Revealing Genius | Brand Strategy for Accomplished Leaders

Category: Excavate Personal Brand

Excavate to identify your executive personal brand. Learn how to make your personal brand stand out in a crowded digital world.

Three Keys to Unlocking Your Professional Brand
Learn more about what you stand for by examining your accomplishments, core values and ‘swan song.’
Unlocking your professional brand is made easier when you have lots of keys—that is, lots of ways to approach discovering your unique genius.
When you’re just starting to create your professional brand, unlocking what is at its core might seem difficult. But we can aid your efforts through the time-proven ETA™ process from Revealing Genius. The first step of this process for creating your professional brand—“excavate”—offers lots of approaches for getting at the core of what you stand for and your unique reason to serve.
In the broader world, we have lots of ways to get down to things that may at first be hidden from view. For example, a shovel can be a great tool for excavating soil and looking at what’s underneath. A password can get you behind the gate on a computer so you can read the files you need. A key can unlock a door so you can see what’s inside.
Let’s talk about three of the keys you can use to help unlock your professional brand: your proudest accomplishments, your core competencies and your “swan song.”
Unlocking Your Professional Brand Through Your Proudest Accomplishments
One way to get insight into your professional brand is to spend time thinking about your proudest accomplishments.
Take a moment right now to write down several things you’ve done that you’re proud of. These can be from when you were a child, a young adult, a college student or from any other point in your life.
Next narrow the list to your top three accomplishments. Think about why they stand out. Your answer will say a lot about what is at the core of your professional brand.
Unlocking Your Professional Brand Through Your Core Values
These days we all have a lot of competing priorities in our lives. You’ll learn a lot about your professional brand if you can narrow a long list of things you value to just three top ones.
First, write down lots of things you value. The values you write down could be ones you view as personal as well as ones you think of as being part of your professional life. For example, some common values people find important include loyalty, compassion, honesty, kindness, integrity and selflessness. Other commonly held values include achievement, adventure, courage, creativity, dependability, friendship, health justice, spontaneity and wealth.
Don’t limit yourself to the values provided in the previous paragraph. The important thing is to write down lots of things that you value. Also at this point in the exercise, don’t limit your thinking about what you value. Make a long list.
Then spend some time narrowing your long list of values to just three that resonate with you. The values you choose will speak volumes about your professional brand.
Don’t rush this decision. Sleep on it. Revisit your list another day and see if you want to make a change.
Unlocking Your Professional Brand Through Your ‘Swan Song’
“Swan song” is a metaphorical phrase for a final gesture, such as a person’s last public performance or professional activity before retirement. The phrase refers to an ancient belief that swans sing a beautiful song just before death since they have been silent for most of their lives.
Many famous people have underscored the value of doing a “swan song” exercise.
For example, educator and keynote speaker Stephen Covey is famous for having advised audiences to “begin with the end in mind.” And late Carnegie Mellon University professor Randy Pausch is credited with inspiring many people to live out their dreams with his “Last Lecture” presentation and his book by the same name.
You can do a swan song exercise today and use it to help create your professional brand!
Think of it as choosing a Ted talk topic. If you were going to give a last presentation, what topic would you choose? Write an outline for the main points you would cover.
Then look at your chosen topic and talking points from the perspective of your brand. What do they say about you and what you stand for? What do they say about your unique reason to serve? These are but three ways that Revealing Genius helps professionals unlock their executive brands. If you’d like more tips like these, check out our blog or sign up for our 45-minute complimentary webinar, our 7-Day Summit, RG365 membership daily emails or 1:1 sessions. We’re excited to help you unlock your professional brand!

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 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.
April 26, 2022
What Is at the Core of Your Professional Brand?
You, the people you want to serve and the transformation that only you can help them make
Getting to the core of things—like to the Earth’s core—involves digging down. At Revealing Genius, we call getting to what is at the core of your professional brand “excavating”—and “excavate” is the first step in our time-proven ETA™ process for executive branding.
Notably, developing your professional brand isn’t just about knowing yourself well. It’s also about deeply caring about and understanding the people you most want to serve. At Revealing Genius, we refer to the people you’ll identify as your ideal customers as “your beloved avatar.” Knowing your beloved avatar well will help you not only dig into the core of your brand but also have conviction about it. More on this later.
The third thing that’s at the core of your brand is the transformation that you—and only you—can help your beloved avatar make. Having a picture in your mind of your client making this transformation will inspire your passion to get up every day ready to make this change a reality.
So, what is at the core of your professional brand? The three-prong answer is you, the people you want to serve and the transformation that only you can help them make.
Let’s talk about each of these in more detail.
Excavate What Is at the Core of Your Professional Brand
When you’re excavating your brand as part of the Revealing Genius ETA™ process, you’ll get at the core of your professional brand by focusing on yourself. To tap into your personal genius, you’ll ask and answer such questions as:
- What am I good at? What are my key competencies?
- Who are my heroes and why?
- What quote or mantra do I live by?
- What do I want to do more of? Less of?
