Revealing Genius | Brand Strategy for Accomplished Leaders

Category: Executive Personal Branding

Key ‘Checkup’ Intervals for Your Professional Brand
Here are good things to do yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily in support of the success of your professional brand journey.
You professional brand is like a medical patient in a key way. Just like patients benefit from healthcare at specific intervals, your professional brand also will benefit from regular examination and care.
Think about it. Certain vaccinations and scans are recommended for people once a year, depending on their age. Patients’ health benefits from a vacation a couple of times a year. They benefit from doing something relaxing every week, too—and from exercising or taking vitamins every day.
Your professional brand will similarly benefit from regular attention. Let’s look at some key intervals and what you can do at each.
A Yearly Checkup for Your Professional Brand
Revealing Genius recommends doing at least these three things for your brand every year:
1.     Launch or reassess your professional brand advisory board. Feedback is essential to success with your executive brand. If you haven’t already set one up, it’s a great time to think about who would give you great feedback on what makes you unique and how to best express that to the world. Invite them to join your advisory board! If you have an advisory board already, it’s a great idea to take time once a year to assess how it’s functioning and make adjustments as needed.
2.     Do a science-based assessment of how you present yourself to the world. One of my favorites is the two-minute survey at onpurpose.me, which will provide back to you your two-word “purpose statement.” This amazing tool helps people reflect on why they do what they do. I also like the Enneagram, which describes personality in terms of nine types, each driven by its own set of core emotions, fears and beliefs; the Core Value Index, which reveals your unchanging motivational drivers and how you are wired to contribute to the world around you; and the DISC tool, which helps you understand both your personality and your communication style.
3.     Create or update your vision board. A vision board is a visual representation of your goals. People create them in a variety of ways, including creating drawings, clipping images out of magazines and printing things from the web that point to your “vision.” Then they put these together on a board and look at everything together. Creating a vision board for the first time can help you center yourself and move forward in creating or living out your professional brand. I know people for whom this exercise has been life-changing. Revising your board every year can help you do valuable fine-tuning.
Quarterly and Monthly Checkups for Your Professional Brand
Attending to your professional brand once a year is helpful, but not enough. On a quarterly or monthly basis, we recommend also connecting with your advisory board and reviewing your keystone goals. Monthly or quarterly is also great timing for doing a “more of this/less of this” exercise.
What this review entails is thinking about the activities in your recent work that have given you a lot of energy—and which ones drained you. Then, consider how you can shift the balance to do more of the things that give you energy and less of the ones that drain your energy. It’s a powerful understanding that, done well, can boost your productivity and effectiveness.
Weekly and Daily Checkups for Your Professional Brand
At Revealing Genius, we often talk about how developing and continuously refining your professional brand is a practice—something to do often and regularly, much like people practice martial arts or yoga every day or every week.
Here are some things to do to keep your professional brand fresh and effective:
Consider your calendar. This is akin to the “more of this/less of this” exercise described earlier in this post, only more focused on the here and now. Look back at last week’s calendar and see what meetings, activities or projects gave you energy and which drained your energy. Then look at your calendar for next week. What can you do to shift the balance in favor of doing more things that give you energy in the days ahead?
Choose a day or two each week that you’ll consistently spend time on your professional brand. Think of “Amazon Day.” The shopping giant allows customers to choose one or two days of the week for all their Amazon packages to arrive. Choose a day or two that you can spend time with your professional brand each week.
Use tools that will help you reflect on your professional brand regularly. For example, RG365 membership includes a daily email that will prompt you to take a positive step on your professional brand journey every single day. You can also read the Revealing Genius blog, sign up for our newsletter and use the email follow-up prompts you’ll get from the science-based assessments you’ve done to help you.
Your professional brand will benefit from regular checkups such as those described above. When it’s time for you to gather new ideas for your professional brand or give it special, focused attention, please check out our 45-minute complimentary webinar or our 7-Day Summit. We look forward to supporting you in your efforts!

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.
