A Unique Branding Strategy That Feels Good, Unlocks Your Strengths, & Expands Your Dignity

This episode was inspired by a long term client and a friend -  two brilliant women starting their businesses! What if your brand could feel like an extension of yourself - like coming home? This session is for anyone craving authenticity in how they show up—not just entrepreneurs. 

In honor of these lovely women, I share a tactical, creativity-driven episode rooted in self-expression. With over a decade of experience in marketing, branding, and creative business, I reveal a method that turns your natural energy into a brand that unlocks your strengths.

Inside this session:

1. Introduction to my bonding-with-light strategy and how it works
2. What not to do when following this method
3. Fun and effective ways to execute the strategy
4. Four of my favorite free tools for finding your primary shade

📖 Ritual Accompaniment For This Episode

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Transcript

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Dilshad 0:00

Welcome to the Delicious Dignity Podcast. Let's settle in securely and ever so nicely into the brilliance of our own dignity. Hello, lovely people. I'm so excited for this episode because this is the most tactical episode on the show thus far. Every episode includes some amount of tactical ritual stuff, but this episode is all tactical and I love that. We're talking about business and branding, but even if you don't have a business, this is also for you because this episode can be an exercise in helping you bring out the most authentic, the most unbridled, expansive potential. you can possibly have in this lifetime. I know that seems like it's a big thing and that I'm probably over-promising, but I assure you I'm not because I've lived this and it's very true. So I'm very excited to share this method with you. This is my own method. It's nothing you've ever heard of before, although maybe you've heard of it told in a sort of similar way in other areas, but never like this. So I'm so excited. This episode is actually inspired from two women that I know and love. One of them is a long-term client. I think she's been my client for almost 10 years now, so almost the life of the business. She's been one of my clients. And then the other one is one of my own precious friends, who's also been my friend for about 10 years. I just realized this overlap. And they're both about to start their own businesses. This is an honor of both of these beautiful women and what I wish I had known when I started my business and what I would love to give to them and also what I would love to give to you. Who am I to talk about branding? I want to talk about this because I graduated, one of my majors in college was a marketing major. I also graduated with a specific certificate program in branding. I worked in marketing for a while and I also worked for an ad agency. And That is not the place I'm talking to you from today. All of the things I just said, throw it out because none of those things are things I actually used in my business and just in my personhood. Instead, I'm just going to draw from my own life experience and what I have lived in the world of branding and also what I have realized from 10 years in business. And that's the place I want to talk to you from because you can read all the books on branding you want. There's so many out there. And those are all great, I guess, in their own right. But I ended up using none of them in my business and in my life because none of them felt good. None of them felt like they were me. None of them felt like I was able to step more into myself as a result of having a brand. So here's the branding strategy in one sentence. Didn't mean to keep you in suspense for so long. So if you were, I'm so sorry. But in one sentence, here it is. You're bonding with your brand. That's your brand strategy. Your brand becomes you and you become the brand. The brand being the physical representation of an energy you already naturally bring into the world. So a solid brand, in my opinion, brings out the best in you. It brings out your creativity, your ideas, your purpose, your passion, your strengths, your potential. It even attracts the right people to you. It also, not only in terms of clients and buyers, but also in terms of partners and even friendships. That to me is what a true branding strategy is. That to me is the highest potential of a true and honest brand. And notice that nowhere in here did I talk about other people. I didn't talk about finding your niche or finding your market or what people naturally respond to, what people don't respond to. I didn't talk about other people. Why? Because if that's what you want, there are plenty of things out there that are talking about market research and the trends and branding and all of that. I've been there. I've done that personally. It didn't make me feel good. It felt dishonest. It felt like I was misrepresenting myself because I was trying to be what they told me to be as opposed to just be me. It felt like I was making myself into an imposter. You know how they say the imposter syndrome? You guys can Google it if you want to, but it felt like I was making myself have an imposter syndrome. And I didn't want to hang out on my own website. I talk more about it in episodes four and five. And one of the ways this realization hit me so hard in 2025 is because of what I was seeing as trends in my business and hearing about what other people said that I should do in my business and not wanting to do any of it. And branding was one of those things that I feel like I got right a while ago. And it helped me get to this point where I realized that I'm over the hustle and I just want to feel good. And I want to feel good about my brand. I I want others to feel good about my brand if they resonate with it. If they