Building Your Personal Brand: Establishing Thought Leadership Online and Offline with Carol Cox and Diane Diaz: Podcast Ep. 333

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We’re continuing our new series on personal branding.

If you caught our episode last week, we dug deep into defining what a personal brand is. 

We chatted about how to discover your unique brand, and why it’s crucial as a thought leader to sync it up with your audience.

Today, we’re all about building that brand of yours and establishing your thought leadership, both in the digital world and in person.

In this episode, Diane Diaz, our lead speaking coach, and I talk about:

  • How we built our personal brands when we started our businesses in 2015-2016
  • The importance of consistency
  • Why you shouldn’t discount jobs or businesses you’ve had in the past, even if they don’t feel like they are relevant to what you do now
  • Strategies for attending events and networking as an introvert
  • What to do after attending an event to nurture relationships with the people you met
  • Tips for building your personal brand online, especially on LinkedIn

Discover your Speaker Archetype by taking our free quiz at https://www.speakingyourbrand.com/quiz/

 

About Us: The Speaking Your Brand podcast is hosted by Carol Cox, joined in this episode by our lead speaking coach Diane Diaz. At Speaking Your Brand, we help women entrepreneurs and professionals clarify their brand message and story, create their signature talks, and develop their thought leadership platforms. Our mission is to get more women in positions of influence and power because it’s through women’s stories, voices, and visibility that we challenge the status quo and change existing systems. Check out our coaching programs at https://www.speakingyourbrand.com

 

 

Links:

Show notes at https://www.speakingyourbrand.com/333/ 

Discover your Speaker Archetype by taking our free quiz at https://www.speakingyourbrand.com/quiz/

Enroll in our Thought Leader Academy: https://www.speakingyourbrand.com/academy/ 

Connect on LinkedIn:

 

Related Podcast Episodes:

333-SYB-Building Your Personal Brand.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

333-SYB-Building Your Personal Brand.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Carol Cox:
We’re continuing our series on personal branding to talk about building your personal brand both online and offline in this episode of the Speaking Your Brand podcast. More and more women are making an impact by starting businesses, running for office and speaking up for what matters. With my background as a political analyst, entrepreneur and speaker, I interview and coach purpose driven women to shape their brands, grow their companies and become recognized as influencers in their field. This is speaking your brand, your place to learn how to persuasively communicate your message to your audience. Hi there and welcome to the Speaking Your Brand podcast. I’m your host, Carol Cox, joined today by our lead speaking coach, Diane Diaz. Hi, Diane. Hi, Carol. We are back for the series that we are doing on personal branding. Last week, Diane and I talked about defining your personal brand. So what does it mean to have a personal brand? Why do you have a personal brand, whether you think you do or not? How to go about discovering your personal brand and then why it’s so important as a thought leader to understand what your personal brand is to align with your audience. Today, we’re going to talk about building your personal brand, so establishing your thought leadership both online and offline. Next week’s episode is all around styling your personal brand, so how you look when you show up, but how you look so that you are confident and comfortable in who you are. And then finally, the fourth episode in this series will be all about amplifying your personal brand. You don’t need to have listened to the last week’s episode to listen to this one. Of course, you can always go back and listen to that one, but if you’re listening now, just continue on.

Carol Cox:
You can go back later and listen to last week’s episode. And if you’re new to speaking your brand, welcome. We’re so glad that you’re here. Here speaking your brand. We work with women entrepreneurs and professionals to help them develop their thought leadership and their public speaking and signature talk, because we believe that by amplifying the voices of women and increasing their visibility, we work towards changing the status quo to help drive positive change in the world. All right, Diane, so last week we talked about defining your personal brand. And we have our three C’s, which is all around clarity, consistency and credibility. I know we’re going to talk some more about how important it is as you’re building your personal brand to be consistent and the places that you’re showing up so that it’s clear what it is that you do and who you are. And also then to helps to build your credibility. And so as we were kind of thinking about this episode, I thought back to what we both did back in 2016, 2017 when we were starting our businesses. So I started speaking to your brand in 2015 and you started the brand Teacher in 2016. And I know in those kind of that three, four years in there, we went to a lot of women’s business groups, a lot of networking events. We were very involved in the community here in Orlando where we lived. I swear we were out 3 or 4 days a week between luncheons and evening groups and I’m like, Wow, how did we have the stamina and the energy for that?

