Revealing Genius | Brand Strategy for Accomplished Leaders

Category: Tell About Your Personal Brand

Articulate your executive personal brand story/your personal brand message. If you can’t articulate it, you can’t establish it with others.

Want to Share Your Personal Brand Message Effectively and Confidently?
Here are three steps to executive branding success
Time, when you’re sharing your personal brand message, is of the essence.
You might get two minutes to share your brand story when someone visits your LinkedIn profile.
You might get seven seconds to make a good first impression when you meet someone in person.
And yet, if you’re like most people, you get tongue-tied—or experience writer’s block—when you have an opportunity to share who you are, what you do and why you do it. You might not feel confident telling someone what you are best at in the world.
But this can be overcome.
My clients who have followed the time-proven ETA™ process know their brands, believe in them deeply, and can confidently and effectively share their personal brand message.
Let’s talk about how each step in the process helps them to do this so well.
Excavate Your Brand
My clients get multiple opportunities in the “excavate” step of the ETA process to reflect on what they do and how it is unique. Getting clarity about your unique reason to serve makes it so much easier to tell other people about it.
Many people start on their executive personal branding journeys with Revealing Genius by reflecting on 10 key questions that help them to sort out what makes them unique. Don’t underestimate the power of two of these ten questions:
1. Who is your favorite superhero and why? Your answer can be a character you admire from fiction, someone in your life or a famous person. Don’t forget to answer the why part of this question. Why you have chosen your superhero will speak volumes about your brand.
2. What is your favorite quote or mantra that you live by and why? Again, make sure to consider why you chose it.
If you’d like to get a taste of clarifying your brand and really do this exercise. Get out a piece of paper or wake up your laptop or tablet. Capture your answers to these two questions. Then think about them. What light do they shine on your authentic personal brand?
You can get all 10 brand excavation reflection questions when you attend our 45-minute complimentary webinar—and several other opportunities to get more clarity about your brand through excavation when you join our 7-Day Summit.
Practice Your Personal Brand Message
In the “tell” step of the ETA process for executive personal branding, my clients get lots of practice talking and writing about what they’ve learned from the “excavate” step.
Two adages seem to consistently apply during this phase of the process. They are: “practice makes perfect” and “writing is rewriting.”
Why these two refrains?
After you do some brand excavation, you will find you have so much clarity about your unique reason to serve the world that talking and writing about it will come more easily. But even so, your efforts to tell the world about your brand will benefit from practice.
Rehearsing your elevator pitch, your presentation for a board seat interview or your Ted talk will be essential to delivering it well. In the same way, writing and then rewriting your resume, CV, board application, LinkedIn profile or marketing brochure will help you hone your message.
Fortunately, you don’t have to do this alone! In fact, we’d recommend against doing all your practicing and rewriting in isolation.
One of the most popular parts of our 7-Day Summit is “hot seat” day. That’s when participants volunteer to have the cohort of participants review a piece of their brand collateral (for just two minutes!) and give feedback on what they understand about that person’s brand after doing so. I’ve seen so many participants have “aha” moments about their brands as they have heard what their classmates have to say.
While we’d love to have you join us for an upcoming summit and experience hot seat day for yourself, you can also get feedback from people in your current network about how effectively you’re telling your brand.
Ask them to spend two minutes—and only two minutes—reviewing your LinkedIn profile, CV, brochure, presentation or elevator pitch and then give you feedback. I assure you that you’ll get a lot of ideas for how to apply “practice makes perfect” and “writing is rewriting.”
Affirm Your Executive Brand
The “excavate” and “tell” steps of the ETA process help you know what you stand for and how to share that with the world. The third and last step, “affirm,” is what gives you the confidence to do with conviction.
If you Google “affirmations,” you’ll see there are affirmations for the morning, for success, for happiness, for overcoming anxiety, for kids, for self-esteem. You name it. The most effective affirmations are bespoke—unique—for their particular purpose.
Whether you work with me one-on-one, read the blog, sign up for the newsletter, attend the webinar, join RG365 or participate in the 7-Day Summit, you’ll find the positive energy and support of affirmations for who you are and what you do at every turn.
As an example, participants in the 7-Day Summit pair up in a breakout session to practice their elevator pitches. When the larger group comes back together, participants introduce their partners by saying, “It is my honor and privilege to introduce _____” and then explaining their understanding of their partner’s executive personal branding.
The phrasing of the introduction using “honor and privilege” is key to partners affirming one another’s executive brand; the support emanating through the virtual classroom during this part of the program is almost palpable.
Powerful voices come from people who have excavated how they alone can transform the world, know how to tell others about it and have affirmed their belief that this is what they were meant to do. I look forward to hearing yours.

