For over a decade I avoided branding like the plague. 

I didn’t want someone to put me in a box. So I forged ahead on my own, with fear driving my branding and business decisions in sneaky ways. 

Fear of being too much. Too real. Too loud. Too intense. Too raw. Too weird. Too ME.

So I borrowed, as we often do when fear is driving. 

We look at who else is doing what we do, take the pieces that seem to be working, and build something functional. A business that gets us by.

In my attempt to avoid someone else putting me in a box, I ended up in a mismatched confusing box of my own making.

Designer and brand strategist Rachel Lee calls this a Frankenstein business.

It runs. Technically. But no matter how long you work on it, something about it never quite fits.

The Curated Storefront Problem

There are two ways to think about personal branding.

The first is the curated storefront: a carefully managed online presence, strategically positioned to land a certain impression. Clean. Consistent. Designed to convert.

The second is a mirror: an external expression that reflects our inner truth. 

Rachel spent years in the first camp before she realized the disconnect was costing her more than a rebrand.

When people hired her, they got someone different from who they’d seen online. More alive. More strange. More real. And that mismatch, however subtle, created a rupture in trust before the relationship even started.

She was setting the wrong expectations.

Because her curated 1950s storefront kept the most interesting parts of her on mute.

What Happens When You Turn the Volume Up

In 2022, Rachel tore the whole thing down.

She rebuilt her brand around the version of herself she’d been hiding: the color, the kitty ears, the irreverence, the weird.

She didn’t know if it would work. She genuinely didn’t know if she’d make any money.

What she got in return wasn’t just better clients — though she got that too. She also got something I believe is one of our deepest human longings: 

The feeling of being fully seen. With all of the messy edges showing. And still being chosen.

For someone who’d spent most of her life as the good girl — doing what was expected, being what was palatable, performing competence in a way her family and community would recognize — that feeling was seismic.

And that became her work.

Not “personal branding” in the strategic sense. But the more intimate, riskier version: help people figure out who they actually are, then make sure what the world sees matches.

The Permission Slip

What Rachel discovered is that most people don’t need a better strategy.

They’re waiting for permission.

Permission to show the weird parts.
Permission to stop performing professionalism for an audience that doesn’t actually exist.
Permission to let the brand be honest.

We do others a disservice when we show up as anything less than what we are. The energy we spend managing how we’re perceived is energy we could spend actually helping people.

And the people who can’t handle the real version of you?

They were never your people anyway.

There is a version of you — weirder, louder, more textured than your current brand allows for — that some client out there has been specifically waiting to find.

The only thing standing between you and them is the mute button.

Listen to my conversation with Rachel Lee on the Untamed Leader Podcast.