Diane Diaz:
Oh my goodness. When I think about it, it doesn’t even feel like it was me, but I know it was.

Carol Cox:
And I think I wore heels most of the time, which I know you instantly know. We’re going to talk about in next week’s episode. But those heels do not work anymore.

Diane Diaz:
No, I wore them too. And now it’s a no for me.

Carol Cox:
And if you want to hear more about styling and heels, definitely listen to next week’s episode. But when we were we were going to all of these networking events and we were doing speaking engagements, we were getting to know people in the community. We were building our personal brands as well. We were showing up as ourselves, so we weren’t pretending to be someone else or pretending to have other personalities, but we were showing up as ourselves, but with the intention that obviously we wanted to make a good impression. We wanted to build relationships with other people and we wanted people to understand the work that we did and how potentially they would want to work with us to achieve the goals that they had. So, Diane, can you share a little bit about, you know, when you’re thinking about starting the brand teacher, what were your thoughts around your own personal brand and your business brand and how you wanted to show up? You know.

Diane Diaz:
I did think about it a lot because, of course, I teach branding at the university. So it was, you know, on my mind that I needed to kind of put some thought into this. I tried to capitalize on experience that I already had being a teacher and incorporate that into the brand that I wanted to present, which that’s kind of how the name the brand Teacher came about. But in my role in my in my company, I wanted to work on people’s personal brands. So I wanted obviously if I’m going to help people with their personal brands, my personal brand needs to be pretty clear, right? Because the cobbler must have shoes in this case. So I needed to make sure that everything that I was putting out aligned with who I said that I was, which is the brand teacher and the brand teacher, was not some, you know, made up persona for myself that did not fit with who I was. It did fit with who I was. I’ve always sort of been a natural teacher even before I was a teacher. So it was something that was very aligned with who I was. And I do like to help people learn in this instance, learn about their personal brand, learn about what they stand for and how to convey that.

Diane Diaz:
Online, offline, everywhere that they exist. So I made sure that my business cards, my website, my social media profiles, my LinkedIn, my business cards, that everything had a consistent look and feel and messaging to it to present who I was and who how I wanted to come across. And it didn’t mean that I had to spend a ton of money because I didn’t. You probably the most expensive thing I did was the headshots, but I created my own website on Wix. I even did my business cards, I think through I think I created them on Canva and then had them printed through Vistaprint. So I didn’t even spend a ton of money. And yet I still had a consistent look and feel. So when I showed up everywhere and anything I was giving out that talked about myself was all consistent with how I wanted to come across. So I was presenting this image of the brand teacher to everyone and in anybody I spoke to at a networking event, anything I did. And everywhere I went, I was the brand teacher. And so people started to know me as that.

Carol Cox:
And I remember that very well. And we have pictures together from those events and we were joking before we hit record that, you know, your hair is much longer now in 2023 because you had like a short bob back then. And so, you know, so our personal brands evolve and shift over time, whether it’s how we look, how we choose to dress or what it is that we choose to focus on. Because when I started speaking your brand in 2015 and we were and then started going to all of these networking events and speaking engagements and, and women’s business groups, my prior experience and my prior network here in Orlando had been in politics first and then had been in technology. So I had spoken at a lot of kind of marketing and technology related conferences and 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and so on, and then made the shift away from the focus on the technology company into speaking your brand. So I had to reestablish myself off in the community, not as a different person, but as someone who was doing something different in their business. So I had to be very intentional about showing up in the speaking engage the topics that I chose to speak about and the groups that I chose to attend.