don't resonate with my brand, then you know what? My brand is also doing its job because the brand is not only about who you attract and the potentials you attract. It's also about who you filter out. So yeah, that's the branding strategy we're going to talk about today. So I talked about the branding strategy in one sentence is you're bonding with your brand. Your brand becomes you, you become the brand. So how do you do that exactly? The best way that I knew how to do it and that I found for me worked really well is color. What is color? Color is the visual perception of light. We hear so much in the new age community about light and love. Well, this is an aspect of light. An aspect of light is your brand. All spiritual traditions talk about light or playing with light. My tagline for my business is, here's to being lit up from the inside out. Being lit up also means that you are in touch with your light, with your brand, with your color. Do you see the cascading waterfall effect of that? So not only does it cascade down from light to love to color, but it also cascades up from color to love to light to just being more of who you are. And so anyway, I'm going to tell you exactly how we're going to do that. Just take what serves you, leave the rest, but try it. Just try it. It sounds kooky, but I promise you the number one thing is you're going to enjoy this process and you're going to love doing this and you're going to end up with a really solid brand in the process. I think that is the sweet spot. Okay. In my brand, my color, one of my main colors is this sort of grayish pink color. Let me tell you the story of how I arrived at this. Okay, so when I was about 10 years old, maybe 10 or 11 years old, I came across this book, it was called Thorn Birds. And it was this uber romantic book and very tragic romance story. And the story was pretty hard hitting. But what I remembered most from that book, what really struck me about that book, is there was a line in which the protagonist of the book, this woman wore this ashes of roses dress in front of the other protagonist, the man of the book. Everything else in the book is kind of a blur, but that part I remember the most because when I read those words, ashes of roses, I couldn't get it out of my head. So I tried to imagine what that color would look like. And I remember imagining that color as this dusty pink color, this grayish pink color. And that, as it turns out, is exactly what she meant by ashes of roses. So that was my first introduction to the color. I had this little ping in my brain as I was reading it and then I imagined it. So that was my first sort of, the color was kind of coming into my life. As I grew up, I started just randomly buying this color in all sorts of different aspects of my life. So in my home decor, my water bottle, the clothes I was wearing, and I didn't realize I was doing it until I realized I was doing it. But I was subtly buying this color quite a bit. And then I remember doing a lot of manifestation work where I was trying to imagine my highest potential. And in that imagination and using my imagination to call in what I wanted, I remember the environment that I was imagining would always be that sort of dusty pink color. So I started wondering whether I could involve this color in my own business. Instead of just being something I like, why can't I involve it in my own business? And I remember being a little bit hesitant to do that because I didn't want to give the impression that my business was this flowery, frou-frou thing. I mean, it is very flowery, but it's not frou-frou. It's not on It's not without substance. So I had this resistance and also it was pink. And of course, there's this whole thing with women and the color pink and how some of us resist it and some of us start accepting it. And I see these trends on Instagram about women who meet men who really support them. And then they say that this man made me love the color pink again. And it's kind of similar with my business. It's my business made me love the color pink again. It made me really sink into this because it's so much a part of who I am that particular shade of pink. And I don't know why, but it just really resonates with me. And this color pink, as I started researching it to put it into my business and my brand, it led to other colors that also ended up becoming part of my brand. That looked nothing like the color ashes of roses or dusty pink, but that led to other colors that became my brand. And I remember as soon as I rebranded without actually meaning to rebrand, Everything I did, the best work I have done flowed from that place. It was as if I stepped into myself, but in the form of a color. All these new ideas, group rituals, retreats, podcast offerings, all of these things just came out like a tsunami from having these right colors. Because you know what it felt like? It felt like my soul had a home in the form of a business, in the form of a website. in the form of graphics. Every time I saw one of my graphics, every time I see one of my website offerings or anything, it's like, oh, there's my soul. It's like I'm giving it a home. You know that episode I did on rose mysticism? I think it was episode 14, maybe, or 13. But it was the first rose mysticism class I did, and it was about practicing heaven on earth. This is another way that you can practice heaven on earth. And I didn't mention it at that episode because I didn't think about it, but this is one of the ways you can do that and you can do that in your own business. Something that's traditionally been extremely patriarchal and capitalist and very extreme in one direction. It's almost as if you're bringing the balance back through doing it this way. And most recently, that pink color has led to a most recent color that I have found just, I think, two or three weeks ago, which is this dark terracotta