When you’re in the excavate step of your personal brand journey with Revealing Genius, you will also take science-based assessments to help you understand your strengths and your style. I’ve seen these assessments help clients own strengths they previously didn’t give themselves credit for having. I’ve also seen my clients’ surprise at something an assessment revealed they do exceptionally well—and then come to own that uniqueness.
One more idea about excavation: Think about your “brandthem.” This is the upbeat song or piece of music that makes you feel great about yourself and gets you going. Participants in our 7-Day Summit identify and share theirs. Take a moment to put yours on now as you read the rest of this post.
Your Beloved Avatar Shares Your Brand Spotlight
Many business people talk about their customers and clients. Maybe even their ideal customers and clients. But how many do you know who refer to the people they serve as their “beloved avatar”? At Revealing Genius, we’ve seen how this terminology makes a difference.
While “avatar” is simply “an icon or figure representing a particular person,” “beloved” means cared for deeply. Your beloved avatar is someone you’d love to serve. You’d move mountains to make your beloved avatar’s life better. Your mission in life is to help them.
This may seem very theoretical, so let me give you a real-life example. A good writer I know was only kind of ho-hum about her brand until she defined who she most wants to use her skills to serve. Her beloved avatar is “people who are alive with purpose and vision.” Once that phrase defined who she would aim to work with, she couldn’t wait to get to it!
In all, when you know who your best clients are—and you love them—you’ll have all the energy in the world to serve them as only you can.
Transformation Is What Is at the Core of Your Professional Brand
Lots of business people talk about practicing their “elevator pitch” so they can talk effectively about what they do in just a few minutes.
At Revealing Genius, we help people polish their elevator pitches. But our approach is a little different. When we help our clients develop “elevator pitches,” we coach them to include the transformation that they will help their beloved avatar to experience.
I’m rather partial to the example I’m going to give you—because it’s the example of my mom, an accomplished keyboard player. If you ask my mother what she does, she won’t say, “I’m the music director at my church”—even though she is. She won’t say, “I’m one of those rare keyboard players who can make both pianos or organs sing”—even though she is. If you ask my mother about what she does, she’ll tell you about the transformation she makes for her beloved avatar—the members of her congregation—each time she plays in church.
My mother’s elevator pitch, aka transformation statement, is:
“Through my music, I enable my congregation to peacefully pause and reflect so they can tap into what makes their spirits soar.”
So, when you’re ready to get at what is at the core of your professional brand, you’ll be addressing three things: who you are, the people you most want to serve and the transformation you’ll bring about in them—the transformation that only you can deliver.
Don’t worry! You don’t have to do this alone. Besides the help in this post, you can get more ideas and inspiration from our 45-minute complimentary webinar, our blog, our 7-Day Summit, RG365 membership daily emails and 1:1 sessions.
I look forward to learning about the core of your professional brand—and seeing the transformation you’re going to make for your beloved avatar.

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 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.
April 12, 2022
Build Your Professional Brand on a Deep Understanding of Who You Serve
Getting to know your ‘beloved avatar’ well will help you succeed in the marketplace.
When I work with healthcare leaders like you to build your professional brand, a key thing we need to talk about is who you serve.
Defining who is your ideal customer or client—what we at Revealing Genius call your “beloved avatar”—may seem tricky at first. You might say, “I serve people.” But then I’m going to ask you, “Which people?”
Identifying key details about who you are meant to serve will light you up and send you on the path to doing the great work of your life. I know this because I’ve seen it happen.
OK, you say, but why do you use the phrase “beloved avatar”?
In video games and internet forums—indeed, in the coming “metaverse”—an avatar is an icon or a figure representing a person. So, as we talk about your brand, your beloved avatar is a representation of your ideal client or customer. It’s the person in your mind’s eye that you can help with a key transformation. To build your professional brand successfully, you’ll need to know a lot about people who fit this bill.
It’s very important that your avatar isn’t just your avatar, but your beloved avatar. Your beloved avatar represents people you want to spend more of your time with. People you would move mountains to serve. People you would get out of bed every day charged up to help achieve a transformation in their lives—as only you can do.
This is heady stuff. But defining your beloved avatar is a process with reasonably concrete steps. Let’s first talk about how you can develop your beloved avatar and then how you can use that deep understanding of your best client or customer to help you successfully take your brand to market.
Build Your Professional Brand Through Knowing Your ‘Beloved Avatar’
To start, try an exercise that’s likely to be familiar to you already; then we’ll do a very similar exercise directly related to defining your beloved avatar.
The familiar exercise is to answer this question: What things are on your list of ideal attributes for your ideal life partner? Get out a piece of paper (or your favorite electronic note-taking app) and jot some ideas down.
Now that you’re warmed up, try it for your beloved avatar. What things are on your list of ideal attributes for a person that you’d love to serve with your unique professional talents? Be sure to note these ideas too.
Next, you can test your early thinking by surveying people you think represent your beloved avatar. Ask them, “What’s the one question I could answer for you in my area of expertise?” Their responses will be telling.