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 8, 2022
Executive Personal Branding Can Help You Build a Superb LinkedIn Profile
Making a good first impression on social media is supported by doing authentic personal branding.
Executive personal branding matters when it comes to building a strong and effective LinkedIn profile—the kind of profile that helps you put your best foot forward, make connections that convert and drive your career more rapidly toward its next milestone.
Before we talk about specific steps you can take to build a LinkedIn profile that fully supports your brand, let’s take inspiration from Michael Dowling’s LinkedIn profile.
When you look at Dowling’s page, you learn three important things about him in the first four lines:
- He is president/CEO of Northwell Health, New York state’s largest health care system.
- He’s a “healthcare optimist.”
- He wrote a book on immigrating from Ireland.
Having such on-brand information right at the start will inspire some people to dig deeper into who Michael Dowling is and what he stands for. Those who do will find the website his team created that features his NY Times quote:
“This is not a job. It’s a responsibility. If it were a job, you could work anywhere. You’re here to transform care and change lives. In return, yours will be transformed.”
Feeling inspired by Dowling’s authentic personal branding? You’re not alone. He has over 37,000 followers.
Doing effective executive personal branding can help you build a LinkedIn presence that’s like Dowling’s—one that’s easily understood and that inspires people to connect with you.
The key thing to keep in mind when applying your executive personal branding to your social media presence is that first impressions matter.
Executive Personal Branding Helps You Make a Good First Impression
I am a firm believer that spending time with the time-proven ETA™ process from Revealing Genius helps leaders better express their personal brand message and make better first impressions.
The process has three steps. “Excavate” is about uncovering your purpose. “Tell” is about developing messages to express your brand effectively in many different situations. (In the “tell” step, you develop such brand collateral pieces as your LinkedIn profile and your elevator pitch.) And “affirm” is about the ways you practice and “steep” in you can talk about it with conviction.
I don’t know if our example, Dowling, went through a formal executive personal branding process, but it’s clear to me from his profile that he knows his unique reason to serve, believes in it and has practiced how to express it. He leverages his authentic personal branding to make an awesome first impression.
Establish Your Professional Brand on LinkedIn
You might find it a little intimidating to know that visitors to your LinkedIn profile may form a first impression about you in as little as 50 milliseconds! The first second on your page might matter more than all the seconds that follow (if any do). Interestingly, a first impression can stay with a person for years. So, you’ll want to make sure that first moment of contact hooks them and makes them want to learn more about you.
How can you go about this?
1. Do formal authentic personal branding, like ETA. I’m sure some leaders know who they are and articulate it well as a matter of course. But most people benefit from spending time developing their executive personal branding—thinking about who they are, developing authentic personal branding messages for every occasion and affirming those messages until they can feel them in their bones.
2. Study up on and implement design and presentation best practices. To put it in old-school newspaper language, make sure the “above-the-fold” area rocks! Remember how we learned three incredibly compelling things about Dowling in the first four lines of his LinkedIn profile? Be sure to put your most important “news” at the top.
3. Get familiar with best practices for LinkedIn profiles. For example, first impressions are 94% design-related. If you use a profile photo in which you are smiling, that will build trust from the get-go. Use the background behind your photo wisely as well. It’s known that simple design tweaks can result in significant conversions. Also, the character limit for LinkedIn article headlines is 220, including spaces. Here’s a place to spend time. And don’t forget to do market testing!
If you’d like to do executive personal branding in support of your efforts to have a LinkedIn profile that makes a fantastic first impression, I have some resources for you. To get our free monthly Revealing Genius newsletter, please add your email in the box at the bottom of this webpage. Or, if you’re ready to be reminded to be on-brand every day of the year, please become one of the first 50 to register for the RG365 Membership, which is in the “alpha” test phase of development, so it’s just $12/year ($1/month).