brown red color that now has also become part of my brand. The brand keeps evolving, but so much of it stays the same, like the foundation stays the same, and I keep building on it. It's like your brand unfolds you and your skills. you just get more and more unfoldings from this foundational bonding with the color. From this story, what can you tell, right? You can tell that we're not really doing it to build a brand, although it ends up becoming that. You're only thinking of what feels good. And maybe you find it synchronistically, the way I did through the book. Maybe you don't. That's not the point. But the point is you take one primary color and you sort of bond with that and let that color lead you to other colors. Again, you might have some resistance. Even though it's a color that you love, you might have resistance putting that into your brand. And that's okay. You just have to accept that that's a thing. Really, we're finding a primary color and we're going to start bonding with it. Now, before we go into the actual method, I want to tell you just up front, don't worry about how other people see the color. For example, if I had listened to how other people see the color. I would have designed my website the way every spiritual new age person designs it with blue and purple, all these whitewashed colors, overly exposed photographs in spiritual communities. That wasn't me. That's not me. And I didn't worry about how other people see it. And that's just what I want to say. Don't think about other people. Don't think about your market. Don't think about your clients. Don't do any of that. Not to start with. Just be as clean with it as you possibly can, which is just you and the color. and don't think of conventional advice you can get so much of that later down the road and because it often gets in the way of your creativity and your energy you can always pick that up but first start with you you're just picking one color scheme and you're bonding with it just don't think of anything else and don't resist anything because again just because you're bonding with this color that doesn't mean it's going to end up have to end up on your website or you know I've been talking a lot about websites but it could also be in your restaurant, your cafe, your architectural building that you're designing. It could be anything. You're not thinking about where you're going to put the color. You're just thinking about bonding with it. So don't automatically think of where the color is going. Just accept it as a part of your unfolding and your evolving. Okay, so now we finally get to the actual method. Basically, you're going to find your primary color. You're going to look around the world. You're going to take a picture of a color you're you like, because you're going to go places and you're going to really like a color or two, and you're kind of going to keep a color library of all the colors you like. Maybe someone is wearing a dress or pants that have the exact color that you really like. Maybe you take a picture of that. And it's not necessarily about the color. It's also about the shade of that color. You know, it's a particular shade. Like the pink that I have is not pink, pink. It's like a grayish, dustier pink. In order to find this color, you you can do the things I just talked about before. But what you can also do is ask yourself a bunch of questions. So for example, I'll take you through some of them right now. What is a color that repulses you? You don't like that color at all. So for me, I don't like blue. There are specific shades of blue I just don't like. I like a dark midnight blue and I just made a painting with the dark midnight blue color, but I don't like other shades of blue. What you can do is take the color that repulses you, look at the color wheel. So go online and Google color wheel and look at the opposite color of the color that repulses you. And that might give you a starting shade of what color you want to start bonding with. The other way you can do this is you can ask the question, what else element do you love the most? So for example, the element I love the most is fire. Bonfires, hearth fires, candle fires. I love putting pine cones in my fire to make it erupt with fire. Please do that with caution. It's a very dangerous thing to do. But when I would make my bonfires, that's what I would do. So I love fire colors. So that gives me a starting point of some kind. You can also ask yourself, if you like earth, what kind of earth? Do you like mud? Do you like mountains? Do you like grass? You will always have a preference. If you like metal as an element, what kind of metal? Is it gold? Is it silver? Is it tungsten? Is it mercury? If you love the element of air, what kind of air? Is it the air that comes right before snow or the air after a monsoon? The smell of earth? What kind of air? So get kind of like these tactile visual images and that might might give you a color starting point, a primary color you can bond with. And then what material do you love the most? Do you like wood, concrete, stone, mud, clay, paper? liquidy, maybe you like those slime materials. It doesn't matter. Just sort of get some images of what kind of material you like. What smells do you like the most? For me, I love flower smells and I love the smell of Indian food. Now, you might think, well, how does what I smell and what kind of element I like lead to my primary color? So I'll give you an example, right? The element I love the most is fire colors. So I know that that maybe my primary color is going to have some shade of red, orange, or yellow. So I know that. And I know the smell I like is Indian food. I know that somewhere in there, there's going to be a flavor of India in my brand color. If you notice that shade of pink, and you notice the shades of red that I have, you see a lot of those colors in India too, that