You can also test your initial thoughts by looking at your marketing campaigns. Where do you get engagement? Follow up with a series of tests. Start with a small sample and up the ante as you see where the best results come from. Who is responding to your message?
A final way to shed light on your beloved avatar is by answering such key questions as:
1. What are their goals and values?
2. What are their challenges and pain points?
3. What are their usual objections?
Don’t Cast a Wide Net; Go Spear Fishing
Once you know your beloved avatar well, you can go spearfishing rather than casting a wide net with your marketing. That is, you can target the people you most want to serve.
Are you using paid ads? Are you using posting content on social media? Are you developing a resume, curriculum vitae or LinkedIn profile?A website? When you’re putting these materials together, have a picture and description of your beloved avatar at your desk. Write to them. Design the ad for them. Envision the social media post for them. Create the one-page bio, LinkedIn profile, resume or CV for them.
When you focus on that bullseye client as you create these materials, you’re not excluding other potential customers or clients. Instead, you’re writing content that is deep and meaningful for—and that resonates with—your beloved avatar. Ironically, when you do this, you will attract other folks too.
For example, my own beloved avatar at Revealing Genius is leaders in healthcare. But I get calls all the time, saying, “I see you have a lot of physicians. I see you work with a lot of healthcare technology executives. I’m not in that space. Can you help me?” And the answer is yes, absolutely, I can!
In this post, I’ve given you a lot of solid strategies for how to build your personal brand through knowing your beloved avatar. But you really don’t have to go it alone. Each Revealing Genius 7-Day Summit brings many more exercises and approaches to help you excavate, tell and affirm your personal brand. Plus, you’ll attend with a cohort of supportive professionals who are also intent on being successful with their executive branding.
Won’t you join us?

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 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.
February 1, 2022
How to Build a Personal Brand by Identifying Your Signature Stories
Getting in touch with the anecdotes that only you can tell will help you do effective executive personal branding.
When people ask me how to build a personal brand, I often encourage them to get in touch with the stories they like to tell about their brand. These stories are unique to them. They can’t be authentically told by any competitor.
Consider the yellow stadium chair in the image for this post. It stands out. The obvious reason is that its color is different from the chairs around it. But allow me to suggest that the yellow stadium chair also has a backstory that drives its uniqueness.
The yellow chair could be green like the rest of the seats in the stadium. But it is yellow. Why? Was there a mix-up at the manufacturing plant, causing the production of a single yellow chair—that the installers loved so much they put it right into place? Is there a VIP who sponsored the stadium whose favorite color is yellow who always sits in that seat? Knowing these details helps make that one yellow chair stand out even more.
Identifying your unique brand stories is a key part of the “Excavate” step in the Revealing Genius time-proven ETA™ process. In this step, you take time to dig into your brand and uncover its uniqueness. Doing so sets you up for the second two steps of the process in how to build your personal brand, in which you learn how to “Tell” others about it and “Affirm” it in your own mind and heart so you can talk about it with conviction.
Let’s talk now about how signature brand stories provide evidence about your brand and how your stories can support the development of your two-word purpose statement. Plus, I’ll provide some bonus examples of real peoples’ signature stories.
How to Build a Personal Brand Using the Evidence of Your Stories
So how do brand stories provide evidence about your brand? Think about these three well-known car makers: Volvo, Mercedes and BMW. They all sell essentially the same product. But I bet you can predict what brand story a commercial for each of these brands will emphasize.
You are right if you said that Volvo will advertise that it makes transportation safe. While Mercedes and BMW certainly care about safety, Mercedes would show in its ads just how much luxury its cars provide. And BMW ads would emphasize its cars’ incredible performance. These stories help the products of each of these car makers stand out in the market.
To bring this home for how to build a personal brand, let’s consider journalist Robin Roberts. There are a lot of journalists out there. What makes Roberts unique?
An anchor on Good Morning America since 2005, Roberts has brought her viewers firsthand reports on breaking news stories as well as feature reports on everything from the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina to First Lady Laura Bush’s breast cancer mission in the Middle East. She has also covered numerous special events ranging from the homecoming of soldiers aboard the USS Roosevelt to the Golden Jubilee at Buckingham Palace to the 25th anniversary of the papacy of Pope John Paul II in Vatican City.
A key part of Roberts’ brand is that she covers news related to being a good citizen of the world. The stories she can tell about her coverage fit under the overarching story of good citizenship. No other journalist can tell the very same brand stories as Roberts.
Your Brand Stories Help Support Your Two-Word Purpose Statement
During the Revealing Genius 7-Day Summit, participants take the two-minute survey at onpurpose.me and receive their two-word “purpose statement.” This amazing tool helps people reflect on why they do what they do, a key stepping stone in how to build a personal brand.
These two-word statements don’t arrive in a vacuum. Onpurpose.me delivers a dozen follow-up emails to help you reflect on your purpose and refine it. Reflecting on your personal brand stories is a great way to refine your two-word purpose statement and make it uniquely your own.
For example, if your two-word purpose statement were “igniting joy,” how might that connect to your work in selling technology products that support leaders in their work to serve their customers?
