Bringing Your Full Self Into Your Personal Brand
Ep 6: On Brand Expression and Being Fully Human
For a long time, I hid behind the intellectual, “safe” side of my business. It felt comfortable. Reliable. Easy to explain.
But parts of me, the poet, the sensual Leo, the mystical, intuitive side, were quietly insisting on being included.
In this episode of The Midnight Edit, I share what happened when I stopped editing myself down and began letting more of my humanity shape my personal brand and business expression.
Inside this episode:
The trap of building a one-dimensional personal brand
What shifted when I allowed softer, more creative parts of myself into my work
A behind-the-scenes story of guiding my client and creative director, Freya, through her own brand expression evolution
Why people are craving depth, nuance, and real humanness in the brands they connect with
If you’ve been feeling the pull to bring more of yourself into your work but aren’t sure how to do that without losing clarity or credibility, this episode is for you.
Mentioned Resources
My phenomenal creative director Freya Rose Tanner
Episode Transcript
Welcome to episode six of the Midnight Edit. It's 1:55, so let's dive in.
Today, I wanna share two stories with you — both from my side and my own experience, and also from a dear friend and client’s experience of working through bringing our whole holistic self out into our brand, and what it looks like to really move outside of that comfort zone and start finding the different threads that want to be expressed.
It’s kind of funny that as personal brands, we forget that the very best thing we can do — the best thing for our souls, the best thing for our happiness, the best thing for our clients, the best thing for our marketing — is to inject more personality and more person into the personal brand.
And I don't mean influencer-style personality, where you just sound like everybody else, or feeling like you have to be vulnerable and raw for the sake of being vulnerable and raw.
I’m talking about actually bringing your full personhood into your brand.
Because there's this trap that we can fall into — I know I for sure have — where we get caught up in the (I’m using air quotes here) “strategy” of:
finding the perfect Instagram hook
creating the perfect subject line
writing emails in a way that converts
All of these different pieces of strategy that help with conversion and sales and marketing… and we start to snip off the buds and blooms of our creativity.
We forget that the whole reason we're running our own brand is because we wanna do things our way, not someone else’s way.
We forget that we are unique. We’re not going to sound like everyone else, and we're not gonna fit into this perfect content pillar formula.
But I think there’s sort of a rite of passage that we all have to go through when we are starting our businesses and building our brands.
We get to try on different personalities. We get to try on different strategies. And we also have to give ourselves permission to evolve.
Because as we grow — and I often say business is a very, very fast track to self-development, personal development, healing, so many things — with that growth, with that healing, with that transformation, our brand is also going to need to evolve with us.
What ends up happening often is we hit a point where there are these parts of us that are sometimes whispering, sometimes screaming, that they want to be brought to the surface.
But our logical brain tells us: Absolutely not.
Whether it’s our sense of humor, our softness, our artistry, our spirituality — whatever it may be — we all have a comfort zone in our marketing and our brand where we’re like:
Yes. This is what people pay me for. This is what people understand. This is the clear cerebral part of me.
And when we look at all these other parts of us that want to come to the surface, we’re like: Absolutely not. People are going to think what? This is going to weaken my credibility. I’ll be seen as too much. I’ll be seen as flaky or dumb. People will question the validity of what I’m doing.
There are so many ways that we see these other parts of our personality as weakening or diluting the work we’re doing.
I know for myself, I was deeply comfortable in the cerebral part of my business — having finished my master’s degree and then heading straight into the corporate learning design world, then leaving corporate and running my own business as a curriculum designer.
I talked day in and day out about neuroscience and learning psychology. The science of how people learn and how change and transformation happens. The science of motivation.
I was so in the brain. I was very much about how people learn and what’s going on neurologically.
I was comfortable in the intellectual side. Six years of academia in a row — I had my research, my citations, my science, my brain. I was covered.
I remember relatively early on in my business when my client Amber Rae said: I really want you to let your woo out of the closet.
She told me, You have this softness and this little bit of woo magic to you, but I didn’t know that about you when I hired you. I only found out through working with you.
And I remember being like: Okay, I love that… and that’s terrifying. I’m just gonna lock that up. Absolutely not. People want me for my intellectual brain.
A few years later, I led the France Retreat for the very first time. I thought: Okay, we’re gonna go in, we’re gonna design offers, it’s gonna be great.
But the majority of the work we ended up talking about was:
the identity behind a personal brand
how we feel as whole humans in our brand
the multifaceted parts of who we are as humans and how they want to come to the surface
And I felt more embodied, more grounded, more me in that experience than I ever had in any offering, in any client session I’d ever done.
And I was like: Ooooh. There’s something here that needs to come forward.
Thankfully, my dear friend and client, Freya Rose Tanner — the most ingenious creative director (I think I talked about her in the last episode too) — was at that retreat.
Afterwards, her and I talked and I was like: Hmm. I think it’s time for a rebrand.