Carol Cox:
So I kind of stopped attending the tech groups because it just didn’t align with what I was doing in my business and started attending events and groups that were more aligned. So for those of you listening and I feel like we get this a lot from our clients that they want to kind of pretend that other aspects of their career didn’t happen or they feel like, well, don’t do that thing anymore, so maybe I shouldn’t talk about it or like they’re embarrassed about it or they they want to like, just like not hide it because there’s anything wrong with it, but just because they feel like it doesn’t fit. But I feel like everything that we’ve done in our careers, there’s always a thread that ties them together. And you don’t have to have that be front and center in what you’re doing, but also feel like that those things can also give you credibility and authority. So don’t discount them either.

Diane Diaz:
That is such a good point, Carol, because I remember when I was working as a brand teacher and I was working on a client’s LinkedIn profiles, I had a client ask me about something related to her LinkedIn profile experience section, and she said, you know, I’m I was in the military, so I took all of that stuff off my profile because that’s not what I do anymore. And I said, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Your military experience or any experience that you have has informed where you are now. And so so think if you can think of your personal brand as the story of you. And your story doesn’t didn’t start yesterday or when you opened your business or five years ago. It started from the very beginning. And so everything is part of your personal brand. Okay. Yes. Maybe you’ve made a career pivot. Maybe you’re in something completely different. But that doesn’t mean what you did before is completely irrelevant to where you are now. You might pull stories from those times. You know, I still pull stories from when I used to be in corporate because it is part of my personal brand. So everything is relevant. And you’re right, you might not put it front and center, but don’t get rid of it completely. It is the story of how you became this personal brand.

Carol Cox:
And. Exactly. And there is a thread. And as we talked about on last week’s episode, Diane, I feel like for you, you know, personal branding has in branding and marketing obviously is your degrees are in business and marketing. You’ve done marketing and branding and the different jobs that you’ve had over your career. And so I feel like the thread that ties all that together, even though what you do now is speaking your brand and working with our clients is different than the marketing that you did and land development, the thread is that you’re helping people to show up how they want to show up and then achieve whatever goals that they have related to their brand.

Diane Diaz:
Yes, basically helping them tell their story. Right. And that’s and it’s no different than a physical brand like a you know, in a when I worked in land development, working on a community, telling that story, this is telling your personal story. So for your personal brand, same, same ideas apply to our personal brands that apply to actual physical products and service brands.

Carol Cox:
So let’s talk about some strategies that listeners can take to build their personal brand, both online and offline. So let’s start with offline, since we are, you know, more and more events and conferences and groups are coming back in person. And as we chatted just a few minutes ago, we we really built our personal brands and our businesses by going to in-person events and groups and doing public speaking. And this is why we are such big advocates for the women that we work with. And obviously they come to us for public speaking because that is one, I would argue, probably the best way to and the fastest way to build credibility and authority is as a public speaker, because by standing in front of a room of people, whether it’s 20 people or at a workshop or 200 people or 2000 people on a stage, you are by default seen as the expert, seen as the authority you have built in credibility. And that is the best way to leverage that and to really to help to get yourself out there as a brand and as a thought leader.

Diane Diaz:
Yes, that’s so true. And I think now, having lived during the Covid times of everything being virtual, I can see even more the value of that offline life and being in person, being on stages, actually going to events, going to networking events, well, nothing can replicate the human to human connection that happens when you are in person with one another because so much transpires in your being that cannot be conveyed virtually so much, you know, body language or movement on the stage, little gestures, little facial expressions, intonations in your voice, eye contact with someone that cannot be replicated 100% virtually. So you must get on stage, go to events, speak to other human beings to be able to build your personal brand in a really authentic way.

Carol Cox:
And Diane, I know that you’ve been going to more in-person events and groups over the past couple of months, kind of getting back involved in the Orlando community. And so what are some strategies and tips you have for showing up, especially as introverts? I know you’re an introvert. I’m an introvert and I know so many of the women we work with consider themselves introverts and is listening right now. You may consider yourself an introvert, and as an introvert, you can still go to events, you can still go to networking groups and you can still I don’t know if you’re going to love it as much as an extrovert, but you can still get value out of it. So let’s talk about Diane first, tips you have for actually showing up and then what do you do after you meet someone at an event to continue to build the relationship?