Bonus: Brand Stories
I encourage my clients to write out their signature brand stories, even give them headlines. A writer/editor I know came up with these headlines for her stories: “What Kind of Tractor Is It?” “You Told Me to Write the Next Paragraph and Now I Have 90,000 Words” and “You Wrote What I Meant.”
Here’s how the tractor story goes. As a child of 10 or 12, this writer spent several weeks in the summer on her grandmother’s farm. During the visit, she launched a “newspaper.” The front-page story was about her grandfather and the hired men fixing a tractor in the barn. The writer’s grandmother asked her, “What brand of tractor is it?” So, the writer went out to the barn to find out. (It was a Farmall.) When the writer tells this story about her brand, she explains that it illustrates how she learned about the importance of including detail to make her writing shine.
Here are some other headlines that have cropped up among my clients: “You Should Sell Information!” “It’s Better to Ask for Forgiveness Than Permission” and “It’s All About Character Study.” I bet each of those makes you want to know more about those people and their brands!
What are the headlines of your signature brand stories? What are the stories themselves that only you can tell? Reflecting on these and writing them down will help you stop swimming in a sea of sameness and stand out in your market. This exercise will put you well on your way through the time-proven ETA™ process for how to build your personal brand that we use at Revealing Genius.
Fortunately, when it comes to building your personal brand, you don’t have to go it alone. Right now, you can download a complimentary resource and sign up for our monthly e-newsletter on the Revealing Genius home page. We look forward to being part of your efforts to create your brand.

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 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.
January 25, 2022
Creating Your Professional Brand Is Easier When You Know Your ‘Why’
Three approaches to excavating your unique reason to serve
Creating your professional brand and all the associated materials from elevator pitch to LinkedIn profile is easier once you figure out why you do what you do. Answering this “why” question can be difficult. But think about it. Getting answers to “why” questions is powerful.
For example, small children are notorious for asking their parents an endless series of why questions: “Why is the sky blue?” “Why do I have to take a bath?” “Why does Tommy wear glasses?” In all, it can tire their parents out. But think about how much small children learn in a day.
In the business world, the “five whys” is a strategy for finding the root cause of a recurring problem. People who use this approach ask the question, “Why does that happen?” five times in a row, diving deeper and deeper into the issue.
As I alluded to at the start of this post, answering a key “why” question is foundational when you’re creating your professional brand. That key question is: “Why do I do what I do?” When you answer it as part of creating your professional brand, you’re on the path to knowing with conviction why you do what you do. Once you know why,telling the world what you do becomes easy.
Let’s talk about three ways to approach defining your driving purpose.
Two Words to Help You Understand Your Why
A great first thing to do is an assessment of who you are.
For example, during the Revealing Genius 7-Day Summit, participants take the two-minute survey at onpurpose.me and receive their two-word “purpose statement.” This amazing tool helps people reflect on why they do what they do, which as we’ve said, is a key stepping stone in creating your professional brand.
“Knowing your purpose in life brings greater focus, confidence, contentment and meaning to life,” says Kevin McCarthy, the creator of onpurpose.me. “Becoming a more authentic you improves your performance and well-being. You’re well-positioned to make a very positive difference for others when you start with yourself.”
Here are some examples of two-word purpose statements that 7-Day Summit participants have received in the past: imparting wisdom, being authentic, bringing light, igniting joy, cultivating growth and embracing grace.
These two-word statements don’t arrive in a vacuum. Onpurpose.me delivers a dozen follow-up emails to help you reflect on your purpose and refine it. One of my summit participants admitted that she thought this “two-word purpose statement stuff” was a lot of “hoo hoo” at first. But after spending some time with her two-word purpose statement, she saw everything she does come into focus. I also watched a salesperson get really motivated to close a big deal after receiving and reflecting on his two-word purpose statement: igniting joy.
Knowing What You Stand for Aids With Creating Your Professional Brand
A second great way to approach answering the question, “Why do I do what I do?” is to imagine that you are going to give a media interview or be a guest on a podcast. You know the interviewer is doing to ask you, “What do you stand for?” And you must prepare to answer the question.
One way you can get your creative juices going is to think about well-known brands. For example, consider these three carmakers: Volvo, Mercedes and BMW. They all sell essentially the same product. Yet each has a very different reason for serving. Volvo has as its top concern making transportation safe. Mercedes and BMW certainly care about safety, but paramount for Mercedes is luxury. And BMW is all about performance.
Another way to prepare to answer the media or podcast interviewer is to think about what celebrities you know stand for. You might expect Tony Dungy’s reason to serve to be “winning.” After all, he’s a former professional football safety, coach and sports analyst; served as head coach of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Indianapolis Colts for 13 seasons; and led the Colts to victory in Super Bowl XLI. But Dungy stands for a winning attitude, which not only embraces his sports career but also how he handles his personal life after losing his son in a tragic suicide.
Creating Your Professional Brand by Knowing Your Why
Take some time today, tonight, this weekend—soon—to try a third exercise that can help you answer the question of why you do what you do. It’s a fill-in-the-blank question:
I exist to serve by ______________________________________.
