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.
