The Self-Actualization of Personal Brands
Oct 06, 2023
The Self-Actualization of Personal Brands
I've always obsessed over personal growth and the human potential.
My favorite class in college was positive psychology, where we studied the possibilities of humans instead of problems and diagnoses. (Probably why my first iteration of online business was a life coach.)
One idea immediately struck a cord with me: self-actualization.
The idea of overcoming your problems, to live a life of freedom, autonomy, and joy.
Abraham Maslow, a psychologist, described self-actualization in his hierarchy of needs framework.
It looks like this:
(Image from The Berkeley Well-Being Institute)
You can see how any person can ascend in the hierarchy of needs.
It works bottom up. It's hard to focus on spiritual or existential problems (self-actualization) if you are starving or don't have a place to live.
So as you meet your needs in a specific order. You solve for the basic needs and move upward into more complex and spiritual needs.
Makes sense.
Building a personal brand also has a hierarchy of needs in order to actualize.
When you build a personal brand, you digitize your consciousness profitably. You do this by:
- following and studying your curiosities, so you gain specific knowledge
- using that specific knowledge to experiment and discover ways to create new desired results
- sharing your insights publicly (content)
- selling solutions to people like you (programs, courses, and mentorship offers)
We know what to do. How do you do it?
The Self-Actualization of Personal Brands
Let's dive in.
Value Exchange + Distribution
(Business Fundamentals)
Sell something, to someone, at a profit.
That is the basics of business in general, and the online one person/creator business is no different.
The big idea: Figure out how to add value to someone's life and get paid for it.
This is usually where personal brands realize they have a specific skill or knowledge they can pass down to others.
This is where personal growth becomes a desire for contribution.
Businesses are about solving other people's problems. And people exchange money for those problems to be solved.
In phase 1, this is where many one person businesses use their own experiences and results as evidence that they can help someone else. They have a vague idea of the value they can exchange for money.
Once you know what value you want to add, you move on to phase two.
Applied Marketing and Sales
After the entrepreneur decides what they want to do in their business, this is when they must learn how.
Learning how to get paid for what you do is what we call marketing and sales.
The skill stack here is:
- getting people's attention
- articulating the value of what you do
- persuading people to buy
Of course, this is oversimplified. It's nearly impossible to dive into marketing and sales in depth in an article like this. (I recommend studying principles of direct response marketing to get started or if you're new.)
Here's the rub: marketing and sales mastery is an infinite game.
As you grow more successful, the mastery required to reach the next level of success increases.
This means you are always learning and iterating in marketing and sales.
If you want to build a profitable, and eventually, self-actualized personal brand... marketing and sales are non-negotiable skills to learn.
And to go a step further, it's not enough just to learn them.
You have to apply what you learn, and experiment to find what feels best and works best for you.
Then you iterate endlessly.
Constant, never-ending improvement and iteration is the path to mastery.
Once you've got a marketing and sales system that works, you move on to phase 3.
It's important to note here that these phases are inclusive. This means when you move to a new phase you don't discard the lessons and understanding from the previous phase.
Each phase is included in the emerging phase.
Phase 1 is included in phase 2.
Phase 1 and phase 2 are included in phase 3. And so on.
Now we will move into phase 3...
Creative Distinction and Community
Until now, the focus has been on basic principles.
When you are learning marketing and sales, I recommend learning the basic principles and just sticking with them.
This is where you emulate from people who are successful.
Or.
You pay to learn a system or way of marketing and selling and apply what you learn.
Both work.
But once you've got something really working and you're making money...
You can start to focus on creating a community and creative distinction.
I define creative distinction as publishing content uniquely your own. Digitizing your consciousness.
You develop your unique consciousness by spending time at the intersection of your curiosities. (The next letter will be going over that in detail.)
The intersection of your curiosities is where you will begin to develop thought leadership.
It's where you start emerging from the crowd of other creators just like you.
You also begin to attract "your people" aka your ideal audience and clients, instead of random people paying you here and there.
This is where you begin to play with ideas that get shared...
You have your own way of explaining things and your people resonate with it (and even share it with their friends and network.)
In this phase you get renewals, referrals, and people seeking you out (instead of you needing to seek them out.)
This is where business becomes fun. And you naturally are ready for the next phase.
Autonomy + Pioneering Consciousness
At this phase, your business provides more than enough cash for your needs and wants. So a bigger picture begins to emerge.
You don't "have" to work.
You want to.
You choose the structure of when and how you work.
You choose who you work with.
You get to experiment with different offers, pricing, and business models.
You also get to experiment with your content by combining new ideas, sharing it with your audience, and iterating as you go.
This is where your personal brand becomes less about vanity metrics... and more about spiritual meaning and elevating the collective consciousness.
Personal brands who have autonomy and who pioneer consciousness, change the world.
Every time these personal brands drop a podcast episode, or publish a post, or write an email... the individual minds who consume the information elevate.
Their thoughts are shared, researched, and accepted by others as good, true, or beautiful.
This is powerful.
And it brings us to phase 5.
Brand Actualization.
This is where we see true leaders and history makers emerge.
People who change the course of human evolution...
People like Steve Jobs, or Elon Musk.
In the self development industry... people like Tony Robbins, Eckhart Tolle, Adam Grant, Byron Katie, and others.
People who change collective consciousness with their published ideas.
Obviously I'm not on this level yet. And I don't necessarily want the business model or fame that many of those names listed have... but the state of mind and the impact they have is what remains compelling to me.
It paints a picutre of what's possible when you consciously take your personal brand to the next level.
Now the question.... how?
Introducing The One Person Business Mastery Stack:
- online business (writing, persuasion, marketing, sales)
- craft (writing, coaching, design, speaking, video, animation)
- self-management (beliefs, states of being, performance)
- emotional intelligence (compassion, boundaries, communication)
- grit (longevity, focus, persistence)
All 5 of these umbrella skills are infinite games you play with yourself.
Devote yourself to the study of these skills, not merely the passive observer.
The creators who devote themselves to mastery are on the path of personal brand actualization.
When you apply these ideas, you get something that looks like this:
This is a framework with infinite possibilities and potentialities.
Your business will be completely customized, bespoke to your passion, interests, and desires.
As you learn the skills, grow the audience, and master your craft...
You will help make the world better by helping individuals.
You will make money.
You will become the version of yourself you hope to become.
That's the game worth playing. That's the game we have the privilege of playing as a one person business.
A quick note-- the ideas I discussed today aren't something you accomplish in a weekend.
This is something you devote your life to mastering.
But what else would you rather be doing??
Food for thought.
With love,
Amber
P.S. I'm running a brand new solopreneur business cohort.
It's called 'Bespoke Business Sprints" -- where we are going deep into how to actually build a profitable personal brand online.
You can read more here. We start on October 10th. I'd love to have you join us.
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