Bonni: Today, on episode number 441 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, How to Create an Authentic Personal Brand.

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Bonni: Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students.

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Bonni: I know, I know, personal branding, it doesn’t really resonate with a lot of people who might be listening right now. In fact, maybe some people never even pressed play on the episode, and I get it, because, even though I put the word authentic in front of the phrase personal branding, it still can really be something that just really turns people away from wanting to hear. I think I can’t necessarily negate the challenges that we have when we think about ourselves as a brand because that feels so commercialized and so transactional.

I just want you to know that I get it, and I scrutinized myself [chuckles] and went back and forth on what to call this. I was thinking about calling this episode Authentic Digital Presence, but I want to talk about more than just digital presence, I want to talk about our presence in general, so bear with me on the perhaps clumsy title. Thank you for trusting me enough if this phrase isn’t one that resonates with you. Thank you for trusting and sticking around.

I had an opportunity to speak with our graduate organizational psychology students about authentic personal branding, and I wanted to share the experience with you and also share some of the things that I talked about with them. I began by running a Poll Everywhere. By the way, the talking points that I’m going to be sharing are available on a speaking resources pages that I made for this group. That’s going to be in your show notes, and you can come and see some of the slides that I’ll be talking off of.

Starting off, I showed a picture of Jane Goodall. Not all of you may know who Jane Goodall is, and some of the people who were in the class were not aware of who she was. I suggested that, even if they didn’t, to still respond to what they saw in the photo. It’s a picture of Jane Goodall, who is gently caressing the arm of a chimpanzee, it looks like to me, it’s kind of blurred, but through some kind of a barrier of some type.

I said, “Even if you don’t know who that is, what are three words that this person evokes for you?” If you happen to head on over to the talk page that I’ll be referencing in the show notes, you might get confused because one of the words on the word cloud in the poll that I did is actor. You might be thinking, “Well, she’s not an actor.” Well, that’s me not using Poll Everywhere well because [chuckles] I thought that I had moved on to the next person who I’ll share about after Jane Goodall but didn’t quite advance the poll fast enough, so some of the next ones trickled here. What are you going to do? [chuckles]

The words that pop out that aren’t related to the next person are kind, animals, caring, leader, gorillas, inspiring, peace, zoologist, science, research, monkeys, passionate, gentle, generous. That gives you a sense of what Jane Goodall’s image, her presence in the world evokes in people. The next individual I pulled up on the slides is Chadwick Boseman. Chadwick Boseman was clearly known to more of the people in this class than Jane Goodall was. In the background of the photo that they would have been looking at were him playing a number of roles that he was famous for.

If you’re not familiar with Chadwick Boseman, probably the most prominent acting role he had was as Black Panther. I’ll just read some of the things that they shared about in the word cloud when I asked them to type three words that come to mind when you think of Chadwick Boseman. Talented, actor, strong, Wakanda, trustworthy, authenticity, husband, influential, famous, representation, Black Panther, and cancer.

Some of the individuals knew that he had passed away from cancer, and when he was alive, that was a part of himself that he did not reveal to the general public but really cared well for young people who were being treated for cancer. Whether he went to visit them in the hospital or would exchange sometimes letters and videos and such. I do a class on personal leadership and productivity, and in talking about having a personal mission, I often will show clips of him speaking, either videos that he made for children with cancer or the parent of one young person who sadly is also no longer with us and just him talking about the power of Chadwick’s presence in his son’s life.

Then another big part of Chadwick’s values, his mission was around representation. There’s some really powerful speeches, including one that he gave at Howard University that just is incredibly powerful. It was nice to see this brand coming through. As I was creating the talk, I had done what is sometimes called productive procrastination. Productive procrastination is, you know you need to get something done, but if you give yourself too much time, you’ll spend exactly that much time.

I waited until the morning of the talk that I was giving to this group of graduate students, and I texted one of my former students, and I asked him, “Hey, can you–” Because I’m not a big sports person, in case you can’t tell if you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while. I said, “Hey, can you help me out? I’m doing a talk on personal branding, and I want the name of an athlete that would–” I think I had mentioned maybe specifically a basketball player, I’m not sure, but someone that would evoke, like, “That person has a brand,” definitely, people would have a perspective.

He knew about Poll Everywhere because he’d done it when he had been in classes with me. Anyway, he sent back the name LeBron James, who I would have been able to, in my three words, if I was given the Poll Everywhere, I would have had basketball player. I wouldn’t have known a lot about him. I’ll just read some of the words that came up for the three words on the Poll Everywhere. Basketball came up, leader, NBA, king, GOAT, rich, Taco Tuesday, confident all-time, winner, family, legacy, money, overrated.