Diane Diaz:
So I agree with you as an introvert, I would not say that I love it, but I do know that it’s necessary. And while I don’t love it, what I do love about it is that you are making a human to human connection. So that I actually enjoy. Because the reason I don’t love it is because I am an introvert and I prefer smaller groups like maybe 3 to 5 people. And you don’t have that when you go to a networking event. But while you’re at the networking event, you can make a connection with a few people. So that I love. Now, I think I got this tip from Nikki Roush, which is the idea that when you go into a networking event, have a plan to connect with a certain number of people, not 25 or anything crazy like that, I usually say, okay. I’m going to meet three new people and then I’m going to really connect with one of those people. And usually when I go in with that intention, it does work. So what I would say, especially for introverts, this can be really hard to do. I’m going to say try to go to events, not along with someone that you know, because what I have found as an introvert is if I go with someone I know, I will only talk to that person. That’s why we.

Carol Cox:
Don’t go together to these groups and events.

Diane Diaz:
No, you know, I feel like, yeah, it’s still fun to go, but you’re sort of defeating the purpose of going, which is to meet new people already know the people I know. I need to know some people I don’t know. Right? So. So even though it feels uncomfortable, I force myself to do it. The other thing that I do, and I just did this at a recent event that I went to and this was uncharacteristic of me, but I said, What the heck, I’m just going to try. It had never been to this particular group before. It was a local chamber of commerce, women’s group. And I literally when I when people were sitting like, you know, people were there, they were chit chatting with each other, I did know someone there. So I was talking to her, met a couple of people that were kind of standing up, milling around. But then I kind of looked around and saw people sitting at tables already. So I said, you know, I’m just going to go up to maybe 3 or 4 women at different tables and introduce myself. Now, do I love doing that? 100%.

Diane Diaz:
No, I do not. But I figured, guess what? If I don’t enjoy this, I don’t ever have to come back to it again. And if they’re not nice, which they’re always going to be nice. Let’s face it, they’re all there for the same purpose. They’re not going to not be nice. But if it’s not good, then I just won’t connect with them further. And I did meet a couple of people that I really enjoyed chatting with, some good, you know, women that I might want to connect with further. So that is my first tip is just don’t be afraid to just walk up to someone and introduce yourself. This is like first day of school, right? It’s nerve wracking. You don’t know who’s going to sit with you at the lunch table. I was a shy kid like this is hard for me to do, but trust me, if I can do it, you can do it. And it’s I think it also shows a certain human ness to open yourself up to that person that you don’t know. And then they reciprocate, which they always do, because we’re all just humans.

Carol Cox:
Yes. Yeah. Thank you, Diane, for sharing that. And yeah, thinking about going up to groups of 3 or 4 women and just introducing myself because I was definitely a shy child as well. I feel like as I’ve gotten older, I’m definitely much more comfortable doing that than I was when I was younger. One of the reasons I became a public speaker at conferences and events is because it gave me a role. It gave me a title. So I almost felt like then I there was of course I was going to go and introduce myself to people because I was one of the speakers. So I wanted to find out like, what brought you to this event? What are you interested in learning about? That’s one reason to be a speaker, but if you’re not a speaker at a particular event, kind of give yourself a role. Like you can give your you can pretend that you’re part of the welcoming committee. They don’t have to know that you have named yourself part of the welcoming committee. But in my head I tell myself that and I also say everyone else is there. They’re probably awkward feeling awkward as well and unsure of who to talk to. So if I just go up and introduce myself as if I’m the welcoming committee, then maybe, you know, then hopefully that will make us all feel more comfortable.