March 22, 2022
Executive Personal Branding ‘Keystone’ Goals You Can Set Today
First learn about effective goal-setting, then choose goals for the next stage of your personal branding effort.
Executive personal branding is something you can nurture over time. On the other hand, you can expect to build your brand faster and better when you set effective short-, medium- and long-term goals.
Since I hail from Pennsylvania, nicknamed “the keystone state,” I like to call the executive personal branding goals I help my clients set “keystone” goals.
Pennsylvania got its keystone moniker for its position as the middle colony of the original 13—and because it’s shaped like the keystone in an arch—the key building block that holds the whole structure in place. In keeping with this, my clients’ keystone goals play a central role in their work to use the time-proven ETA™ process to excavate, tell and affirm their executive personal brands—so they will not only know with conviction their unique reason to serve but always be ready to talk with others about it.
Later in this blog, I’ll list some goals you could set depending on which stage you are in the executive personal branding process. But first, let’s talk about how to effectively set goals that will help you with your branding efforts.
Effective Goal-Setting for Executive Personal Branding
If you Google “effective goal-setting,” you’ll get a lot of results. Here are five strategies I recommend to my executive personal branding clients:
1. Make the goal specific. Compare these two goals: “I will improve my personal brand” and “I will practice my elevator statement until I can recite perfectly in every situation.” Clearly the second goal in this list is more specific.
2. Make the goal measurable. Compare these two goals: “My executive personal branding work will help me make my website more beautiful” and “The newsletter I use to promote my brand will have a 20% open rate for each issue.” If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it will be very difficult to measure! Definitely go with a more measurable goal like the second one here.
3. Make the goal timely. Compare these two goals: “I will use LinkedIn to gather 10 leads” and “I will use LinkedIn to gather 10 leads by the end of the second quarter.” Deadlines can be incredibly motivating and helpful.
4. Write down your goals. Busy people like healthcare executives can understandably get focused on the tasks of a particular day. That can make it easy to forget the executive personal branding goals they set a month, a quarter, six months or even a year ago. If you write your goals down, you can always pull them out and refresh your memory.
5. Have an accountability plan. One strategy I’ve used to keep myself on track is asking a colleague to be my accountability partner—to check in with me about how I’m coming along on a particular goal. Other people plan rewards for when they achieve a key milestone. Know what works for you and do it!
Sample Keystone Goals for Your Branding
Now that you’ve thought about the foundations of goal-setting, let’s talk about some goals that might work well for you for each stage of the ETA process.
A great goal to set when you’re excavating your brand might be: “By the end of this quarter, I will review each of the 10 questions from the ETA process and see which one resonates with me.”
A goal to set when you’re preparing to tell your clients and prospects about your brand might be: “By May 31, I will ensure that my LinkedIn profile reflects everything I know about my executive personal branding.”
And finally, as you affirm your brand, you might set this goal: “By Oct. 31, I will collect feedback from people I trust about the executive personal branding work I’ve done so far and use that feedback to finish writing my elevator pitch.”
Revealing Genius would like to support your executive personal branding goals. I hope you’ll sign up for our free monthly e-newsletter by adding your email at the bottom of this webpage. You will also find a great deal of valuable information about executive personal branding in the complimentary resource accessible from the Revealing Genius homepage.

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 4, 2022
Authentic Personal Branding Builds Calm Assurance and Top Performance
Get the confidence that results from building your professional brand.
Authentic personal branding helps executives and leaders calmly and effectively deliver great results.
It helps other people with this too—including my mom. Let me tell you a story about her that illustrates the connection between calm assurance and top performance.
My mom is a tiny woman—just about 5’” tall “on a good day” as she says. She’s a skilled and seasoned organist and pianist, and one day I went to hear her play for mass. Her music was nothing short of amazing! The congregation recognized this and clapped when she was done.
After the service, she asked me what I thought. All I could think of to say was that I thought I had witnessed a woman at the top of her game.
Her response both surprised and inspired me. She smiled knowingly and said, “Yes. Yes you did.”
