Your Personal Brand Can Change When You Do

In this solo episode of Fearlyss & Unfiltered, Alyssa shares her personal journey of navigating major life changes while maintaining and evolving her personal brand. She emphasizes the importance of authenticity, vulnerability, and strategic pivoting to stay aligned with your true self and goals.

Key topics:

• How personal life shifts influence your brand identity
• Building and re-aligning your brand through authentic sharing
• The Flow Framework: Assessing core values to guide branding
• Building in public and embracing vulnerability during transitions
• The importance of sharing small, relatable moments to connect deeply
• Overcoming fear and insecurities when pivoting your personal brand
• Practical tips for staying true to yourself while evolving your branding
• Examples of real-life brand pivots and lessons learned
• Why polished perfection can hinder genuine connection
• Encouragement to reflect on what parts of your brand feel aligned versus misaligned

Timestamps: 00:01 - My journey of launching season two with authenticity 00:30 - The core idea: your personal brand should evolve with you 00:58 - Building your brand under your name vs. business name 01:52 - How life changes affect your brand identity 02:22 - Navigating brand pivots during personal and professional shifts 03:01 - Showing up authentically in tough times 03:24 - The struggle of sharing behind the curtain 04:22 - Personal brand flexibility depends on your growth 04:45 - Revisiting the Flow framework to reassess values 05:13 - Values remain stable even when circumstances change 06:11 - Leaning into entrepreneurial, motherhood, and ADHD content 06:49 - The power of packaging your authentic self 07:42 - Building in public and sharing your journey 08:53 - A real-life example of career pivot and how to navigate it 09:22 - The importance of starting imperfectly and sharing your story early 10:18 - Growing trust through transparency in your transition 11:01 - The challenge of showing up as the new version of yourself 11:26 - The willingness to be vulnerable as a key to authentic branding 12:20 - Connecting deeply by sharing relatable moments, not just polished content 13:03 - Setting boundaries on what to share in your personal story 13:58 - Using everyday moments to build rapport and conversation 15:27 - Reflection: What parts of your brand are true, and what parts need realignment? 16:30 - Digging into the fears behind your brand shifts 17:16 - When desire outweighs fear, change becomes easier 17:34 - Final thoughts: Embrace change, stay fearless, and keep authentic 18:04 - Call to action: Share and review to grow the message

Resources & Links:

 Flow Framework for Personal Branding

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

My goodness, I am so excited to be recording my first solo episode of season two of Fearless and Unfiltered because holy shit, the last time I recorded, life was entirely different. And I did not feel good about interviewing any new guests on a show called Fearless and Unfiltered without acknowledging the fearlessness of what has been the past six months and sharing with you the unfiltered thoughts and stories behind this crazy thing we call life, the one I'm living over here in Pittsburgh, North Carolina. So I want to talk about today your personal brand and how it shifts when you shift. Before we get into story time, I have always believed that the beauty of building a personal brand is that when you change, it can change with you. People always ask me in the social media space, should they be building under their business name or their actual name, their name and their likeness? And almost always, without doubt, when we are talking about a service-based business owner or an entrepreneur looking to build their credibility, we are talking about building under their name. Because if you decide to go a different route in business or life changes and you are suddenly not working under the brand of your LLC, what then you've built this audience, you've built this community that is attached to the brand, but they don't know you as a person. So how do they move with you? Right. And your name is almost never gonna change. Actually, I said that and then I realized that that's not necessarily true. But your first name will almost always stay the same. And what you value and people what people know you for when you build your brand correctly should stay the same too. There are times in your business where the brand pivots naturally and automatically if you decide to go into a whole new direction, right? Your brand is gonna change. But sometimes none of those things change. Sometimes you change. Sometimes your personal life changes. And it can be really hard to know how to show up authentically when that's happening. I will be completely honest with you. As somebody who runs a social media marketing agency, showing up on social media in arguably the hardest time of my life felt damn near impossible. And it felt impossible because I didn't know who I was or what brand I wanted to build. I had a lot of unlearning, relearning, and building and healing and all of the things to do, right? So you find yourself in a situation where you're trying to do the thing that has always worked. You're working in the business that you've built from the ground up. And then suddenly you're like, I can't, I can't do this anymore because I'm not the same person who built this thing. I am this person now. And I remember actively thinking to myself, like from the outside looking in, what I'm posting on social media, nobody has any idea what is happening behind the curtain, what is happening in my daily life, the struggles that I'm facing, or the small tiny victories that I'm seeing. And I have always healed by sharing. And when you don't know how to share or what's okay to share, that brand that you've been working on building kind of automatically pauses. And that's really scary for somebody who runs an online business. But again, the first thing I said when I hit record is that your personal brand can shift with you. If you are not familiar with the Flow framework, it is a personal branding and social media strategy that I wrote early last year, 2025. And as I was looking at my brand, I had to go back and read the book that I wrote because I I wrote it such a long time ago that I mean, I know the foundation of the framework. I teach it regularly, but I don't remember like the stories and the examples and all the things that I use. So I had to go back and look at it again and say, okay, now that I am in this new life and everything has changed unexpectedly, how do I want to show up? And what was really cool about that in going through those exercises in the foundational exercises, which is the first portion of flow, you talk about your values and what makes you who you are. And there are things that you can do to sort of define that and how you're gonna live that in your brand. What was really cool for me was none of those things had changed. So even though all of the circumstances in my life were completely different, none of my values were different. There were things that I could still truly and authentically share and talk about without giving away my entire life story. I started leaning really heavy into entrepreneurial and motherhood and ADHD content because I felt that shift within myself of I don't think that social media manager is what I want to be known for anymore. It's still my business, it's still the work I do with my clients, but I felt such an insane shift within myself that I almost needed to package it differently. And I will be completely honest with you that I have not yet entirely nailed down what that is gonna look like, but I've done a lot of work. So I'd say maybe I'm 70% there. There are very many times where I will just be sitting there minding my own business. Example, it happened last night when I was sandwiched between my children in bed, just waiting for them to fall asleep. I had this download of like, okay, wait, I know how all of these things I value and these things that I'm passionate about could fit together in the future of fearless media. So that was really cool. I think the idea that when we pivot and our brand pivots with us directly correlates to the idea of building in public. Building in public is something you've probably heard before. It's something that I teach regularly that you don't have to have it all figured out. You don't have to have the end goal in sight to post about the things that are important to you and your business and the things that can help your clients and the things that can help you connect with other people. And there is no time, like the messy middle, to start building in public. I actually had a conversation with someone this morning who is a couple months into her professional pivot. She was doing really amazing work. And in fact, I'm gonna have her come on the show soon and share her story. So I don't want to give away too much details, but she was doing really amazing work, making a good amount of money in a field that she did not care about. And she even decided to switch companies. She thought maybe the the ownership that she was working under wasn't aligning with her, and she went and got a new job in the same field. And when she got there, she was like, oh shit, it's not actually the work. It's me. This isn't aligned with me. And so she made the powerful decision to exit that line of work, and she is slowly but surely figuring out what comes next. That is a great example of the messy middle and building in public. When she was asking me about social media, I said, Why do you feel like you need to have this perfectly packaged brand together to start posting? You don't even have a business name yet, right? You but you know it's important to you, you know the business you want to build, that's not gonna change. Who you are as a person isn't gonna change. So if you wait until that brand is perfectly polished and you have the logo and you have the font and you have all of the things, you're gonna be talking to nobody. You're gonna be launching and announcing that to nobody. But if you start to talk about the things that you value and share your story in the pivot and how you got to where you are now, do you see how that's the personal brand building with you? So that by the time you are ready, six months from now, to launch this new business, you're already gonna have that community who trusts you because they know you and they're gonna buy from you and they're gonna wanna work with you. At the end of the day, it all comes down to this. One of the hardest parts about a major transition is realizing that people may know one version of you, but you're not building as her anymore. So then you have to decide, how am I going to show up? Am I willing to be vulnerable? Am I willing to say the hard thing or say things out loud that might feel a little scary? Because if the answer to all of those things is no, you then have to go one step further. Why? If we talk about building an authentic brand, that's what everybody wants to do. Everybody wants to build an authentic brand. But if you are only willing to show up as the polished version, you're not, you're lying to yourself. You're not building an authentic brand. You're brand, you're building a brand that you think looks good to other people. And if I'm being really honest, that perfectly polished branded crap that you're posting on the internet that AI made for you in like half a second, that's not getting your people to connect with you. What gets people to connect with you on a soul level is when you share something that they can understand and they feel like they're there with you. Now I'm not saying you have to share all your dirty laundry. I still, even in this episode where I've said to you that my whole life changed and da-da-da-da-da-da-da. You're never gonna hear me share the specifics of what's happening in my family that is only for me in my family. You can take a guess. I've shared, I've alluded to it, right? But that's nobody's business. They can read between the lines. You don't need to share every tiny detail to be authentic, to connect with other people. But what you can do is choose little moments, or maybe it's a moment that you need support, or you have a question, or you're learning something new, or you learn something new and you're excited to share it. Those are the connection pieces that move with you, that build with you. You're you build your brand by having conversations with people. You probably are in a reinvention season. You're probably thinking about how you're gonna show up if you've listened this far, right? So at the end here, I want you to think about this question. What part of my brand and the way I show up still feels true? And what part now feels a little misaligned and why? Let's dig into the why. When you do that, you're likely gonna figure out that there's some fear there. And like I always say, we got to go a level deeper. We got to dig a little deeper. Where is that fear coming from? What are you worried about? And when you know what you're worried about, you can gauge that against what it is you want to be known for. Because if what you want to be known for is stronger than this fear over here, if your desire to do and achieve and be this person is stronger than the fear that's telling you you can't pivot, you can't change, you can't build, you can't be hard, that's all you need. We're gonna have a lot of conversations about change and pivots. And I'm gonna share my unfiltered thoughts with you. I promise this was just a warm-up. If you have listened to Fearless and Unfiltered through season one, or if you're brand new here on season two, I want to say thank you. Being able to share my unfiltered thoughts, my ADHD squirrel moments with you. That brings me so much joy. And it would be so helpful if you could share this episode with somebody who you think needs to hear it, or if you can just leave a review wherever you're listening to this. That is the quickest way to get this podcast in front of more people and help it grow. My goal, I'll tell you now, is to bring some of the people I admire in business onto the show by the end of the year. So thank you for anything you can do to help me get there. As always, I hope you stay fearless and I will see you next time.