PERSONAL BRANDING

Podcast 13 min read

How NOT to Build a Brand (But Everyone’s Doing It)

with Jodie Cook

Chris Do and Jodie Cook examine personal branding through influence, identity, and the cost of fitting a template.

Chris Do

Founder, The Futur™ · June 5, 2025

A following is not the same as a force

A personal brand can look successful while revealing almost nothing about the person behind it. Jodie Cook, a Forbes columnist, software business owner, and powerlifter, brings a more demanding problem: her public presence already attracts customers, but she wants it to express more of who she is. Her experience makes the distinction tangible, because this is not a search for attention from a standing start.

Cook reports roughly 50,000 followers across her platforms and regular inbound messages. Customers identify her writing and social accounts as the places they first encountered her. The machinery is working, at least by the usual measures.

What remains unresolved is whether it is the right machinery.

In her conversation with Chris Do, Cook wants to identify what deserves more attention and what deserves none. She does not want to become busier at maintaining an online presence. She wants a clearer relationship between her work, her interests, and the difference that work makes for other people.

Do begins by challenging the scoreboard. An account can accumulate millions of followers by curating viral material or publishing faceless content without making its creator recognizable. Distribution demonstrates reach, not necessarily a relationship with a particular person.

Audience size is not proof of personal influence.

His proposed tests concern what happens because a person is involved. Does their presence help someone else become more influential? Will an audience support an endeavor beyond the activity that originally attracted it? Does attaching their name to something increase its perceived value?

King or queen maker: Other people gain influence through association with the person.
Ability to print money: An established connection supports additional revenue streams beyond the person's usual work.

The second phrase is deliberately figurative. Do is describing an audience's willingness to act, not an automatic entitlement to sales. A bestselling author whose audience has no interest outside the book represents, in his view, a narrower form of influence than someone whose relationship with supporters carries into new endeavors.

Cook finds the first test especially useful. Her ambition is not simply to become known. It is to become known for work that helps others achieve something meaningful, including success of their own.

This is a demanding definition, and Do presents it as his working interpretation rather than a settled measurement system. It nevertheless exposes the weakness of treating follower growth as the whole assignment. The number says how many accounts subscribed; it does not explain what those people believe or what they will do.

The broader subject also runs through The Futur's Personal Branding Masterclass with Daniel Priestley. Here, however, Cook's circumstances make the central tension unusually specific: she has evidence that her visibility works commercially, yet that evidence does not settle what her personal brand should become.

More reach would not answer that question. It would only distribute the existing answer more widely.

The premium lives in the meaning

Do turns an ordinary bottle of water into a thought experiment. Give the same commodity to a group of personal branding experts and put each person's name on the label. The contents remain unchanged; the question is whether the name makes anyone value the bottle differently.

Some names would add value. Others would add nothing. Some would make the product less desirable.

The example strips away the comforting assumption that recognition is inherently beneficial. Being known and being wanted are separate conditions. A personal brand has commercial force when the associations attached to a person change how an offer is understood.

Cook plays along, imagining a premium bottle endorsed by Do. But his response moves beyond endorsement. If the product carried his name, he would want it connected to education, whether through books for children, scholarships, or access to courses.

The proposed bottle is hypothetical, not a product announcement. Its purpose is to show why an extension should make sense within the person's existing commitments. The name alone is less persuasive than the name attached to a recognizable mission.

Cook supplies a less theatrical example from her software business. Its homepage had emphasized speed and ease of setup. Those benefits appeared obvious until the team considered the customers it most wanted to attract: coaches who had already invested substantial effort in developing their content.

These customers were not necessarily afraid of work. Some had written books and saw themselves as conscientious people with high standards. A promise that everything would be quick and easy did not automatically reflect how they understood valuable work.

For that audience, effort was not simply friction. It could signal care.

Cook's account does not establish that difficult onboarding is better. It establishes a narrower, more useful point: the business had to reconsider what its promise communicated to the people it wanted to serve. A benefit can be technically attractive and still carry the wrong meaning.