Side note: I could talk about how brilliant Freya is for a very long time. If you are looking for someone who can hold all of you, who can really see all of you, and then bring it forward into a visual brand that captures everything you’re here to share — she is your woman. She is phenomenal.
What she helped coax out of me were these different parts of how I work.
Being able to see them for the first time helped me really land in: How do I bring these different parts of me forward into my brand in a way that’s not absolutely terrifying?
How do I honor:
the very strategic, very Virgo side of me who loves taking all the threads in people’s brains, mapping them into ecosystems, designing frameworks, adding structure, leveraging strategy so that things can be profitable and scalable…
…but also:
the parts of me who love rituals under the full moon
the parts who want to journal and check in with the body
the full, silky, sensual Leo in me
the poetic sides of me that want to come forward
It took about a solid year and a half after rebranding for me to feel fully anchored in bringing those different parts of me forward.
That really landed for me in the photo shoot I spoke about in the last episode — where I was able to draw on different colors, different outfits, and different aesthetics to capture the different elements of who I am and how I serve people in my business, in a way that communicates a visual story.
What was interesting is, Freya and I are in a mastermind together. We’ve been each other’s clients. We are very, very dear friends.
She had an upcoming photo shoot where she was going to really be bringing all of herself forward — celebrating the evolution she had brought to her brand through our work together — and expressing that in her shoot.
What ended up happening is her and I got on a call.
Because this work is basically impossible to do in a silo.
You can’t see it for yourself. You can’t figure it out by yourself. You need someone else to reflect it back to you, to play off of, to draw it out.
So in this session, I guided her on a journey to meet and draw out the inner archetypes of the different facets of the way she works with clients.
Having been her client and witnessed her work, I was able to pull out threads, facets, and we gave them names, scenes, environments.
We were able to talk to them, see what they wanted to express, what they wanted people to know, how they wanted people to feel.
This immersive journey was about two hours, and it was so beautiful. The more we clarified and enumerated these different facets, the more we could start to see how they wanted to be expressed visually.
Here’s the thing: this is the incredible work that Freya does at the drop of a hat for her clients, day in and day out.
But seeing yourself — pulling this out for yourself — is basically impossible.
I know I experience the same thing with my own offers and strategy. It’s what I do every day for clients, but being able to see it for myself? Such a challenge.
That’s why I’m so grateful, day in and day out, for the mastermind I’m in.
I can go to this incredible group of women and say: Here’s how I’m feeling. Here’s where I’m stuck. I can’t see it.
And they reflect it back.
Whether it’s in the mastermind or with Freya as my creative director, I need that reflection: This is what it is. This is what you need to bring it forward. This is how you land it.
And I’m going to get more into the strategy and structure in the next episode. But I wanted to share these stories — mine and Freya’s — to celebrate and call forward this truth:
The time for a one-dimensional personal brand has passed.
You are here because:
you have big, bold, spicy opinions
you have beautifully juxtaposed parts of your personality
you’re the kind of person who organizes cupboards for fun but has a messy office
you’re the brilliant scientist who also wants to make food puns
you’re multifaceted, human, and magnetic
And all those facets are what make your brand alive.
I know the trap of what will people think? Will it dilute my expertise? Will I be seen as too much or not enough?
But especially in this day and age of AI, where everything feels too polished, too perfect, too same-again-and-again, people are hungry for your human.
The feedback I’ve heard again and again from my clients, from my students, from people in my community, is that it’s often the quirks, the little moments, the unexpected pieces of my personality that magnetized them.
I once signed a five-figure client because I did a ridiculous Reel lip-syncing to The Little Mermaid.
Not because that’s the “secret” to a $10K deal — but because those are the fun little parts of our personality that want to come forward.
Whether it’s your humor.
Your artistry.
Your soft, soulful writing.
The more we show up as ourselves, the more we decondition from patriarchal programming that tells us we can’t do it our way.
We give others permission to do the same.
And I know it can feel edgy, scary, uncomfortable.
That’s why we need space-holding. Community. Mentors who see us when we can’t see ourselves. Strategic structure to hold us when we’re learning to bring these parts forward.
The main takeaway I want you to have from this episode is this:
Your people want all of you.
The quirks.
The softness.
The spirituality.
The dance parties at midnight.
All of it.
That’s what sets you apart.
That’s what magnetizes your people.
And that’s what makes you feel at home in your business.
✨ Let’s keep the conversation going
I’d love to hear what stood out for you in this episode - feel free to send me a DM on Instagram @emily.mwalker (it's my fav place to hang out!)
If you’re enjoying The Midnight Edit, subscribing, sharing an episode with a friend, or leaving a quick review is one of the best ways to support the show and help these conversations reach the right people.
And if you want more behind-the-scenes thoughts on business, bodies of work, and building in a way that feels expansive and grounded, you can click here to subscribe to Notes from the Atelier, my private newsletter.