“Your life is your own creation.” And so is your Leadership Brand.

A few years back, I met this girl at the airport. She was on her EuroTrip as a solo traveller. As we waited to board, we got talking. 

Let’s call her Shanaya.

Shanaya started her career with a start-up in creative design, in a remote area of South India. Far from home, in a small, peaceful town.

She was phenomenal in her role – successful and popular at her workplace. 5 years in and she had an epiphany. She decided to quit. Not just her job, she decided to quit her role. She didn’t know ‘what next’ at that time.

She just knew she was limited in her current role and that in the long run, she was someone else.

For obvious reasons, her company didn’t want to let her go. They even gave her the option of opening their franchise wherever she chose to go. Lucrative offer for a girl her age and experience, but not for Shanaya. 

As an artist, she had a decent following on Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Truth be told, she had an amazing fanbase. I know that because she showed me some screenshots. She said, “I took snapshots and screenshots of all that I did then. They are keepsakes for me - a reminder of where I have been.”

After she left her job, she spent most of her savings to travel across the country. She worked as a freelancer to meet ends. All along her journey,, she wrote about her travel stories. By the time she reached her final destination, she knew that she wanted to become serious about travel blogging.

So she did.

So she did.

It was tough to start from scratch. People knew her as a designer, they knew her as an employee. But a storyteller and an entrepreneur – that was new. 

And new is not easy.

For obvious reasons, her company didn’t want to let her go. They even gave her the option of opening their franchise wherever she chose to go. Lucrative offer for a girl her age and experience, but not for Shanaya. 

As an artist, she had a decent following on Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Truth be told, she had an amazing fanbase. I know that because she showed me some screenshots. She said, “I took snapshots and screenshots of all that I did then. They are keepsakes for me - a reminder of where I have been.”

After leaving her job, she spent most of her savings on traveling across the country. She worked as a freelancer to meet ends. All along her journey in different parts of the country, she wrote about her travel stories. By the time she reached her final destination, she knew that she wanted to become serious about travel blogging.

What I really loved about Shanaya was that she was way ahead of her time. Not just in her work, but in her approach to building her personality.

She engaged with people she knew and the people who knew her. She said, “For them to continue trusting me, I needed to tell them my story.”

She rebooted her online profiles. She created a graphical presentation of the end of her previous life and the beginning of a new one. Posted all around. Back then, some online platforms were new. She leveraged every bit of it to reach people.

She said something that deeply resonated with me...

“I am not defined by my roles; my roles are defined by me. They are a manifestation of who I am. With every role, I am becoming more of myself.”

Shanaya loves her work and she is always prepared to reinvent herself.

Shanaya’s journey from a creative designer to a travel storyteller and an entrepreneur had lots of moments that terrified her, but she never backed down. She knew that slipping into another way of living life wouldn’t take away the moments she lived and the scars she donned.

I recently reconnected with Shanaya - she runs a storytelling venture with 50 employees, all connected virtually. One of the 'must do's' for all those who work with Shanaya is to try something that they have never done, ideally learn a new skill for a month, at least once a year.

This set me thinking

Roles are like rocks. Each time we choose a heavier one up, we need to drop some elsewhere.

Sometimes, we need to put all the previous ones down, walk some distance without one, and then carry the next one. But with each mile we cover and each rock we carry, big or small, I believe we become more of ‘who we are’.  

Every leadership brand is a story that unfolds with time and experience. I know so many that didn’t begin because they were afraid of ending the previous one. In case you are wondering, it’s never too late to reinvent yours, to begin yours.

As someone said about life – it’s your creation, your brand is exactly that. What you create, creates you.

So don’t ever be afraid of creating the version of you that you wish to become.

If you want to talk about it, write to me and let’s discuss Your Leadership Brand.