Diane Diaz:
Yes, that’s a great point. You know, too, along those lines of the welcoming committee, another thing that I can share in this, this is something I did at a recent event that I went to was a huge, much bigger event. And I did not know anybody there, which was weird because I had been to other events of this group before, but it was a sort of a awards type event. So it was a sort of a different group of people with the same organization. And I was it was very uncomfortable and awkward. And I don’t know any of these people and everybody sort of had already paired off and was chit chatting. And so it was kind of hard to like, well, let me just go up and talk to them. But I did see one young woman sitting on a little settee and the little waiting area where we were waiting for the doors to open. She was sitting by herself. So I thought, you know what? She probably feels exactly how I feel. So I’m going to go talk to her because we’re both in the same boat here. So I said, I said to her, Hi, you look like you’re here by yourself. And I am too. May I sit with you? And she’s like, Oh, thank God. She was so happy to have me talk to her. So would I would offer this piece of advice is to look for the person that looks like they’re struggling to introduce themselves to people. And then you can be that welcoming committee because you probably have a little bit more confidence than they do. And then just introduce yourself to them. And then maybe if you see someone else, you know, introduce that person to those people and this is how our connections get made. But then it lets down everybody’s guard. If you take sort of take that person under your wing.

Carol Cox:
And if we think about this, this idea of personal branding, Diane. Imagine as an event organizer, if I saw a couple of women doing that, like making other people feeling comfortable initiating conversation, I would be like, Oh my gosh, that is amazing. I am so glad that Diane is here, you know, like and doing this. And then now when you go to that event organizer and maybe say, Hey, can I speak at one of your upcoming meetings, they’re going to be much more likely to say yes, because you’ve been a warm, welcoming person just by nature.

Diane Diaz:
Absolutely. Absolutely. Because you however you present. Yourself at this event, even if you’re not the one speaking is what your personal brand. Is to them. Right. So when they see you doing that and that’s how you come across, they’re going to want more of you.

Carol Cox:
So, Diane, you go to these networking events, you meet a few people, you connect with them. So then what do you do after the event?

Diane Diaz:
Do not let your connection that you made die at the event. So what I like to do is when I get back home, I connect with them on LinkedIn provided they have a LinkedIn profile. And by the way, please everybody have a LinkedIn profile. Please make it easy for people to connect with you if that’s the only social media that you have. And if you just start your business and you have no website, at least have a social media or have a LinkedIn profile so that people can connect with you. So I immediately send them a connection request. I remind them in the note, in the connection, you know, when you send the connection request, you can put a little message. I remind them how we met and I try to think of something that, you know, memorable. It was a pleasure chatting with you about, you know, the work that you did with blah, blah, blah or whatever we talked about. If there was something I even connect with the presenters, even if I did not meet them at the event because I want them, Hey, I came to support you, right? So this is how we build connections.

Diane Diaz:
So connect with the people you met. And if you feel like there might be more of a connection that can be made, like maybe they’re a good client for you, or maybe maybe you can connect them with someone else, invite them to coffee. I have done this recently and actually I’m having coffee on Friday with a young woman that I met at a at a recent event. And she actually, when I connected with her, she sent me an email asking me if I would go have coffee with her. So see, so she’s putting into play what I say to do, which I love. So try to nurture these connections because just meeting a whole bunch of people and building out your list of connections on LinkedIn or the amount of people that you know is useless unless you try to nurture it. Right. And this is how we find clients, find speaking engagements, find new connections that can connect us to other opportunities. But you can’t just do it by connecting with them at the event. And then that’s the end of that.

Carol Cox:
Exactly. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about building your personal brand online. I’ll just add one thing, is that another thing is try to show up at the same group at their regular event so they have monthly luncheons or monthly meetings or what have you. Find a couple of groups that you really want to get involved and as long as you like, you enjoy the group, it aligns well with you. You like the people who are there versus trying to find a new one to go to every single time because you’re going to you’re going to build those deeper relationships if you keep showing up with the same people.

Diane Diaz:
That’s such a great point. So I’ve been going to a local women’s group regularly, and you do get to know some of the people a little bit better. And I would say, you know, pro tip, you don’t necessarily have to pay for a membership to the group. Most groups will let you pay as a non-member and come to their their events, their luncheons. So do that. If you find a group that you absolutely love, definitely join and support them. But you can try out a whole bunch of different groups and you don’t have to necessarily join, you know, the local chamber of commerce or whatever group it is, but definitely go more than once and meet the speakers, meet the people there, meet the players and show that you’re supporting them because that is part of your personal brand.

