it as feeling like ‘someone finally understood me’. Lauren opened her Brand Definition Report and immediately sent it to friends saying ‘look at this’. Erica said that once she had it, she couldn’t stop updating everything from her profile photos, her headers, to her website, because she finally had something she was proud of.
None of that is what people usually mean when they talk about personal branding. It’s more emotional, more specific, and considerably more useful.
What I’d call it instead
I’ve done so much thinking around the language and what would feel more accurate. Here are some options I’ve landed on when talking about HIYA VIBES:
- Visual identity that feels real. Because it’s not about performance, it’s about making something true visible.
- Creative direction for individuals. Because it’s the same rigorous, taste-led, emotionally intelligent process that shapes great brand campaigns, applied to the person rather than the product.
- Being a mirror. Because the job isn’t to add anything. It’s to stand outside, see clearly, and reflect back what’s already there in a form the person can use, possibly for the first time.
- The language before the library. Because this is what I actually believe the sequence should be. Words first, then images. Identity first, then visuals. The report before the shoot. You cannot build a visual world around a brand you haven’t yet been able to describe.
None of these are perfect. Language for genuinely new things rarely is, which is partly why we’re all still stuck with personal branding and its decades of unfortunate associations. But any of them gets closer to the truth of what this work actually is: not a makeover, not a marketing exercise, not a content strategy dressed up in prettier clothes.
A translation. From the inside out.
Why it matters what we call it
This isn’t just semantics. The language we use to describe something shapes what people expect from it, what they think they need before they’re ready for it, and whether they recognise themselves as someone it’s for.
When someone hears personal branding, they often think: that’s for influencers, or coaches, or people who want to be famous. They think: I’m not that kind of person. Or they think: I know I need it but I’m dreading it, because it sounds like I have to perform a version of myself I’m not sure I believe in.
When someone hears I help you find the language for who you already are, and then we build the visual world around that, it hits different. The resistance drops a little. Because I’m not asking you to become something new. I’m offering to show you who you already are, clearly enough to build your brand on.
That’s the only kind of personal branding I’m interested in. The kind that starts from the inside, moves outward, and ends with someone finally feeling like their world looks like them.
If you’ve been putting it off because the whole thing felt wrong
You might not have needed a rebrand, you might have needed someone to stand outside and hold up the mirror.
That’s what the Vibe Definition is. A deep-dive process that produces a report naming your aesthetic code, your colour story, your brand mood, and the language for what you actually do… It’s the translation that makes everything else possible.