Thirteen years ago, I hired a marketing firm to help me position my personal brand for keynote speaking and online thought leadership. They were a very successful team, and I loved the passion that they brought to the project. The digital assets they created aligned with the online persona we had identified, and we were deep into the blog creation process when everything came to a halt. I couldn’t write another word.

I froze.

I was having an identity crisis and couldn’t determine why I was so unnerved or what to do about it. Here I was writing the details of my personal adventures, but somehow feeling increasingly lost with every paragraph break. I was writing about my life, but it no longer felt personal. Instead, I felt like I was crafting a story, and I began filtering my words through the matrix of character identifiers that typified the new “brand.”

The whole thing was about me, but none of it WAS me.

I prayed for peace and a path forward, and the answer was clear. I had to stop any work on the project. I messaged the founder of the marketing firm, offering a sincere apology, and asked that all work cease immediately. She honored my wishes, and the digital assets began collecting dust in some Dropbox folder in the sky.

After settling the final invoices and closing the project, I continued to explore why I had felt such insurmountable friction and determined that two main factors were at play. First, I had people helping me tell my personal stories who had not lived my experiences, causing me to overgeneralize at times, agree with positioning statements that were only 97% accurate, and use phrases and descriptors that felt foreign to me.

Second, I found myself writing for others first and myself second. I had flashbacks to the attempted journals of my teenage years when I realized I wasn’t journaling at all but rather writing for others to read instead. There was a façade that felt forced and reminded me of Holden Caulfield’s disdain for phonies (even though he was the real phony).

I vowed to stay vigilant to the allure of success, to be true to myself as my career unfolded. I read that the “divided life” is the bane of man’s existence, and I started building brands that were authentic extensions of the people who made them. I wrote daily, for myself, and posted my thoughts on LinkedIn in case my inner coaching would be of benefit on this one-to-many platform.

Thanks to these life moments, I now work with a group of stunning colleagues that I would describe as genuine, trustworthy, virtuous, fun-loving, faithful, talented, multi-faceted, decisive, family-focused, vulnerable, prayerful, confident, strategic, humorous, collaborative, visionary, confident, fascinating, well-formed, magnanimous, courageous, and ready for whatever comes next.

Together, we form a company called Undivided Life, and I would describe our brand as {SEE ABOVE}.

I’m so grateful that I spent the time, money, and energy building a personal brand that was promptly filed away and never released. That experience equipped me to build a brand and a lifestyle that were seamlessly connected, one and the same.