By the way, I’m not trying to– If you’re a huge fan. Just reading. I’m just reading what’s on the Poll Everywhere. Olympics, celebrity, Chicago, athlete, icon, amazing. I joked with the group that was there, saying that I was surprised what hadn’t come up because the only other thing I would’ve associated with LeBron James would’ve been the controversy of when he switched teams. I didn’t get any of that from people who– They really clearly knew who this was [chuckles] and had feelings about him. It kind of cracked me up that that didn’t come up, but I guess whatever that may have been perhaps, at least with these individuals, that had not been top of mind for them as they thought about three words for him.

The last person that I shared an image of is Steve Jobs, which, if you’re not familiar, was one of the co-founders of Apple and who also has sadly passed away from cancer many years ago. I didn’t tell them that, by the way. Their three words came up. Innovative, Apple, smart, greedy, entrepreneur, visionary, turtleneck [chuckles]. That’s funny because turtleneck comes up, and then just neck comes up. I’m sure the turtle is showing up somewhere else. Egotistical maniac, iPhone, disruptor, creator, intelligence, dead. Yes, he had passed away as well.

I talked a little bit about the difference between how the Apple Corporation decided to handle his cancer diagnosis. I can recall there being a lot of carefulness around, “Let’s not have pictures of him looking sick out there in the news,” and lots of that being tied to wanting to protect the share price for Apple. When we think about contrasting that to the brand of Chadwick Boseman, who also did not go public with his illness but for what would seem to have been different motives, potentially.

I was very careful in how I phrased it. I’m probably being less careful [chuckles] with you. I’m not trying to make any strong conclusions here but just wanting to have conversation about personal presence and how we show up in the world and some of our motivations. Some of the common things that come up when we start talking about this. There’s three things I’d like to share about today. One is that it can feel icky. It really can seem like, what are we commercializing ourselves? I don’t sell my brand. That’s not what I’m about so it can feel yucky. I don’t want to be associated with something like this. It also can be terrifying to show up, and that can be an issue as well, and it can feel overwhelming in terms of all of this. When I think about the ickiness of it, part of why it can not feel as good to do it is just that it can feel inauthentic.

My first suggestion to us all is to show up to the extent to which we can show up in the fullness of ourselves with full authenticity, no apologies. That can be one way to counter the commercialization that may show up. I shared a video of the pilot. It’s a video of a musical performance from the movie, The Greatest Showman. The song is called This Is Me and the song wound up being in the movie, but this is just a rehearsal, but a rehearsal to get the movie to be made, and obviously, it was turned into a movie. That was really powerful. It was fun to have people that were there that day.

I invited them to stand up because it was an all-day class on a Saturday, so I invited them to stand up and some of us may have been tapping a toe or two. In terms of encouraging ourselves to show up, I want to share a Brené Brown quote. She writes, “Vulnerability is not winning or losing. It’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not weakness. It’s our greatest measure of courage.” On more of a practical side of things when it comes to vulnerability, one thing that has felt very vulnerable to me for a very long time now is taking photographs.

About six months ago I decided to partner up with Dave who is my actual partner, husband, and he needed to get his photos redone for a website redesign. Had been a while since I had done mine and I wear glasses now instead of used to wear contacts exclusively, and so it was time. I talked with the group and I would encourage you if it’s been a while that even if we feel at our most vulnerable when we take photographs, if we find someone we can trust to take them for us, it can be that much easier.

I love that after I shared that– I did share someone who’s local here in Orange County, California who took ours that I highly recommend. I also said, “If that’s not something that you’re able to or wanting to spend money on right now, just finding someone you can trust and taking a lot of photos and taking them from different angles, that kind of thing. I loved it because there were people after the workshop who stayed around and were taking photographs of each other.

I actually took a photo of one of our undergraduate students who was there as a guest and had so much fun doing that with her and getting to know her a little bit as well. Second piece of advice I have is to go deep and that if we’re going to counteract how terrifying this feels, I’m going to suggest that we go even deeper in rather than try to shy away from that, to really reflect on who are we. Those questions are ones we sometimes try to numb ourselves from but they’re really important questions to be asking ourselves. Two exercises that come out of the book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, one’s a rather cheerful exercise, the other one’s a little bit more on the serious side.

The cheerful one is to celebrate one’s 85th birthday. I actually have students who take my personal leadership and productivity class. They build out a slide deck, which comes out of some exercises, some reflective questions he has in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to fast forward. It’s your 85th birthday. Who’s there? What are you doing? What was your legacy? In these different roles that you played in your life, what are people there to celebrate about you?