That distinction matters to personal branding because people are not evaluating an isolated list of capabilities. They are interpreting what those capabilities say about the person offering them. Positioning connects the work to an audience's values, rather than assuming that faster and cheaper always win.

Do then separates this longer process from performance marketing. Paid advertising and direct marketing can be judged against comparatively immediate results: money spent, responses generated, revenue returned. If the goal is to create near-term demand for a business, those methods have a legitimate job.

Personal branding is not a substitute for performance marketing.

Do's position is not that money is irrelevant. It is that personal branding should not be forced to behave like a campaign with a clean, immediate return on every unit of effort. His own description creates a useful tension: commercial value can indicate influence without becoming the governing purpose of every expression.

The distinction belongs beside You Don't Need a Personal Brand. You Need an Offer. A business can need a clearer offer before it needs a larger public identity. Cook, already seeing customers arrive through her work, is asking a different question: what belongs in that identity beyond the activities that currently convert?

The template can become another cage

Cook describes the conventional life plan she felt surrounded by: education, a good degree, a respectable job, progression through the hierarchy, then retirement. Travel and exercise occupy whatever space remains after work. Exploration becomes something postponed until the serious obligations are complete.

Her objection is not simply to employment. It is to accepting a prescribed life without examining whether it fits.

She recognizes a second version inside entrepreneurship. Instead of following an employer's ladder, the founder follows someone else's content blueprint. Choose the approved platforms, adopt the accepted video format, hire the consultant, and assume that a successful person's method will transfer intact.

The costume changes. The obedience survives.

Do's response is more measured than a blanket rejection of advice. Institutions and families can impose restrictive expectations while intending to protect people. A rule created to reduce risk can outlive its usefulness and become a limit on what someone believes is possible.

Cook complicates the familiar story of parental restraint. She remembers her parents as encouraging rather than confining, with an attitude of giving things a chance. The strongest restrictions did not necessarily come from home.

At a school open day, an older student told Cook and her mother that boys usually took economics while girls took business studies. The remark immediately provoked resistance. Economics became the choice partly because someone had implied that it was not meant for her.

Then comes the inconvenient detail: Cook says she did badly in economics and should have taken business studies.

The story prevents independence from becoming a simple morality play. A decision made against a stereotype is not automatically the right decision for the individual. Opposition can still leave someone else's expectation at the center of the choice.

That is the deeper problem with the box metaphor. Escaping a category requires more than selecting its opposite. It requires discovering preferences that remain meaningful when nobody is there to approve or disapprove.

The relationship between inherited expectations and identity also appears in Living in the Dogma of your Parents. Cook's account adds an important distinction: support at home does not eliminate pressure from schools, professional culture, or the stories people absorb about a successful life.

For Do, this makes personal branding partly an exercise in self-knowledge. He is less interested in prescribing the best platform than in understanding the person expected to appear on it. Values, wants, interests, and beliefs provide material that a publishing template cannot manufacture.

His rejection of a universal method is explicit: “there's no such thing as the best way.”

That does not mean every approach is equally effective. It means the choice has to account for the person doing the work, their readiness, and the kind of expression that feels natural enough to sustain.

Cook calls her preferred direction the law of least effort: finding work that feels natural, then producing more through that fit. Writing once occupied that position for her. Now she wants room to discover whether another combination fits better, without treating a previous strength as a permanent assignment.

Distinctiveness comes from the overlap

Do's alternative to the template is stacking. He asks Cook to consider the interests, experiences, and abilities that normally live in separate compartments, then search for work that brings more of them together. The object is not a longer biography; it is a more integrated way of operating.

A stack combines interests, not just marketable skills.

This qualification matters. Cook initially names activities associated with her business and public output. Do clarifies that an interest does not need to be something she already performs well. Curiosity belongs in the inventory alongside expertise.