Carol Cox:
Let’s talk about some tips and strategies that people can use for building their personal brand online. So we’ve talked about LinkedIn and how important it is to have a filled out LinkedIn profile. So even if you don’t really use LinkedIn, maybe you’re more active on Instagram, that’s fine. But really for especially for professional engagements and events that you’re showing up to, you really should have a LinkedIn profile. Also, just today as we’re recording this, someone messaged me on LinkedIn because they’re looking for a speaker for an AI, for a conference that’s coming up in a few months. And so, I mean, maybe this happens on Instagram I think is probably harder because people search on keywords in LinkedIn, specifically on speakers, on certain topics. So in my headline, my profile headline on LinkedIn, I have founder speaking, your brand podcaster and so on. But I also added in there I strategist and in the content of my LinkedIn profile. Under my speaking topic section, I added a couple of topics related to AI. So I assume that’s how this person found me. Diane What other tips do you have for people on for LinkedIn specifically, but then also for building their personal brand online?

Diane Diaz:
Is the star student here today?

Carol Cox:
Love thanks to you.

Diane Diaz:
I love that you did that, though, because that illustrates the difference between a platform like Instagram and a platform like LinkedIn. You’re absolutely right. Linkedin is what I call Google friendly. It uses it’s almost like a its own search engine in a way, right. For professional people. So when you go on there, you can put in keywords and search or you can be on Google and searching, you know, AI Speaker and perhaps your LinkedIn profile comes up in the Google results, but that is because of the keywords that you use. So it has a very sort of robust SEO happening behind the scenes. You must have a LinkedIn profile because you can’t really do that on Instagram. Right? And and I would say Instagram is a lot noisier. There’s stuff going. Constantly. Constantly, constantly. It’s not, although there’s a lot of content on LinkedIn. It doesn’t really the frequency isn’t happening like that and things are a little bit more. It’s more like a slow burn, right? You get the information and you can consume it and you can search for stuff. So definitely build your presence there. I would say also especially on LinkedIn, but even on your website or any of your social media profiles, if you want to be a speaker, make sure that is somewhere in your content because you have to tell people who you are and what you do.

Diane Diaz:
You can’t expect them to just know that you’re a speaker. So you have to tell them this. Put it in your headline on LinkedIn, put it in the the content of the body of your profile listed under your experience section that you’re a keynote speaker. Put it on your website, put it in your Instagram handle, put it everywhere so that it’s clear what you do and and make sure that you are using, you know, I know we’re all most of us are kind of sick of social media in general. However, these tools are available to you, so use them in a way that it makes sense for you. I, for the most part, don’t use anything but LinkedIn anymore. You know, I still have Instagram, but I don’t really use it. But I am on LinkedIn, I am posting content, I am commenting on other people’s things, connect with, like I said, event organizers or people you meet at events or people that spoke at an event. People who are speaking at an event know about speaking engagements. So they’re great to connect with. So try to really utilize the tools that you have available to you in the online space.

Carol Cox:
And Diane, let’s talk about headshots and profile photos, because I know that, you know, for most of the of the women that we work with and that we see on LinkedIn, they have nice professional headshots that they that they use as their profile picture. And that’s really, really important. If you’re going to be doing podcast interviews, if you’re doing speaking engagements, they’re going to expect high resolution, professional quality photos of you that you can make available to them. And you don’t have to spend a lot of money. You can find even maybe a younger photographer or someone who’s starting out but still has the good camera equipment, has the lighting, knows how to, you know, to to get you set up. And if they don’t maybe have a lot of experience with professional headshots, then you can do some Googling and find like how to pose. Please don’t do like the old poses from years ago like that. We know what they are and try to, you know, make make it you like make it professional, make it you. But you don’t have to be someone that you’re not. Diane, can you share a little bit about the the comedy event that you’re going to be doing and and thinking about your own photo for that? Yes.

Diane Diaz:
So I’m I might have blacked out when I when I signed up for this. I’m not sure what happened.

Carol Cox:
I think I signed you up. No.

