Finesse Your Mission, Find Your Niche, and Build Your Personal Brand
“The nation doesn’t simply need what we have. It needs what we are” (Edith Stein, aka St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross).
We women can do anything, but we can’t do everything.
Something I’ve struggled with across facets of my life is wanting to do everything at once, be everyone’s friend, say “yes” to every work opportunity, and go to every event I’m invited to.
Not only has it been exhausting, but it’s been incredibly confusing.
In seeking clarity, the questions stirring in my heart have included:
What mission do I feel God has for me?
Whom can I serve best?
How do I start?
Hearing a business coach talk about the P.I.E. model got me thinking about my own personal brand and how I balance building it while glorifying God (and not just myself).
Embracing the P.I.E. Model
The P.I.E. model is a theory of success that highlights the surprising weighting of performance, image, and exposure when it comes to measuring our professional achievements.
In his book Empowering Yourself: The Organizational Game Revealed, Harvey J. Coleman writes that we need more than just performance (which comes in at 10% of success) to get ahead. The other 90% comprises cultivating the right public image (30%) and managing your exposure to increase your visibility (60%).
While work performance will always be important, I found it fascinating to see that how others perceive us actually matters more when it comes to our professional success.
Discovering Your Personal Mission
That said, as much of a temptation as it can be, being everything to everyone is a surefire way to dilute our personal mission and professional brand.
In fact, what matters more than finding our niche is knowing who our target demographic is and allowing their needs to define what we bring to the table.
Identifying Your Audience
Finding the community you want to serve will help narrow down your own messaging, which will help with consistency and the ability to become known for catering to a specific set of people.
Knowing Yourself
Being genuine in how you market your brand, product, or organization will help you reach your audience while amplifying who you are and the mission and vision of your work.
Big companies have an identifiable corporate visual identity through the use of specific colors, fonts, and catchphrases, but we naturally have these preferences as individuals, too.
Sharing our personality through these style choices, as well as more obvious touch points such as selfie videos that talk directly to our audience, help to show the face behind the service.
Our faith, experiences, and stories impact our understanding of the world and business. Identifying them helps us know what we can bring to the table—to the body of Christ—that no one else can, in the exact same way.
Being Consistent
As well as having a consistent marketing schedule or calendar, it’s important to be consistent in your messaging.
What is your mission? As someone who’s always struggled to be “SMART” goal-oriented (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound), it can be hard for me to stay on track. I am easily distracted and innovate new ideas almost daily, so I need to remind myself of my mission first before I can even attempt to put it into the world.
Finding Your Foundation
What is your “why”? Do you live your brand?
Nowadays, trying to separate your professional brand from your personal life seems nearly impossible. This isn’t to say you need to share your family photos on Instagram or do a “day in the life” vlog, but it does mean that who you are at home will impact who you are at work.
Surely that’s refreshing: no more masks, no more fig leaves. Just as we know our mind, body, and spirit are not three distinct parts of ourselves, we ought to bring the essence of who we are to everything we do, inside and outside of our home.
Personally, I am finally starting to embrace living an integrated life—a life with integrity. It’s something I have struggled with since experiencing cancel culture for being wholly open about my values at work. It wasn’t that my values were wrong; rather, I was in the wrong place to fully live them out.
Living Your Values
Your personal brand doesn’t need to look exactly the same every day, because we are not the same every day, but it does need to be a reflection of your values, your beliefs, and your passions. Ask yourself these questions:
What are my values?
What do I derive purpose from?
How can I contribute?
What is my experience, both personal and professional, and how can I bring this to the world?
How can I add value to individual work or within a team?
What do I connect with at work? What do I find most energizing?
The statement that’s helping me to unpack all of these questions is:
I’m a woman passionate about building community and sharing authentic stories to connect with others on a genuine and encouraging level. My background is in journalism and the charity sector; I love storytelling, branding, and communicating with others. I stand for objective truth; being a witness of God’s unfailing, and redemptive, love and mercy; and living life with joy. I lead a nonprofit organization on a voluntary basis and four team members in my day job. People come to me for enthusiasm, creativity, and problem-solving.
When you combine these statements, you start building out the story, values, interests and expertise that make you, you. Remember, even if you don’t consider yourself an expert in anything just yet, you always have something to contribute.
We women can do anything, but we can’t do everything. In order for us to thrive in what God has called us to do, we need to be willing to make decisions that ensure we’re not spreading ourselves too thin and offering a watered-down version of what we can give to the world.
Strategy requires sacrifices. Yeses require us to say “no.” What is it that you’re willing to let go of because it’s not part of your personal mission?
If nailing down what you’re going to do is feeling a little tricky, try instead to ask yourself, “What am I not going to do? Whom am I not going to serve?” Work from there.
I’ve also found it immensely helpful to pick a patron saint to ask to intercede for me and my personal mission. A saint name generator not-so-randomly connected me to St. Gabriel the Archangel, who happens to be the patron saint of communicators and messengers.
While I was concerned with this branding process making me too self-centered, discovering and unraveling both my strengths and my weaknesses has made me realize more than ever that without Christ, I can do nothing.
Every single one of us is called to be a good steward of all God has given us, from the tangible to the unseeable. As Jesus said::
You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.
You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father (Matthew 5:13-16).
Whatever your metaphorical lamp is, let it shine.
Delphine Chui is an award-winning journalist, speaker and charity founder from London. A Catholic revert and former women’s magazine editor who experienced “cancel culture” for being publicly pro-life, she is passionate about learning and sharing how to be boldly Catholic in today’s world, as well as speaking about God’s design for men and women amid modern dating culture on her YouTube channel. Delphine loves to explore themes of intentional living, and having recently taken the leap to go freelance, she’s been reflecting on the definition of “work,” embracing ambition at a pace that’s conducive to holiness and health. She volunteers as CEO of her befriending charity, CareDogs, and has gotten back into writing after a sabbatical of finding her voice again. You’ll most likely find her out in nature walking or multi-tasking while listening to a podcast. Digitally, Delphine is most active on Instagram and YouTube at @delphinediscusses or on LinkedIn and Twitter at @delphinechui.