The exercise looks simple at first, yet may take a great deal of reflection to fully answer. It’s worth the effort!
I find that people who have excavated their unique reason to serve are well on their way through the time-proven ETA™ process for creating your professional brand that we use at Revealing Genius. Discovering your “why” is part of step one: Excavate your brand. Having that in hand readies you for the next steps—creating effective ways to Tell others about your brand and taking the time to Affirm your brand so you can communicate it with conviction.
Ask the parent of any small child: Answering why questions can be hard. But when it comes to creating your professional brand, nothing could be more helpful than authentically answering the question, “Why do I do what I do?” Fortunately, you don’t have to go it alone. Right now, you can download a complimentary resource and sign up for our monthly e-newsletter on the Revealing Genius home page. We look forward to being part of your efforts for creating your professional brand.

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 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.
January 18, 2022
Building Your Personal Brand? Know Your ‘Beloved Avatar’
Clarifying who you serve aids with executive personal branding.
Building your personal brand using the process from Revealing Genius includes a key step that’s different from other approaches.
Revealing Genius does executive personal branding using the time-proven ETA™ process—with its key steps of excavate, tell and affirm. Plus it helps you find full clarity about who you serve and how they will be transformed by working with you. In other words, we help know your “beloved avatar” well.
What exactly do I mean by beloved avatar? I’m glad you asked. To answer that question in this post, I’m first going to tell you the story of one person—my mom. Next, I’m going to define beloved avatar in marketing terms. And, finally—while I could write an entire book about the importance of knowing your beloved avatar as an aid to doing personal branding—I’ll wrap up this post by describing some key reasons you need a beloved avatar.
An Example of Building Your Personal Brand Through Knowing Your Beloved Avatar
My mother is an accomplished keyboard player who is rare in that she plays either piano and pipe organ. As the music director at her church, Mom has been serving her beloved avatar, her congregation, in her rural Pennsylvania hometown for more than 40 years. Parishioners are known to schedule their vacations and weekend activities to align with when Mom is scheduled to play. When she is at the keyboard, holiday masses are standing-room-only. Many couples have paid well in advance to hold a date on Mom’s calendar so she will be able to play at their weddings. And, she’s been told that she’s the only person families would consider having play at the final celebration of a loved one’s life.
Mom says that when she sits down to plan out her music for any occasion, she is thinking only about her beloved avatar. In her mind’s eye, she visualizes the people sitting in the pews and what’s on their minds and hearts—the burdens they are bearing; the fears they are facing; the hopes they have for their families and themselves. Mom believes it is her sacred duty to help her parishioners transcend their problems so they can find peace, even if it’s just for a half hour a week. She says she spends her energy thinking about how they will respond to music that touches their souls.
This is what Mom knows for sure: “Through my music, I enable my congregation to peacefully pause and reflect so they can tap into what makes their spirits soar.”
Mom knows her audience. This helps her go the extra mile to ensure every touchpoint they have with her (and her music) is memorable and exemplary.
A Marketing Definition of Beloved Avatar
In marketing and branding thinking, a beloved avatar is a research-based profile that depicts the bullseye client or customer within your target audience.
When you’re building your personal brand, everything comes down to who you very most want to hear your message, who you want to serve and have in your orbit, who you want to attract into your world.
I call your best target customer your beloved avatar because the word “beloved” is very precise. You want to attract someone you are going to love, someone you are going to do anything for. Think about someone you already consider beloved. You are going to go the extra mile for that person. You will think about them all the time. You are going to want to serve them as best as you possibly can while you’re alive on this earth. It’s that kind of energy.
Some other words that marketers use when they’re talking about your beloved avatar include buyer persona, marketing persona, ideal customer profile and ideal client.
To help you better define and serve your beloved avatar, ask yourself questions like: What do they experience on a day-to-day basis? What challenges do they face? How do they make decisions?
Some of my clients have asked me if they can have more than one avatar. The answer is yes. Here is an example of why I recommend having more than one: The avatar of one woman is the decision-maker at a nonprofit organization—the CEO or a C-level executive. After all, those are the people who sign the checks! However, she’s delivering her leadership training to up-and-comers—20-somethings who just got out of school and are working their first jobs. These are two very different beloved avatars, and being attractive to both helps her draw in new training engagements.
Why You Need a Beloved Avatar to Help You With Building Your Personal Brand
Without question, you want to attract right-fit opportunities. Our time on this earth is finite, so knowing who you want to serve can help you figure out the answers to such key questions as “Who do I want to attract?” and, frankly, “Who do I want to avoid?”
Your beloved avatar is just that—beloved. These are the people you want to spend more of your time with. So clearly discerning who that is can be life-changing.
Defining your beloved avatar is a core component of building your personal brand, which in turn will help define your next milestone and enable the transformation you can help people make—which in turn can transform the world.
Are you looking for a new job or a board seat—or to start a business, attract more clients, launch a new product or write a book? Whatever your goal, defining your beloved avatar is the ultimate exercise to help you gain clarity so that you can attract more of what you want into your life.