Then the second exercise that he talks about in 7 Habits is writing your own eulogy, and what a powerful thing that can be to ground ourselves or to reroot ourselves in our sense of mission, our vision, and our values. I encourage you to think about the way one or both of those exercises might be able to help you rethink or, for the first time, think about those things. Then last, I encourage us to start small. When things are too big we can just convince ourselves that there’s nothing that we can do, and there’s so much we can do. To quote Adrienne Maree Brown, she writes, “Small is good, small is all.”

I remember when I had Dave Cormier on the show, on the podcast, and I will link to this one in the show notes if you missed it, or even if you heard it going back and re-listening. He talked about learning in uncertainty. It’s a class that he taught and he wrapped it around the Future Challenges Initiative. These are the wicked problems of our day. How do you teach students to address issues that are that complex, that are that systemic, that do go that deep?

I’m probably never going to forget what he said. He said, “It’s not about fixing whatever the wicked problem is. It’s about making it better.” There’s something about understanding– you’re not going to fix climate change, but you could make it better. Being able to release ourselves from an all-or-nothing kind of mindset, I just think is and was so powerful. That’s something that’s been bubbling around. Closely related to that on the same theme comes from my friend Sandie Morgan. Sandie Morgan’s been on the show many times, although I guess it’s been a little while since she was on.

One of the things that she does in her role at our university is she’s the director of our Global Center for Women in Justice and one aspect of her research and her expertise is in the area of ending human trafficking. She shares about living in Greece for more than a decade. That was when she first learned that human trafficking, essentially human slavery is still an issue today. It was the same kind of thing that Dave Cormier talked about in terms of feeling so big, there’s not anything we can do, et cetera.

She has an image which has stayed in my mind since I first met her and first had her talk about this with me, is that since she was in Greece when she first discovered this, they have Greek pottery, which is quite large. It’s designed to hold over 1,000 pounds of grain. Of course, this has been throughout centuries in the Greek culture. Rather than one person being expected to do the impossible, which is to carry over 1,000 pounds of grain, the Pithari, P-I-T-H-A-R-I, these pieces of pottery have handles all around the entire piece of pottery. Rather than think we’re supposed to carry it all ourselves, we ask ourselves, “What is my handle? What is it? What’s my part in doing this?”

I shared the example that when Dave, my husband first heard about human trafficking and a problem that big, he didn’t know what he might be able to do to help. Lo and behold, he had podcast equipment, he has a pretty good radio voice, pretty good podcaster voice, and it turns out that all these years later he helped Sandie start the Ending Human Trafficking podcast and has been the co-host, and coming at it with more of a beginner’s mind, introducing people and being able to talk to the experts in this field.

I find those two paradigms really helpful in terms of thinking small when it comes to key issues in our world. When it comes to personal branding, I encourage people to start small as well. Sometimes when people first go to teaching in highered.com, they go, “Oh my gosh, how do you do this? I could never have a podcast,” or, “I could never have a blog,” or, “I could never, never, never.” Well, yes, you don’t start and then the next day you’re done. These are things that I’ve been doing for a very long time now.

Can you start by thinking about your bio? When you speak at really anywhere, you’re going to be often asked for your bio, so do you have one that’s already written out? Does it need to be rewritten? If you have one, do you have it in different lengths? A lot of times people will ask for a 75-word bio, a 150-word bio, or a 250-word bio, so you have three different lengths of your bio, and that might be a good starting point for you in terms of your personal brand. I talked about photos. Is it time for you to decide to invest in some photographs, or is it time for you to ask someone who you trust to take some pictures with your phone and get started that way? I have a media kit that I keep in a cloud service called Dropbox. I have different folders. I have one for bios, one for photos, one for logos of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, one related to sponsorship, and one related to my book The Productive Online and Offline Professor.

I can give anyone the link to the media kit, and if they need photos, they can go in there. I know it’s very easy to navigate, or I can just give someone a link to a particular bio or a link to a particular photo. Maybe that’s the starting small for you. Maybe you have some bios and some photos, and maybe it’s time to set up a cloud-based link where they’re all grouped together, they’re all in one place and easy for you to share. At the end of my time with the graduate students, I decided to ask them– most of them, actually. I don’t think I knew any of them. Yes, I didn’t know any of them.

I asked them, “Hey, we just met today, and I’ve been talking about authentic personal branding, and I’d love it if you would give me a little bit of a gift in terms of feedback on how I’m showing up and what your three words for me would be.” I shared a picture of myself, which is of me in my office on campus, and I’m holding a sign that says, “Show up for the work.” This sign is from an author who sadly is not with us any longer, Rachel Held Evans. She really asked a lot of really important questions in the world before she passed away.