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 14, 2021
Want a Great Personal Brand Elevator Pitch? Use This New Formula
Develop an emotion-evoking answer to the age-old question, ‘What do you do?’ Then affirm it.
The bottom-line secret to a personal brand good elevator pitch is that it must evoke emotion.
When someone asks another person in an elevator what they do, the person answering has an opportunity to capture hearts and minds with the transformation that their work makes possible.
But delivering a good elevator pitch requires preparation. A good elevator pitch depends on a good formula and often a good bit of practice.
A Great Elevator Pitch in Three Steps
At Revealing Genius, we use the following formula to help clients develop incredibly compelling personal brand elevator pitches:
I <action word> <my beloved avatar>
how to <do what they want to accomplish>
so that they can <have the result/transformation>.
The first step in developing a great elevator pitch using this formula is to identify what you do <action word> and for whom <my beloved avatar>.
For one person I work with, this has become: “I <partner with> <people who are alive with purpose and vision>.”
The second step is to identify what you do that helps a person reach a goal. For our example, this becomes <to give voice to their message>.
The third step is critical, as this is where the emotion gets added to a great personal brand elevator pitch. In this third step, identify the transformation or result that you help to bring about. In our example, this is: <so they can confidently share with the world what matters to them most>.
Taking the pieces together, our example personal branding elevator pitch becomes: “I partner with people who are alive with purpose and vision to give voice to their message so they can confidently share with the world what matters to them most.”
Compared with previously popular formulas for developing an elevator pitch, the Revealing Genius approach focuses on bringing out the emotion of the transformation. In keeping with this, at Revealing Genius, we also call a great elevator pitch a “transformation” statement.
Updating a Previous Personal Brand Elevator Pitch
To illustrate more fully how the new formula for a great personal brand elevator pitch works, consider the original version of the elevator pitch in the example above: “making words work for you.”
The new formula helped this person use a stronger action verb. Consider the difference between “making words work” in the early version to the use of “partner with” and “to give voice to” in the revised version. Which phrases are more active and compelling?
The Revealing Genius elevator pitch also clarified the beloved avatar in this transformation statement. Instead of simply “you,” the person served in the new version of the elevator pitch becomes “people who are alive with purpose and vision.” Is the ideal client for this person clearer now? (And are you more inspired to be one of those clients?)
Finally, the original elevator pitch says nothing about a transformation. “Making words work for you” doesn’t inspire someone to find out how the world might change by working with this person. But the phrase “so they can confidently share with the world what they care about most” in the revised elevator pitch is ripe with possibility.
Creating Your Personal Brand Elevator Pitch With a Cohort Has Value
So far, it might seem like developing a great elevator pitch using the Revealing Genius formula is easy. And it’s not difficult. Still, a great elevator pitch will usually require several or many revisions before you arrive at a wording that really resonates with you—and your target audience.
How will you know if the elevator pitch you have written makes sense not only to you but to a person who might be a good client, your “beloved avatar”? An excellent way to do early testing of your pitch is by involving other people in your process.
Keep in mind that what you think sounds brilliant might be unclear to your audience. Thus, “round table” discussions, including those that are part of our 7-Day Brand Genius Summit, can be very valuable. Continue to test the market to ensure you are delivering the utmost value for your beloved avatar.
You can also check your work by asking yourself and the members of your cohort these survey questions:
- Does the action word make sense?
- Can I form a clear picture in my mind’s eye of the beloved avatar?
- Is “what they want to accomplish” crystal clear?
- Is the transformation specific?
- Overall, does the statement create an emotive response?
In a recent elevator pitch co-creation round table that I led, participants helped each other write and rewrite their transformation statements until they were telling each other, “I got tingles when you read that version.” Remember, a great elevator pitch evokes an emotional response.
Affirming Your Elevator Pitch
Revealing Genius believes so deeply in the power of affirmations that we make it the third step of our Excavate-Tell-Affirm (ETA™) personal brand development process. When it comes to developing a great elevator pitch, affirmations might look like repeating your pitch out loud until it rolls easily off your tongue—even when you’re nervous. After all, you might be a little nervous the first time you answer the question, “So what do you do?” in an elevator!
Another way that my clients affirm their transformation statements is by putting them up in their offices.
You can affirm your personal brand elevator pitch by putting it up in your workspace.
A Great Elevator Pitch for a Product
Interestingly, a great elevator pitch can also be used to explain a book, a speech or a product. The goal is always the same—to create an emotional response. Consider this:
Would you prefer to taste “a glass of red wine” … or “a Bordeaux with well-balanced, rich, savory notes; a vintage that has a seemingly endless finish that suggests it will become even better with more age”? The statement that evokes the stronger emotive response will win the day.
So, what do you do? Learn to answer with conviction and purpose. Subscribe to our newsletter by adding your email at the bottom of this webpage. And sign up for our 7-Day Brand Genius Summit.
An executive advisor, educator, speaker and author, Mary E. Maloney is the founder of Revealing Genius and the expert that accomplished leaders trust for positioning, messaging and brand strategy. A former CEO and CMO, Maloney guides CEOs, SVPs, business owners and consultants to purposefully identify and articulate their brand genius so they become recognized experts and rapidly achieve the next milestone in their careers.
September 14, 2021
Make Your Personal Brand Point Effectively With Concise Messaging
The time-proven ETA process can help you choose just the right words to express your personal brand.