The process of clarifying who that avatar is a key part of the ETA process from Revealing Genius—and what helps make our process so unique. Get started by downloading the complimentary resource from our website—and by signing up for our free e-newsletter; simply add your email in the box at the bottom of this webpage.
If you’re an on-purpose healthcare leader in transition, you’re my beloved avatar. I look forward to hearing from you.

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 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.
January 11, 2022
Executive Personal Branding Built on Your Vision for a Better World
Learn from established personal brands, then excavate your own.
During the Revealing Genius 7-Day Summit, we use 10 seemingly straightforward questions to help leaders do executive personal branding. One of them is, “What is the big, audacious change you’d like to make in the world?”
Each leader’s answer to that question can help them better understand their executive personal branding—or “excavate” it, as the first step in my time-proven ETA™ excavate-tell-affirm executive branding process is called.
While this blog explores how others have answered this key question, think about how you’d answer it. Some key categories of big change come up often, including things like protecting the environment and promoting world peace. Here, we’ll consider brands that embrace two more popular themes: improving human health and social change.
Executive Personal Branding Connected to Improving Human Health
An amazing woman we’ve all heard of care deeply about helping to improve human health—and their passion for these causes points to their personal brands.
Arianna Huffington believes so deeply that our society would be better if we placed greater importance on regularly getting good sleep that she wrote a book about it.
Published in 2017, The Sleep Revolution explores the latest science supporting Huffington’s idea that our shared perception that “time spent sleeping is wasted” compromises our health, hampers our decision-making, and undermines our work and personal lives. In the book, she takes on the sleeping pill industry and all the ways our addiction to technology disrupts our sleep. She also offers a range of recommendations and tips from leading scientists on how we can get better and more restorative sleep—and what doing so could mean for us as individuals, spouses, community members and world citizens.
Huffington’s commitment to helping us all get better rest is an important part of her overall brand of helping people avoid burnout. Her Thrive Global company provides behavior change technology and tools to help employees live and work with less stress, more productivity and greater well-being.
Executive Personal Branding Rooted in Social Change
Other leaders build their personal brands around giving specific groups of people a leg up.
For example, Nerd Wallet CEO Tim Chen believes in offering more people access to financial services so they can buy a house or a car, help their children go to college, improve their homes and plan for retirement.
In a 2021 article Chen wrote for Fortune magazine, he explained that he believes
that cooperatively owned financial institutions—credit unions—can make special headway into serving typically underserved or unserved people.
He believes in that change so strongly that NerdWallet deposited $2 million from its traditional bank account into a certificate of deposit at Self-Help Federal Credit Union, Modesto, California, which serves low-income working families in California, Washington, Illinois and Wisconsin.
This action dovetails perfectly with Chen’s executive personal branding as head of a company dedicated to providing the tools, information and insight people need to navigate all of life’s financial decisions.
Andrea Stevenson Conner, the president of Stevenson Conner Global Enterprises, calls herself a “fierce advocate of the gender multiplier effect.” Conner defines the GME as the ripple of good that goes out when you help one woman and she helps many others.
Conner’s passion for this idea, her long history of overseas development work and her current work with Springboard Enterprises to support the success of female entrepreneurs all underscore her executive personal branding around the value of helping women and watching many people reap the benefits.
Executive Personal Branding Based on Your Passion for Change
So, let’s go back to your answer to the question, “What is the big, audacious change you’d like to make in the world?”
What is the big, audacious change you’d like to make in the world?
How you respond—whether that’s eliminating hunger, helping people communicate better in polarized times, telling stories to inspire people to improve their lives or supporting affordable housing offerings—will likely give you some important clues to your executive personal brand.
To find out more about how Revealing Genius helps people identify their executive personal brands, subscribe to my e-newsletter by adding your email at the bottom of this webpage and signing up for our 7-Day Brand Genius Summit.

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 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.
November 9, 2021
Building Your Personal Brand? Make It a Regular Practice
Develop your personal brand over time with useful tools and good teachers.
Building your personal brand is easier if you do a little bit at a time—the same way people practice a variety of yoga poses on a regular basis, building flexibility and strength in each session.
Developing your personal brand really can’t be a one-and-done affair. Just like a yoga students risk pulling a muscle if they stretch too far too fast, you will get better results if you approach building your personal brand with regular practice, good tools and the guidance of good teachers.
Complimentary Personal Branding Tools from Revealing Genius
Yoga students often use a mat, blocks and calming music to help them learn. Similarly, building your personal brand benefits from using tools, especially ones that make you pause and inspire you.
One useful personal branding tool that will give you a reason to pause and do some work toward building your personal brand is our e-newsletter. In each monthly issue, the newsletter delivers a healthy dose of inspiration, plus tools you can put right to use. (Subscribe with the link at the bottom of this page.)