Mom wasn’t arrogant or proud. But she was confident in the quality of what she had delivered that day—and what she regularly delivers to her audiences. Mom owns her personal brand genius—not with chest-high bluster but with the kind of calm assurance that supports her in regularly delivering on her brand promise.
Ask mom what she does and she’ll answer with a well-crafted elevator pitch, “Through my music, I enable my congregation to peacefully pause and reflect so they can tap into what makes their spirits soar.”
Deeply understanding her unique reason to serve, Mom is well prepared to talk about what she does best in the world. She does so with the kind of calm assurance that surely helps her play so very well for her audiences. Do you aspire to building a professional brand you believe in so deeply that you’re like my mom—thoroughly energized about what you do while at the same time calmly certain that you are on-purpose and delivering on your life’s work? Read on.
Authentic Personal Branding and Calm Assurance
First let’s take a moment to look more closely at the phrase, “calm assurance.” Calm means “not showing or feeling nervousness, anger or other strong emotions.” In turn, assurance means “confidence or certainty in one’s abilities.”
Authentic personal branding helps people feel calm and confident because they have excavated what they are uniquely poised to do in the world. They use this knowledge to help them set their priorities—and to calmly and confidently go after the next milestone in their careers.
The research supports the benefits of finding calm assurance in your work.
For example, Forbes magazine reports that research conducted by TalentSmart with more than a million people found that 90% of top performers are skilled at managing their emotions to remain calm and in control. That’s so much easier to do when you know your purpose!
Other research published in an article in the Harvard Business Review found that 94% of the more than 700 respondents reported that of the 18 states of mind studied, calm, happy and energized are the three that drive the greatest levels of effectiveness and performance.
Finally, this article from The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, says: “Calm helps you focus on what you need to do and get it done much more quickly. Calmness can also impact your creativity.”
Authentic Personal Branding Supported by ETA Process
Building your professional brand clearly has lots of potential benefits for leaders. But how can you take productive steps to clarify your purpose and attain the calm assurance that goes with knowing who you are and your unique reason to serve?
Here are two key ways to approach this:
1. Learn about and apply the time-proven ETA™ process. This process has three steps. “Excavate” is about uncovering your purpose. “Tell” is about developing messages to express your brand effectively in many different situations. And “affirm” is about the ways you practice your brand—so, for example, you’re ready with a solid response when someone asks you, “So, what do you do?” A great way to learn about the ETA process is by reading more posts like this one on the Revealing Genius blog. Another is to sign up for our 7-Day Summit. A third is to sign up for our monthly newsletter by adding your email to the box at the bottom of this webpage.
2. Spend time steeping in your brand. When you go through the ETA process, you’ll articulate your core competencies, write an “elevator pitch” and use science-based assessments to better understand your unique brand. I recommend surrounding yourself with your brand collateral to build your confidence in it. I also suggest taking a new science-based assessment at least once a year.
When you use the ETA process to do authentic personal branding, you’ll find calm assurance in your brand, just like my mom has about her organ performances. And that quiet confidence also will light you up and aid you in performing at the top of your game.
If you’re ready to get started, please subscribe to our free digital magazine by adding your name and email at the top right of this page.

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.
December 7, 2021
Executive Personal Branding: 7 Days to Approach It From Many Ways
Revealing Genius Summit helps leaders like you with creating your personal brand.
Executive personal branding can seem like a daunting task—so challenging, in fact, that some people never tackle it. And yet defining your unique reason to serve, the thing you are best at in the world, can help you become a recognized expert and more rapidly achieve the next milestone in your career.
I know this for sure. I’ve seen it happen.
Take the example of Kate and how she got her dream job serving as a chief operating officer for a fast-growing healthcare organization. In short, the Revealing Genius ETA (excavate, tell, affirm) process helped Kate, an introvert, talk comfortably and powerfully with the CEO about her proudest business accomplishments. As this blog explains in more detail, that conversation led him to create a position for Kate on the spot.
As a seasoned brand strategist, I encourage my clients to do executive personal branding as a regular practice—much like many people approach yoga. But even yoga students head off to a specialty workshop from time to time.