particular shade. And one of the other nature elements I love is earth, but I specifically like love, the red rocks of Sedona. And you will see that red and pink scheme sort of matches the rocks in Sedona. And of course, I don't necessarily pull that exact color, but it's informing the color that I might bond with. Does that make sense? Tell me if that makes sense. The other thing you can ask to get your primary color is what type of texture can you obsessively touch for hours? For example, people love to touch trees. They I love hugging rocks. Make me a bed of volcanic rock and I will sleep in it. I love soil, moss, marble, my dog's velvet ears. I love flower petals. All of these things, they inform my brand. That soil color is now part of my brand. That sort of dark brown color is part of my brand. These are all things that will start to inform it. Again, we're just trying to find one color to start with? Just one. So from all of these questions that I gave you, you might find that one shade and you'll find that shade. There are many things you can do to actually bond with it. First, we started off with how to find your actual shade or the actual color. Let's just say how to find your color or your color scheme to start with. Okay, that's the first part that we just talked about. Now, the second part is how can you find the exact shade of that color you want to bond with. So there are many ways you can do this. The first thing you can do is the photos that you have, you can pick the color of the photos. So all you have to do is go into an app that can help you pick the color off. You just use the eyedropper tool to get the exact color. You can do this in Canva. You can do this in Photoshop. You can do this on this app called Colors that I'll talk about in a second. You can do this in many places, but but you're basically taking the eyedropper tool. So it looks like one of those, you know what I mean by eyedropper, right? The little squishy thing and the glass tube where you suck up the liquid and you put the liquid in whatever you need to do it, whatever you need to do with it. So you're using the eyedropper tool. If you don't know what I'm talking about, Google it. And you're using that eyedropper tool to pick the color of the photograph that you clicked and put it into your color scheme to play with and find the right shade. My favorite app to work with colors and finding the right shade and this is how I found the exact dusty pink shade that I wanted and then all the other colors on my website I found through this app because I just kept tweaking and tweaking the colors. This app is called Colors. It's C-O-O-L-O-R-S. So it just has an extra O in the beginning. So C-O-O-L-O-R-S app. You add the color into the app and you lock the color. You can do this thing called locking the color and then you can randomly generate other colors that complement that color. But I wouldn't suggest you do that right from the beginning. I would suggest that you put that color into the app and try to find the exact shade that matches with you. So for example, let's say I talked a lot about pink, but let's say that your color is yellow. You go into the app, you extract the yellow, you put it into the app. When you look at it on the screen, you're like, hmm, that's not exactly the yellow. Maybe I want it a little bit darker. Maybe I want it a little bit lighter. And so you play with that shade until you find the exact shade that you love. Now, when you find that shade, it will have a hexadecimal code. And that's the code given to a color online. So it's usually six digits, numbers and letters. So you find that six digit code. And what you could do is put that six digit code into Pinterest. So you just search in Pinterest with the code. So in Pinterest, you add the words hex code, hashtag, your six letters and numbers. And that will bring up all kinds of pictures, all kinds of feelings and images that work with that particular shade. The other thing you can do is, this is I think the fourth method, I believe, I'll write this all down for you so you have it, is gene keys. Gene keys are a system developed by Richard Rudd that involves human design astrology, etc. And the gene keys is a lovely place to sort of get hints about who you are and maybe what colors match those energies. I would specifically look at, so it's kind of like a personality and soul test. I would specifically look at the areas of life's work, purpose, attraction, spiritual quotient or SQ and vocation. I would look at those spheres and those areas of your gene keys test. to get a sense of what they mean and therefore what colors you can bond with. Because now you're looking at your own soul's personality test and getting the color off of it. But that's, I think, something that's more involved and more intense and something you can do later down the road. But I would just first start with just... Looking around you, finding the photos, picking out the color of the photos, putting them in the colors app, and trying to find the right shade. Now, you've gone through all of the steps and you've found your shade that most feels like you. And again, it's not going to be the only shade, but it's your starting shade. So what I would recommend is this is how you would bond with the color. So first, be in the place that has these colors. So like I told you, for me, it's pink and reddish tones and orange tones. earthy tone. So I'm in Sedona. Now you don't have to do things like me and actually go there, but you can actually visit places that has this color. Like for example, let's say yellow is your color. And I'm thinking of this museum in LA. It's this photography museum and it had a lot of yellow in it. So you can go to a museum that has those colors or a certain exhibit that has those colors and just sit with it. The other thing you could do is you could wear the color. That's the easiest