For example, a recent edition of the newsletter included a link to my “Great Work of Your Life” interview with Liz Bryant. An award-winning television journalist and founder of Liz Bryant Business Etiquette, Bryant grew up in a home where manners mattered. Trained and licensed by The Protocol School of Washington, she’s created a thriving business doing what she loves best—offering training, coaching and courses on such topics as Zoom etiquette, job interviewing and international business diplomacy. Her advice was recently featured in Southern Living magazine.
To be sure, Bryant’s story provides inspiration to work on building your personal brand!
That same issue also included information about personal branding tools, including the Revealing Genius blog post, “5 (of 10) Questions That Can Help You Excavate Your Brand.” In fact, the Revealing Genius executive branding blog is a second tool you can use to help you pause and be inspired to work on building your personal brand. When you subscribe to it by entering your email under the “Get Notified” header on the right side of this page, you’ll get an email notification each time a new post goes up.
A third tool for building your personal brand is our complimentary guide to answering with conviction and purpose the age-old, seemingly innocuous business question, “So what do you do?” Wouldn’t you love to be able to answer that question well?
Our guide introduces the time-proven ETA™ process and its key steps of “excavate,” “tell” and “affirm.” It includes a list of questions to help you dig into excavating your personal brand and a list of sentence starters to help you affirm and gain confidence in your unique reason to serve. To get a link to this resource sent to your inbox, enter your email on our homepage to the right of the “So what do you do?” header.
Personal Branding: You Don’t Have to Do It Alone
Building your personal brand, like practicing yoga, benefits from being done with other people, including a good teacher. Sure, some people do yoga on their own in a special space at home. most people practice yoga more often when their classmates keep them accountable for coming to class. And most people progress more quickly when a good teacher is guiding their efforts.
When it comes to personal branding, similar things hold true. For example, during our 7-Day Summit, participants volunteer readily to be on the “hot seat.” Participants know that being in the hot seat will get them amazing and actionable feedback on one piece of their brand collateral, such as their LinkedIn page. They’ll get to talk about what they have done with the collateral so far and share a unique brand story that no competitor could tell equally well.
Next during the hot seat exercise, the person’s classmates review the collateral piece and provide positive feedback. Then, the summit cohort has a lively Q&A with the hot seat volunteer about how that brand collateral piece might be improved to better help people answer questions like:
- Do I understand at what you are the best in the world?
- What’s the No. 1 key takeaway message?
- Can I explain what problems you solve?
And, parallel to having a yoga teacher, I’m on hand to guide the summit and for 1:1 coaching after the summit ends.
People benefit so much from excavating their personal brand, from learning how to tell other people about it, and from building their confidence in it by using affirmations. If building your personal brand sounds like a natural next step for you, I hope you’ll schedule an exploratory call.

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 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.
November 2, 2021
Personal Branding for Executives Made Easy
Doing many short exercises over time makes identifying your uniqueness manageable and even fun.
Doing personal branding for executives using the Revealing Genius approach is similar to the “sprint” methodology used by many tech teams today when they’re building big systems. Both take a significant project and break it down into small, manageable steps. By doing this, they make a big job easy.
Kevin W. McCarthy, the creator of ONPURPOSE.me, which helps people find their two-word purpose, is enthusiastic about the Revealing Genius approach to personal branding for executives. McCarthy attended the Revealing Genius 7-Day Brand Genius Summit and participated in a series of Revealing Genius mastermind sessions.
“Years ago, I discovered the immense value of small-dose, incremental learning for busy adults,” he says. “My Revealing Genius collection of individual worksheets and checklists are great examples of this. Big concepts in personal branding are presented in small, doable steps toward my keystone goal.”
Personal Branding for Executives: A Sample Easy Exercise
Revealing Genius uses its time-proven Excavate-Tell-Affirm or ETA™ process to lead executives, step-by-step, toward a vision and expression of their personal brand that they can deliver with conviction.
In the first step of the process—excavate—Revealing Genius invites participants to take part in an exercise that’s a great example of how a seemingly quick look at personal branding can help executives to get deep into it.
That exercise seems simple but it’s powerful. It’s comprised of answering 10 questions that get at what is important to each of the leaders in attendance. These questions are: What mantra or quote resonates most with you?, What is your favorite superhero (and why)?, What would the topic of your one TEDTalk be? and seven others.
Usually, one of the 10 questions creates an “aha” moment for each program participant.
Personal Branding for Executives Personalized by Many Short Exercises
The list of 10 questions in the previous section is just one of the “baby steps” Revealing Genius offers when helping with personal branding for executives. Others include:
- Identifying a “signature story” about your personal brand that no other leader can tell
- Using a highly effective formula to write your “personal brand elevator pitch”—your answer to the age-old and seemingly impossible-to-answer question, “So what do you do?”
- Coming to “own” your core competencies, supported by science-based work style assessments
- Sitting in the “hot seat” and getting feedback from your cohort on your personal branding collateral
Box of ‘Marketing Legos’ Aids Personal Branding for Executives
Some attendees of the 7-Day Brand Summit have said that by the last day, when we bring all the exercises and tools together, thinking about their personal brand has become much easier. They find that filling out the final day’s worksheet shows them they’ve developed incredible clarity about their personal branding.