So, too, with building your personal brand. Attending a series of well-designed sessions can help you identify what makes you unique in your market, become better able to talk about your personal brand with others, and boost your confidence in who you are and what you do.
The Revealing Genius 7-Day Summit offers such well-designed sessions.
One of the reasons I think the summit helps people progress so much with their executive personal branding efforts is its structure of seven, one-hour sessions over seven business days. They have, on purpose, a particular rhythm we’ll describe momentarily.
A second reason the summit helps people so much is that it offers a daily diet of small bites of work in large and small groups. That is, it offers something for everyone. A third reason is that the last day of the event purposefully and masterfully brings things all the elements of the summit together.
Executive Personal Branding and the Summit Agenda
From day one, the summit follows a set rhythm.
We start all together with introducing the day’s theme, taking a Zoom poll and having a relevant discussion. Then, we pose an individual prompt to be discussed in a small-group breakout session. Finally, we wrap up the theme and tee up the following day.
The seven summit sessions cover the three key steps of the ETA process—the same process that helped Kate get her dream executive job—before bringing everything together and setting goals for next steps. Here’s a sketch of the topics covered in a typical summit:
- Day 1: ETA™ Process Overview—Set your “energetic” keystone goal.
- Day 2:Excavate—Discern your two-word statement of purpose.
- Day 3: The top 10 questions you must answer to effectively excavate your brand.
- Day 4: Tell—The two-minute brand audit exercise provides actionable feedback to help you develop your compelling brand story.
- Day 5: Identify and “own” your core competencies using scientific evidence.
- Day 6: Affirm—Craft your 30-second elevator pitch so you can confidently answer that age-old question, “So what do you do?”
- Day 7: Wrap-up and Look Forward—Set goals, develop a structure for how to keep your momentum going and get bonus materials.
Knowing what to expect from each day of the program helps the group cover a lot of ground, have many “aha” moments and gather numerous takeaways.
Executive Personal Branding Supported by Large and Small Group Work
We all know that people have a variety of learning styles, so the summit is designed to maximize this. For example, we use big-group time, small-group time and individual time effectively in each hour-long session.
The session content also offers something for everyone. As described above, on day three we work with 10 questions to help illuminate what makes you unique. Invariably one of these questions resonates with each person attending the summit. It’s exciting when people start to get an idea about their personal genius. Everyone can feel the energy in the virtual room!
To add even more opportunities for personal reflection, the summit also provides handouts and worksheets each day that participants can use later to further their thinking about their personal brands.
One of the most exciting days of the summit is “hot seat” day, when several participants share a piece of brand collateral—such as a LinkedIn profile—and get feedback about it from the group. This is designed to give those who are ready custom feedback. And everyone learns from being part of the group giving feedback. In all, this is a great way to “audit” where you are with building your personal brand. And it’s fun, too!
Executive Personal Branding Summit Summary Session Brings It All Together
Clients tell me they love how the summit offers them many different opportunities, tools and strategies for helping them with executive personal branding. The last day of the summit focuses on “bringing your brand together.”
On day seven, we review the ideas people have written down about what they want more and less of in their work. We also consider their selection of “brandthem”—a song that motivates them and moves them forward. We think about what a survey showed is their two-word purpose statement. We remember the stories that only they can tell, which help to define their executive professional brands as unique from any other.
The last thing we do on the last day is to set goals for going forward. Here are two example goals:
1. By the date of the Summit reunion, I will update my LinkedIn profile to better reflect my knowledge of my personal brand.
2. By Dec. 15, I will finalize my elevator pitch and affirm it by saying it aloud many, many times.
Hopefully you’re already working on creating your executive personal brand, day by day. To help you on a regular basis, please subscribe to our newsletter by adding your email in the box at the bottom of this webpage.
And perhaps now is a good juncture for seven days of focus? If so, please sign up for the Summit. I look forward to meeting 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.