When you think about personal brand, think about this quote: “I apologize for such a long letter. I didn’t have time to write a short one.”
Often attributed to Blaise Pascal, Mark Twain, John Locke or Woodrow Wilson, this quote reflects the value of brevity—the idea that when you distill an idea down to its core and write about it concisely, you communicate better.
Developing clear and concise messaging is at the heart of the “tell” step in the Revealing Geniu s time-proven excavate-tell-affirm or ETA™ process. People form first impressions in just a few seconds, so being able to quickly and effectively articulate your unique brand is important.
But developing clear, concise messaging does take some effort.
Think back to the movie, “A River Runs Through It.” In one scene, Reverend McClain is teaching his son Norman to write concisely. The boy comes downstairs, one-page composition in hand. After reading it, Reverend McClain hands it back to him saying, “Again, half as long.” When Norman presents his third draft, the Reverend finally says, “Good. Throw it away,” and Norman is released to go play.
Fortunately, working with Revealing Genius to develop your unique brand messaging is much easier than the Reverend’s drill. After we “excavate” the core of your brand in the first step of the ETA process, we’ll use time-proven tools and strategies to develop clear, concise messages. You’ll be able to use these messages to tell your brand story in a variety of settings—from the elevator to the boardroom. Importantly, the messaging you’ll have after you go through the ETA process will help others better and more quickly understand who you are and your unique reason for serving.

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 by Salvatore Ventura
May 25, 2021
Can You Say What You Stand for in Just a Few Words? (Tony Dungy can.)
Here’s why personal branding so you can do so is not just important but essential.
During a career that included serving as a professional football safety, coach and sports analyst, Tony Dungy led the Indianapolis Colts to victory in Super Bowl XLI, making him the first Black head coach to win the highly sought-after title.
Dungy can say what he stands for in two words: winning attitude.
You might think that was cliché for a famous figure in professional sports. But if you were to read Dungy’s book, Quiet Strength: The Principles, Practices, and Priorities of a Winning Life, you’d learn that for this father who lost a son to suicide, having a winning attitude applies fully to all aspects of his life.
If someone were to ask you to describe what you stand for in just two words, what would you say? Getting your purpose, your unique why, down to such a short phrase can help you really understand what’s at the heart of your unique mission to serve. And that can help you fully live out your brand.
A tool I recommend for helping people identify their deepest purpose is onpurpose.me, created by my friend Kevin W. McCarthy. For a small fee, the site will ask you to choose between a series of pairs of two-word phrases. At the end, it offers a two-word phrase that fills in the blank: “I exist to serve by____________.” Some of my clients have been completely energized by their results.
Defining your unique why is part of the “excavate” portion of the time-tested ETA™ (excavate-tell-affirm) process for revealing your personal genius.

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 2, 2021
Top Tools for Telling Your Personal Brand Story
The right messaging elements help leaders express their personal brand and effectively connect with their audiences.
As a leader, you may have observed that the people in your audiences expect you to do the messaging work for them! Your audiences want to trust you—and their trust will be built on your ability to express who you are and what you stand for in ways that respond to who they are.
We keep this in mind as we help leaders like you develop these three key tools—and others—for expressing who they are and their individual “why”:
1. Overarching brand statement. This defines the one thing a leader wants the audience to know. It can be stated in this format: “I exist to serve by __________.”
2. Value summary paragraph. This is akin to the description of an author found on the inside cover of a book. It includes bullet points with metrics of the leader’s three to five defining career accomplishments.
3. Big relevant change you want to make in the world. This is the mission, cause, crusade, market force or personal interest that’s most meaningful to the leader.
Leaders’ messaging tools must be developed with care and thoughtfulness to ensure that they connect with their key audiences.
For example, as people listen to a leader, they are hoping to find that this leader is in tune with their interests, attitudes and opinions; understands their personality and values; and has taken their lifestyle into account.
Leaders can know their messaging tools are likely to help them communicate effectively if they can answer “yes” to each of the following questions:
- Is my messaging clear?
- Is my messaging distinctive?
- Is my messaging consistent?
How is your brand messaging right now? Would developing these tools help you tune up its effectiveness?

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 8, 2020