way. You can go on Google and put in the hexadecimal code and say hex code hashtag whatever and then say skirts or t-shirts or dresses and you can just wear the color all you need is one t-shirt and wear the color and that's the way you can bond with it you can also drink the color so for me it was this reddish pinkish tone so i love watermelon juice so i will drink watermelon juice let's say your color is green you could drink a green smoothie. Let's say the color is a certain shade of blue. You can buy the blue spirulina and make blue drinks and see how that works. You're really bonding with this color. You're wearing it, you're ingesting it, and you can also eat it. For example, I walked into Whole Foods just a few weeks ago, and right at the front of Whole Foods, right as I entered, were these tomatoes. And they are unlike any tomatoes I've seen before, because tomatoes usually have this bright red, almost fire truck, fire hydrant red color. But these tomatoes were these dark, deep red color tomatoes. And they were these cherry tomatoes. And they just were perfectly the color that I love. And they were me. And I picked them up and now I eat them in my salad almost every day. That's an example of how you can eat the color. And these are all the ways in which you can bond with the color. And then of course, once you found your primary color, you can start finding the secondary, the third color, the fourth color, and just continue. Once you have this color palette, once you have these colors, you will see without you even trying, you'll get all these ideas out of nowhere. People will start to come into your life out of nowhere. Opportunities are going to come out of nowhere. It's really bizarre. I don't even know how to explain this to you but you just have to try it and see but have fun with this you're finding your physical color in the world you're finding your exact shade you're finding yourself and then when you put all of this together you will have a ready-made way to paint your walls of your cafe or put in the specific colors in your logo when you're designing it or if you're delivering some kind of book to people you're writing a book you will know that the cover page of the book is going to have some of these colors. There are so many ways in which this can actually come into your brand. And it doesn't have to be all of the colors or anything like that, like I said, but it can really inform the work you do. And it is such a magical way of building your business and your brand and also just coming into your authenticity as a person. Okay, my lovelies, you know what I would really love? I would really love if you could send me your shades what shade you found and and what are the little funny stories that have happened since you found your shade I would really love to hear oh this makes me so excited I'm so excited to see what happens to all of you when you try this method color is the quickest way you can bring energy into form have you thought about it that way it's the quickest way you can do it you know I actually just realized that I picked more like the primary colors like red blue and yellow and gave you examples, but I didn't think of white and black. Maybe colors that are just not as colorful, shall we say. But I just want to change that. So if let's say that your primary color is white and you've really bonded with white, it could be shades of white. It could be cream. It could be ivory. It could be pearl. Maybe you like the texture of pearls and you realize that, oh, I really like that kind of pearlish glow. Maybe you see that you like clams and you like the inside of the clam and the way it looks with the pearl in it. Maybe you like those abalone shells or abalone shells. I don't know how they're pronounced. So you bring some of that incandescent rainbow light into your white shade. Maybe it's black. Maybe black is your favorite color. And in the black, maybe you like a full black color or maybe you like this midnight black that I talked about with my painting or So it's got slightly this bluish tone to it. Or maybe you like a different kind of black, like a reddish, blackish tone. There are many ways that you can work these colors into your life. It doesn't matter what color you pick. There's always a particular shade that would just be glorious to you. It will feel glorious. And I'm so excited for you to feel that feeling that I'm purposely extending this episode and not wanting to end it because I just, oh my god, talk about manifestation and manifesting. I didn't want to center the whole episode around that, but this is unintentionally what you will be doing. You will manifest out of thin air. I promise you that. I'm so excited. Okay, I have to end this episode. Clearly, I'm procrastinating on doing that. But yes, my lovelies, please share it with me. I'd love to hear. And I will link everything in the, I promise I'm not over extending this episode now, but I will link everything in the ritual guide. So you'll have all the links to the different apps and resources I talked about. And also, I forgot to tell you about Gene Keys. You can get a free profile of the Gene Keys on the Gene Keys website. So if you don't want to buy all the courses and do all of the studying that I did, you don't have to. You can just get a snippet of that information to inform your colors. In fact, I would recommend that you don't go too deep into it just to find the color. Go deep into it when you want to know more about your soul and stuff. But in the beginning, just a few words and a few feelings is all you really need to start. You can go to the Gene Keys profile and get the free profile. And I'll link all of that for you in the ritual guide. Okay, my lovelies, I'm finally attempting to end this episode. So may your dignity find its colorful expression here on this earth. Much love to you. Much excitement. to you bye