November 16, 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
Do Executive Personal Branding by Noting What You Say ‘Yes’ To
The things you’d welcome more of in your life speak volumes about your executive brand.
By Mary E. Maloney
There are some things we should all say yes to—things like eating well, going on a diet from our smartphones and spending time with people we love. When it comes to executive personal branding, however, what each person says yes to will be different. What you, personally, say yes to speaks volumes about your brand.
This is such a powerful idea that I use it in the Revealing Genius 7-Day Summit to help executives and leaders create their personal brands—or “excavate” them, as the first step in my time-proven ETA™ excavate-tell-affirm executive branding process is called.
To see what I mean, take out a piece of paper right now and try this easy exercise: Make two columns, one with the header, “More of this, please,” the other with the header, “Less of this, please.” Spend two minutes completing your table.
What would you like to have more of in your life? Less of? Think about all aspects of your life as you compile your answers: spirituality, health, style, relationships (family, friends, community), work, finances, recreation, social and learning. Write down what comes top of mind.
Now, look at your list. What stands out to you? When you think of your executive personal branding, what gives you energy when you do it? What would you like to say yes to?
Executive Personal Branding Helps Focus Your Energy
We often talk about having limited time and energy. And we all know we can’t expand our time. But we can boost our energy by doing the things that light us up, that we are born to do, that we are the best at in the world. In these things lie clues about our executive personal brands.
What if, in the next week, you did more of the things on the “more of this, please” side of your list? You’d get charged up, right?
Try it. I bet you’ll find you have more energy for doing even more of the things you already knew you’d like to do.
Your ‘Brand’them Can Help You Manage Your Executive Brand Energy
It is cool that we can boost our energy. One way that my Revealing Genius clients do this is by discerning and playing their “brand”them, their theme song. This song must make you move, snap your fingers, even strut.
Some examples of these brandthems that participants in Revealing Genius programs like the 7-Day Summit have chosen in the past include:
- You Gotta Want It by Jordan Sparks
- Lose Yourself by Eminem
- Just Fine by Mary Blige
- Ain’t Nothin’ Gonna Break My Stride by Matthew Wilder
- Who Let the Dogs Out by Baha Men
- Timber by PitBull
- Soul Man by Sam & Dave
The idea behind your brandthem is that you put it on and within seconds your energy is boosted. What is your brandthem?
7-Day Summit participants get a musical bonus to aid their executive personal branding work: recommendations for music neuroscience-based apps that use music to promote productivity and produce desired mental states. Here are two of them:
- Focusatwill.com: a neuroscience-based subscription service that uses phase-sequenced playlists of instrumental music designed to improve users’ productivity by four times
- Brainfm.com: a program that leverages technology called “functional music” that teams of scientists and composers patented. It’s purpose-built with pioneering auditory neuroscience and neural phase locking to steer listeners into a desired mental state—focused, relaxed, meditative or ready to rest.
Shift Your Actions to Better Support Your Executive Personal Branding
Take a moment to ask Alexa or Siri to play your brandthem or to tune it in on your stereo. Get in your executive personal branding groove. Now ask yourself: “What shifts could I make in where I spend my energy? Can I commit to one?”
Your answer is your personal energetic goal. And I guarantee it will support your executive personal branding.
To take a deeper dive into more aspects of executive personal branding, please sign up for an exploratory call or register for the 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.
Photo Credit: Karolina Grabowska
October 26, 2021
The Goal of ETA? Conviction
When you’ve fully excavated your unique brand, you’ll feel it in your bones.
Oprah says it was Gene Siskel who first asked her the question, “What do you know for sure?” While Siskel’s question stumped Oprah at first, it was ultimately so effective at drawing out what truly mattered to a person that she has been inspired to ask it of many others in both her magazine and on her talk shows.
“Sometimes people (like me that first time) are caught off guard,” Oprah writes in this blog. “But usually, … they rally with thoughtful and profound responses that reveal the essence of who they are.”