She used to have above her writing desk the sign, Show up for the work and so my colleague and friend had a sign made up for me, and that is in my office all the time and just a reminder to me of the importance of showing up. I shared that photograph with them and did one final poll with the group and here are some of the things that show up in the three words that come to mind when I invited them to share when you think of me.

Teacher, authentic, real, friendly, human, genuine, kind, enthusiastic, vulnerable, education, encouraging, caring, inspirational, strong, leader, intelligent, convicting, confident, higher ed. It was really fun to see those words and to get to spend that time. I started out sharing with you as I started sharing with them how some of this can feel icky sometimes. Some of it can feel terrifying. Just not ready to show up in those ways. Some of it can just feel overwhelming, like how would we ever get there? I offer to you today these three recommendations. Show up, go deep and start small.

This is the time in the show where I get to share some recommendations. I wanted to recommend, first off, that song that I mentioned. This is Me from The Greatest Showman. You may have heard the song before, but did you see the video that was part of their pilot, part of their pitch to turn it into a movie? It’s really wild to see the singer go through such a radical transformation. She shares about– you’ll hear her speaking before the actual video is played, just talking about she didn’t want to come out from behind the desk that she was behind. You can just see her confidence building, her sense of self, and the way in which she has so embraced the other people who are there singing and making music along with her.

I highly suggest that you check out that This is Me and then we go from music to writing. I wanted to share and recommend that you check out an article by Kevin Gannon. The article was in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the title is Let’s Disrupt the Calls for Disruptive Innovation. Too often the demand for novel solutions to higher education woes disregards existing work and those doing it. It’s a beautifully written piece and I’m going to just read a couple of highlights and then some questions for us to wrestle with.

He writes that he really pushes back against talking about something that is new and not being such a privileged thing over stuff that already has been happening, worth celebrating, worth rethinking. He talks about the origins of the Latin root innovate from innovation, which is best translated as renewed or altered. He says, I’m quoting here, “It suggests an object that is not brand new, but rather renewed or perhaps revitalized.” He has some advice for us. I suggest that you go and read, but I’d like you.

I’m just going to end this particular recommendation with just some questions he says we should ask ourselves.

He’s talking about really telling us not to think in dichotomous terms when it comes to online in person. Why do we do that so much? Instead, he says, here’s some questions we should ask. What teaching practices can we make new that have already been happening on our campus? Who has been successfully engaging students in the classroom both in person and online? Whose course designs and practices are encouraging deeper connections between students, student and instructor, and student and course material? What would it look like to lift up those practitioners and expand on their examples? How do we do all of that without framing things and overly rigid dichotomies?

Thanks, Kevin, for this beautiful piece and giving us so much to reflect on and challenging our dichotomous thinking. One of the things that I like in terms of rethinking these dichotomies is to not be quite as predictable and to be more in the moment with what is emerging. I am by nature a planner, but I also know I can draw on my strengths when I am in the moment as well. One of the things I used to love to do when I was in my 20s is a type of swing dancing called the Lindy hop. I have followed– I’ve really enjoyed following Lindy Hop dancers and then there’s West Coast swing dancers that have a similar look to their dance.

Of course, it’s changed over the decades and all of that, but a really fun thing for me is to watch dancers who haven’t practiced together. It’s not a choreographed dance. Of course, it all comes back to a six-count or an eight-count, but they don’t know what the lead is about to lead them into next. In some cases, there’s actually the lead follow. You can sometimes not even tell who’s leading and who’s following. I want to encourage you to go watch an improv, as in their names are literally drawn out of a hat. They don’t know who their partner is going to be, they don’t know what songs are going to be played, and they don’t know any kind of choreography.

There’s a wonderful– this is just one of many examples I get into YouTube on these things. Ben Morris and Alyssa Glanville are doing a West Coast swing to an old song from Frank Sinatra Fly Me to the Moon. It is such a great watch. Those are my three recommendations, two videos, one article. Thanks so much for listening to today’s Teaching in Higher Ed. This episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever-talented Andrew Kroeger. The amazing Sierra Smith provides podcast production support, and each one of you listens and some of you engage with me on email, Twitter, I so appreciate it.

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The transcript of this episode has been made possible through a financial contribution by the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE). ACUE is on a mission to ensure student success through quality instruction. In partnership with institutions of higher education nationwide, ACUE supports and credentials faculty members in the use of evidence-based teaching practices that drive student engagement, retention, and learning.

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