Issue #23 Someone Is Writing Your Brand Right Now. Is It You?

A CEO once looked me in the eye and said something I was completely unprepared to hear.

"You can't just be the funny guy on stage. You need more executive presence."

First off… You found me funny? Sweet!

Second… WTF?!

Fifteen years. Multiple successful roles. High-performing teams across multiple continents. Strong results. Corporate awards. A national television appearance as the company spokesperson.

The work wasn't theoretical (or just in my head). It was real, and I was proud of it.

And yet, when all of that got distilled down in her mind, here's what stuck: he's the guy who entertains on stage. That was my brand.

Not "strategic leader." Not "high-potential SVP." Not even "strong operator."

Just… the (let's be honest: mildly) funny guy working a 500-person sales conference at the Biltmore.

I did what everyone does after feedback like that… I made a voodoo doll.

Once that was done, I replayed everything. Conversations. Presentations. Decisions. Moments where I could have said something sharper, framed something better, shown up differently. The full mental edit reel.

Basically, I reconsidered every professional decision I'd made up to that point.

Once that noise settled, something more uncomfortable started to take shape: I hadn't been hiding. I was in the meetings. Running the teams. Driving the outcomes. I wasn't invisible.

But I was… simplified.

The CEO wasn't telling me I was a bad leader.

She was telling me the material I'd been giving people—the humor, the energy, the performance mode I defaulted to in high-stakes moments—was doing a completely different job than I thought.

I had been accidentally writing the wrong story. Or more accurately, I hadn't been writing one at all. I was improvising and assuming the audience was filling in the gaps correctly. They were filling in the gaps. Just not the way I would have. Or the way I wanted them to.

Somewhere along the way, a complex body of work had been reduced to a single, easy-to-carry idea. And the part I missed was that the reduction didn't happen randomly.

It happened because I let it.

🧠 Not Everyone Should Be Holding Your Pen

For a long time, I carried an assumption I never really questioned: if you do strong work, people will see it clearly.

That the results would speak for themselves. That the patterns would add up. That over time, the story would be so evident that everyone would have to see it. As clear as my shiny noggin.

In that shiny noggin, I knew I was right. In reality, however… I was very, very wrong.

People don't experience your work the way you do. For lots of reasons, they never see the full arc. They see moments. Fragments. A presentation here, a decision there, something they heard about you in a meeting you were never in… because that was the other bald guy with a salt and pepper beard.

From those fragments, they build a story. Piece by piece by piece. Incomplete but woven together nonetheless. Not a biography. A headline and a blurb. Something simple. Memorable. Easy to echo.

That story is getting written whether you're involved or not. The goal isn’t to be the subject of the story. It’s to be the author of it.

Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich (yes…that Tasha Eurich! Just kidding, I didn’t know her brilliance either until researching for this issue) found that 95% of people believe they have an accurate sense of how others perceive them. The real number is closer to 10–15%. I’ll do the math for us: most of us are pretty self-unaware.

Which means the meeting you just left—the one where you felt sharp, prepared, completely on your game—statistically included several people who walked out with a version of you that you wouldn't recognize. Or maybe even like.

That's not a criticism. That's just a frustrating mix of reality, neuroscience, and math.

Your brand isn't what you intend. It's what registers. The old ‘perception is reality’ coming to take a personal bite out of your proverbial ass.

See, what registers is rarely your full body of work. It's the parts that are most visible, most consistent, and easiest to explain.

That's the trap. Not invisibility. Misinterpretation.

You can be doing excellent work, delivering real results, showing up consistently…and still be understood in a way that feels incomplete. Or worse, inaccurate. Or the absolute worst: as a sales conference jokester.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that the fix wasn't working harder. I was already doing that. It also wasn't being more visible. I was in the room.

The problem was more specific. And it was actually two problems.

First: my story wasn't portable. I had a body of work, but I didn't have a version of it that could travel without me there to explain it. The people who worked closely with me got a full picture. Everyone else was working from whatever fragment of me they'd encountered most.

In my case, it was the guy who could hold a room. Not wrong. Just incomplete. And I hadn’t consistently given others—especially senior leadership—a sharper version to work with.

Second: my story wasn't reaching the right people. The leaders forming opinions about my trajectory weren't always the ones watching me work. They were working from secondhand information—what they'd heard, what someone mentioned in passing, what stuck from a single interaction. I had no idea whose version of me was making it into the conversations that actually mattered, but it certainly wasn't the one I was projecting in my own head.

That realization was the moment it shifted for me. Not overnight. Not dramatically. But deliberately.

I started being more intentional about how I talked about my work—especially in the moments that felt routine. Instead of just giving updates, I'd connect the dots. Not in a performative way. Just… more clearly. What was hard about the decision. What trade-offs we were making. Why it mattered beyond the immediate outcome.

I also got a lot more disciplined about how I described what I actually did. Less "we had a good quarter." More "here's what changed, and here's what it unlocked."

Same work. Better story. And slowly, that story started to travel. Not perfectly. Not everywhere. But further than before.

Because results don’t travel on their own. Stories do.

The simple but critical change I made: going from passive to active. The difference between a passive brand and an active one isn't self-promotion. It's authorship.

A passive brand says: I'll do the work and trust that people will connect the dots.

An active one says: I'll do the work… and I'll make sure the story is specific enough to travel, and that it's reaching the people who need to hear it.

Not louder. Not more performative. More deliberate.

🍴 Try a Bite This Week

Your story is your reality. So, if you’d rather not go down the whole voodoo doll path, start with a few exercises to test how you show up and to whom.

• Make your story portable. Can you describe what you do—and what you’re distinctively good at—in one sentence that someone who barely knows you could repeat accurately? Not your title. Not your résumé. The sentence that travels. If you don’t have one, don’t worry—someone else already wrote it. You just might not like their version.

• Frame your work while you’re doing it. This is the part most people skip. Don’t just present the update—explain the thinking. Talk about trade-offs. Call out what made the decision hard. Connect what you did to why it mattered. Same work. Different interpretation. If you don’t frame your work, people will. And they won’t do it as well as you can.

• Map your orbit. Who is forming an opinion about you right now—without you in the room? Name three people who influence your trajectory that you rarely interact with. What’s their headline for you? If you don’t know, that’s your signal.

💡 A Final Thought

Everything we just talked about assumes you’re in the room. That you have some surface area with the people who matter. That you can shape the story—at least in part—through how you show up, how you communicate, how you frame your work.

But there’s a whole category of rooms you’re never in.

Conversations where your name comes up but your voice doesn’t. Decisions that get made before you even know they’re happening. Opportunities that go to someone else because the right person happened to think of them first.

No amount of personal clarity fixes that. Because at that point, the problem isn’t the story you’re telling. It’s who’s telling it when you’re not around.

That’s a different problem. And it has a different name. We’ll get there next issue. (Personally, I can’t wait!)

One more thing...and I say this with full awareness of the irony.

Dorie Clark has spent her career helping high-performing people stop leaving their narratives to chance. She literally wrote the book on personal branding. Several of them, actually. And I recently sent her a copy of mine.

The fanboy in me really, really hopes she likes it. Especially the personal branding chapter. Which, now that I think about it, is me publicly asking one of the world's foremost branding experts to grade my homework.

Solid brand move. Clearly, I've learned nothing...

🌶️ Add Your Spice

Are you actively writing your brand, quietly hoping your work speaks for itself, or somewhere in between — and when’s the last time someone’s description of you genuinely surprised you?

If this one landed, share it with someone who is excellent at their job and a complete mystery to the people who could actually change their career.