It’s almost as if the various exercises, worksheets and tools have warmed participants up, readying them to go full steam ahead on discovering what lights them up and pointing them toward their unique reason to serve.
McCarthy says he still relies on the Revealing Genius exercises and tools to help him create the right blend for his current branding need.
“I analogize the worksheet collection to a box of marketing Legos where the individual pieces can be mixed and matched depending upon my current need to create what I need most to succeed with my business, brand or programs,” he says.
If you’d like to get “marketing Legos” for personal branding for executives delivered to your inbox, please subscribe to our newsletter. Simply add your email at the bottom of this webpage. Or, to get even more tools for excavating and expressing your personal brand, sign up for the Revealing Genius signature 7-Day Summit.

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 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.
October 16, 2021
Why You Should Do Executive Personal Branding
When you know what you stand for, you’ll be better able to lead in your current role and better positioned to achieve your next career milestone.
Executive personal branding is something you should prioritize, even though you, like other CEOs, executives and aspiring leaders, are busy and have to-do lists a mile long.
Simply put, it’s because knowing yourself will promote personal growth. It will help you lead more effectively in your current situation. And it will help you more rapidly achieve the next milestone in your career.
Personal Branding Success Stories
That sounds good in theory, you say, but how does executive personal branding really apply in the real world? What are the tangible benefits of doing it? Let me tell you about Jodie, Sydelle and Richard and how excavating their brands using Revealing Genius’s time-proven ETA™ (Excavate-Tell-Affirm) process led to exciting personal growth for all of them.
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jodie got downsized from a Fortune 25 company. At first, her job search didn’t seem to be gaining any momentum. But within 30 days of defining her brand statement and learning to tell the stories of her achievements in engaging the workforce, a CEO hired her as COO on the spot.
Sydelle is an M.D. and singer who wanted to merge music with writing prescriptions. But Sydelle was doubtful she could successfully pull off connecting the two. After doing executive personal branding—and affirming what she truly stands for and believes—Sydelle created and published end-of-life protocols related to musical medical interventions, launched a related podcast and medaled in international vocalist competition.
Now, let me tell you about Richard. In his 46-year career at the same company, he moved from controller to CEO. He never had a résumé because he never needed one. Two years after retiring, he wanted to get back in the game by being on a board, investing in a growing company or doing consulting. At a conference hosted by a private equity firm, Richard was harshly humbled when he tried to network with another attendee and couldn’t articulate a moving answer to the age-old question, “What do you do?” After transforming his executive personal brand to one centered on the two-word purpose statement of “imparting wisdom,” he has be able to invest in four companies and earn a board seat.
When CEOs, founders and leaders excavate their brands, learn how to tell other people about their unique reason for serving and affirm their brands to themselves and others using ETA™, they will be recognized as experts and more rapidly achieve the next milestone in their careers.
Here’s a quick list of where your executive personal brand can take you. And I know—because I’ve seen these things happen! Getting clarity about your personal brand so that you can talk about it with conviction can lead to you:
1. getting your dream job
2. earning a board seat
3. successful speaking engagements
4. changing careers (and getting your dream job)
5. revising your curriculum vitae or resume
6. developing a one-sheet professional biography or elevator pitch
7. pursuing your passion in your career
8. pursuing your passion in retirement
9. updating your LinkedIn page (and your social media presence overall) to make it purpose- and power-ful
10. revising your resume to make it purpose- and power-ful
11. putting up an effective website
12. putting up a fantastic virtual studio in Zoom
13. writing a winning business plan
14. creating a compelling video or podcast
15. successfully leading a new team
What Can You Get Out of Doing Professional Branding?
During the Revealing Genius 7-Day Summit, I often ask participants what they hope to get from doing personal branding. Here are just a few of the answers I often get. Do you identify with what these people are seeking?
1. I seek clarity about the value I bring to audiences and clients and how to communicate that quickly, clearly and concisely.
2. I want to be clear and able to communicate my brand first to myself, then to others—outside of just my role at work.
3. I want to build my precise brand since I’ve never put together a brand statement or mission—and then take action and have passion for my mission and who I am.
4. I am looking to learn how best to allocate my energy to foster having the kind of sustainable energy that will help me fulfill my mission.
5. I want to develop my focused “self-brand” that will help me define my goals and move forward toward them.
6. I want to be confident in my ability to share what I have to offer professionally.
7. I want the motivation to build increased self-awareness.
Interestingly enough, many different kinds of people can reap the benefits of doing executive personal branding, including:
• Current, retiring, emeritus C-suite executives
• Board directors
• PhDs
• PharmDs
• MDs
• MBAs
• MBAs
• Nurses
• Dentists
• Nonprofit presidents
• Military veterans
• Investors
• Hospital and health system administrators
• Consultants who are the brand name for their company
• Healthcare tech | home health agency business owners
• Public servants
Does this resonate with you? If so, I hope you’ll subscribe to my e-newsletter by adding your email at the bottom of this webpage and sign up for our 7-Day Brand Genius Summit to learn more.

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 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.
September 28, 2021