Building Your Professional Brand Helps You Take Off Your Mask

Come more fully alive by discovering who you are and how you are uniquely poised to serve.

Building your professional brand can help you spend more time without a mask.

Thinking about the word mask literally, medical professionals have always chosen to wear one in situations when doing so would protect their health or the health of others. And during this pandemic, medical masks have been a useful tool to help protect public health.

But thinking about the word mask figuratively, you may discover that you hide behind one at least some of the time. You may not put out to the world who you truly are and what you are uniquely poised to do. Building your professional brand can help you take off that figurative mask by giving you tools for better knowing yourself and what you are best at in the world. Building your professional brand also can help you believe in yourself and talk about yourself and your genius in ways that benefit your career—and the world.

One of my favorite quotes applies well here. Author, philosopher, theologian and educator Howard Thurman once said: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.”

Building your professional brand can not only help you take off your mask but come alive. The ETA™ process from Revealing Genius is a great pathway for this effort.

Building Your Professional Brand Using the ETA™ Process

So, what exactly is this ETA process?

The ETA process is a custom, time-proven methodology designed to help leaders—especially healthcare leaders—achieve their goals. It leverages the 10,000-hour rule, an ideology made popular by Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book “Outliers.” The rule posits that if you dedicate 10,000 hours deliberately practicing an activity, you can master it.

Importantly, some educators point out that the study on which this popular idea is based included an often-forgotten second key success factor: a masterful teacher. That’s where Revealing Genius comes in. If you’re ready to go about deliberately building your professional brand, Revealing Genius—and the people you’ll connect with as you go through the ETA process—will be the masterful teachers you need.

Visionary thought leaders, including global C-level executives, physicians, public servants, military leaders, Ph.D.s and consultants have benefitted from the ETA process. Many have said it was the catalyst to transforming their respective brands and reaching the next milestone in their professional or volunteer careers.

What are the foundations of this ETA process you ask? ETA stands for excavate, tell and affirm, the three steps in the process. We’ll dive into more deeply into each of these in the next section of this post.

Building Your Professional Brand With Three Key Steps

So, are you ready to take off your mask and show your true genius to the world? Here are three steps that can help you there, under the guidance of the professional branding experts at Revealing Genius.

1. Excavate. This is the part of the process when we dig into who you are and what you stand for, confirm your “keystone” goal and objectives, work on your statement of your purpose and prepare to develop your succinct and powerful elevator pitch.
2. Tell. In this step, we build your brand framework based on a 10-question brand story review. You can also take science and evidence-based assessments designed to help you understand your core competencies so you can better express what you are best at in the world and how you are uniquely poised to serve.
3. Affirm. Finally, we use your brand framework to prioritize your brand asset needs. And you’ll actively affirm your brand in such a way that you will feel it in your bones.

In 30 to 90 days from starting to work on building your professional brand using the ETA process, you can expect to excavate what’s behind any mask you might usually wear, learn how to professionally and compellingly tell others about your passion, and solidify, through affirmations, your conviction about how you can best serve. 

Here are some resources for getting started: 

• 45-minute complimentary webinar
• 7-Day Summit
• RG365 membership daily emails
• 1:1 sessions

We look forward to helping you discover, believe in and talk about the true genius that’s under your mask.

Mary E. Maloney, FACHE

An executive advisor, educator, speaker, author and producer, Mary E. Maloney is the founder of Revealing Genius and the expert that accomplished leaders trust for positioning, messaging and brand strategy for themselves, their teams and their organizations. A former CEO and CMO, Maloney guides healthcare C-suite leaders, founders, physicians and board directors to powerfully and strategically message their expertise and “why” so they lead with conviction and achieve their most coveted goals. She is a fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives (FACHE), one of only ~8,000 in the world to earn the credential, the benchmark for board certification in healthcare management.