Revealing the essence of who you are—your own personal genius—is at the heart of the ETA™ process, which is comprised of three steps: excavate, tell and affirm. By first focusing on identifying your purpose, then developing messaging to best articulate it, and finally affirming out loud your conviction, the ETA process helps people know in their bones who they are and how they may best serve. When your personal brand runs that deep, talking about it is easy.
I know from my clients’ experiences that going through the ETA process helps them answer with confidence a seemingly innocuous but actually very difficult question that comes up so often in business: “So what do you do?”
The ETA process builds people’s conviction that what they are doing is what they are meant to do. People who are on purpose, who deeply understand their unique reason to serve, are not just able to answer the question of what they do, but the questions of who they are and how that drives what they do.

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 9, 2021
Have you Googled your Brand Name in the Last 10 Days?
Personal branding helps you know what you stand for.
Have you Googled your brand name in the last 10 days? There’s no better time than now to take inventory of your personal brand and what you stand for in your circle of influence.
Kickoff 2021 by laser-focusing on what you want your personal brand to stand for in your respective market as a thought leader. When you join a like-minded group of colleagues on this webinar, you’ll be introduced to a trademarked process on how to strategically position and message your personal brand within your targeted circle of influence.
The International Executives Resource Group (IERG) is a professional association for corporate executive-level professionals working in diverse industries whose careers include broad experience in the global arena.This unique global network of internationalists enables its membership to share their diverse experiences, cultures and language to connect, network, collaborate to identify opportunities, and learn from each other to accelerate commerce and to make the world a better place.

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, 2021
Where Can Your Excavated Personal Brand Take You?
The time-tested ETA™ process helps leaders in transition turn their passion into a personal brand that leads to action.
The Revealing Genius trademarked “ETA” process helps leaders like you excavate, tell and affirm their individual brands and get really good at communicating them. While doing so is great on its own, what real-life efforts can excavating your individual brand support?
The answer is: A lot of them! Here are 15, for starters:
1. Getting your dream job
2. Readying you to apply for a board seat
3. Preparing you for 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. Leading a new team
What are some things you’re considering doing next in your life? How could excavating your personal brand and developing messaging to better communicate it move you toward your dreams, a board seat, a new job or ____________?

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 18, 2020
Why Do I Need a Purposeful Personal Brand?
Key benefits of having an on-purpose personal brand
“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. ” ~ Howard Thurman, Author, Philosopher, Theologian, Educator
We live in a less-than-seven-second world. According to Business Insider, people form a solid impression of who you are in less than seven seconds. And, according to ExecuNet, people form an impression of a candidate’s resume in even less time—just 6.5 seconds.
How you come across in the first few moments of connecting with a potential client, colleague or employer can change your life or define the next step in your career. Are you prepared to make the right first impression?
Spending the time to excavate your brand and plan for how you will communicate it to others doesn’t just pay off in good first impressions. Research shows that purposeful corporate brands outperform other brands. Plus, all purposeful brands will be better positioned to build trust and manifest a unique “why.”
Let’s look at each of these benefits of on-purpose brands in more detail.
1.    According to Gartner, www.gartner.com, on-purpose brands outperform the stock market by 120%. Let’s consider three successful brands in the automotive industry. Mercedez-Benz makes its name for luxury, Volvo for safety and BMW for performance. Why did you buy your last car? Would you consider purchasing a car from one of these makers if you valued their clear brand promise?
2.    On-purpose brands are trusted. Tetley is one of the most trusted brands in the world. Hershey, a brand from my home state of Pennsylvania, has been on the list of most trusted brands for a decade. Why is it worth having a purposeful brand that people trust? Research from CapGemini’s Digital Transformation Institute finds that 82% of people make buying decisions based on emotion.
3.    On-purpose brands manifest uniqueness. Excavating your brand helps you know how you are meant to serve. When you know that, you can position yourself with purpose and message with conviction. Each of us has a unique calling. When we deliver on that, great things happen.
There’s no time like now to excavate your brand genius. Joins us on the next webinar. You can register at: https://revealinggenius.com/webinar
Your life—and the world—will be better for it.

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 6, 2020