Diane Diaz:
Maybe you did. Maybe that happened. I don’t know. Maybe somebody got me drunk. I’m not sure what transpired. I’m kidding. I, I, I attended an event here that is just regular women in the community who do a five minute comedy set. And it was so much fun that Carol decided no, Carol. And I said hey. And I agreed it would. I like to. I love humor and I am obsessed with comedians. So we thought it’d be a good idea if I signed up and then I wasn’t going to. And then I just got a, I guess a maybe blacked out, I’m not sure. And then I did sign up. And so now the event organizer said, Hey, when you get a chance, send me a headshot and it can be something funny. It doesn’t have to be like a serious professional business headshot. And, you know, I don’t really have anything like that because I am not one of these people who’s first of all, I’m not I’m honestly someone who rarely takes pictures of anything. I just am not from that generation that, you know, I, I was born before the existence of computer in our pocket.

Diane Diaz:
We did not have those. So I rarely take pictures of anything, much less myself. So why would I? I don’t do selfies and I have short arms, so it’s just really not conducive to selfies. I don’t really have anything fun. So I’m like, Well, I mean, I have a serious headshot. Is that what I want to send? I don’t know. So I’m trying to figure out a way to get something fun. But but it has to be aligned with who I’m am because I’m not the I don’t do selfies. I don’t do the little you know, I don’t do TikTok dances. I don’t do any of that stuff. So I don’t really have anything like that. So I’m I’ve got to find a way to have something that is more genuine. Maybe while I’m on vacation that’s upcoming, I’ll do something like that. But I’m sort of having a conundrum about I want to give her something that is fun because I am, I think, funny, but it has to align with my personality too. Yes.

Carol Cox:
And you are funny. And I completely agree, because if I saw a photo of you where you were like making a funny face or something, like, I don’t know, I would I would look at it and I’d be like, Yeah, like, I know Diane. And that’s just not it’s not her. So that wouldn’t. Feel genuine to me and aligned with me. But I know there is one photo of you, one of your professional headshots. I think you’re in a white top and you have a great smile on your face. I feel like it’s really warm and inviting so you don’t come up with anything else. I think that one.

Diane Diaz:
I would have to agree with you. If it comes down to it, that’s the one I will send because I’m struggling to come up with anything else.

Carol Cox:
So the thing with the with your headshots is, again, you don’t have to necessarily spend a lot of money you can like there. I mean, there are amazing photographers, the photographer we use here in Orlando, she’s incredible. And so it could be very much be well worth it to invest in that. If you’re at a place in your business where you know you’re going to be using a lot of different photos for your website and speaking engagements and your social media and all of that. But yeah, you can also just find a way to do it affordably but still have it look professional and have that consistency across your social media profiles and on your website so that when people go to your different places online, they recognize that it’s you. You don’t have like a photo of you at the beach on your LinkedIn profile and then something completely different on your website. So you want to make sure that you have like we talked about that clarity and that consistency because that reinforces the credibility as you’re building your personal brand and your thought leadership. And so we’ve been talking quite a bit in this episode about going to events, going to networking events, the impact you can have as a public speaker, why we’re such advocates for women being public speaker, if that’s something that you are interested in doing and that you want to uplevel your skills around public speaking, you can check out our Thought Leader Academy and our Thought Leader Academy.

Carol Cox:
We work with you closely to develop your thought leadership message and your signature talks so that you can feel confident and clear about your message. As you go out there and do your speaking engagements. You can get all the details about the Thought Leader Academy as speaking your brand.com/academy. Again, that’s speaking your brand.com/academy. Diane, thank you as always for coming on the Speaking Your Brand podcast next week. You have interviewed our client concierge, Selena Roberts, who’s also an incredible image stylist. And I know you and I listened to the conversation about styling your personal brand and it is so good. I can’t wait for listeners to hear that. So if you’re listening to this podcast right now, make sure to hit, subscribe or follow in your podcast app so you automatically get next week’s episode in your podcast queue. Diane, thanks for being here.

Diane Diaz:
Thank you so much, Carol.

Carol Cox:
For the rest of you, until next time, thanks for listening.

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