Writing and the existing outlet provided by her Forbes column.
Conversation, meeting people, and understanding their experiences.
Systems, principles, and structures that support creative work.
AI applications that expand what people can produce.
Powerlifting, training, travel, and time with friends.

Cook's relationship with systems is particularly revealing. She does not see structure as creativity's enemy. She schedules time for boredom, staring into space, and creative work because a defined space makes those activities easier to protect.

Her interest in AI follows a similar logic. She is frustrated by people using technology to eliminate work they actually enjoy. Her preferred application starts with identifying what someone wants to do more of, then removing or delegating the unwanted work around it.

The technology serves a preference. It does not determine one.

For Do, the value of stacking comes from specificity. Many people share one skill or interest. A particular combination makes the person harder to reduce to a familiar professional category, while giving an audience more ways to recognize something of themselves.

He offers his own career as an example, not a neutral formula. Graphic design, business, video production, teaching, comics, performance, debate, and an interest in systems did not initially have a common home. Different jobs gave different parts of him permission to appear.

Teaching at ArtCenter provided fulfillment but relatively little compensation. Commercial work paid well, yet the pitching process and layers of approval increasingly restricted the play he wanted from creative work. Neither arrangement felt like a complete expression of his interests.

Video eventually gave those interests somewhere to meet.

Do describes the shift less as reinvention than as the release of a playful side that self-consciousness and earlier bullying had pushed down. The public presentation changed because more of the existing person became visible.

His later speaking work makes the point concrete. In a room of real estate and finance professionals, he expected references to beloved comic-book characters to land badly. Instead, he recalls people responding through their own attachment to those stories.

The supposedly irrelevant interest became a point of connection. That is a useful companion to Storytelling Is A Superpower: personal material can give professional ideas an entry point without replacing their substance.

Still, Do's account does not prove that every interest belongs in every piece of content. Its force lies in the experience of fragmentation that preceded it. The integration mattered because it allowed him to teach, design, perform, and explore ideas without continually putting one part of himself away.

Cook recognizes a version of that integration in her own work. The strongest evidence is not a proposed new identity. It is a community she already helps run.

The experiment already has an audience

Cook describes her community of coaches as a place where several interests naturally converge. She likes the people, their self-awareness, and their willingness to have substantive conversations. Teaching happens through discoveries she has just made, rather than material kept at a distance in a textbook.

Those conversations also supply stories. Cook learns what customers are doing, writes about their experiences, and shares their work publicly. The activity combines curiosity, conversation, writing, teaching, and promotion of other people's achievements.

It also gives the earlier king or queen maker idea a practical setting. Cook is not merely presenting herself to an audience. She is helping members of that audience become more visible.

Another connection emerged during a 30-day YouTube challenge intended to loosen perfectionism. Her commitment was to make and share a video each day rather than wait for a polished production. During a customer Q&A, several participants referred to videos she had recently published.

People she had mentally placed in separate groups were showing up in both.

That observation does not establish that every subscriber was a customer. It shows that the boundary between her business community and her public content was less definite than she had assumed. Some relationships were developing through multiple forms of contact.

The next step is less comfortable. Do asks how many of Cook's interests appear in her powerlifting. Training clearly involves systems and discipline, but writing, AI, and entrepreneurship are not inherently present. He wants to explore whether those activities can meet.

His hypothetical proposal combines travel, training, gatherings with coaches, AI learning, and writing. It is offered as a brainstorming possibility, not a validated business model. The point is to imagine a day containing more of what Cook enjoys.

Cook immediately sees the mismatch. Her customers are business and marketing coaches, not primarily fitness professionals. Her work and training already make her happy as separate pursuits.

Do asks her to leave the idea open before applying those objections. The brainstorming principle is “no buts, just yes and.”

His broader suggestion can be expressed without turning it into a guaranteed formula:

List activities that create enjoyment, along with skills and experience.
Include unusual interests rather than editing for professional respectability.
Look for an overlap that would make the working day more satisfying.
Test a possibility before demanding certainty about the final business.

Do's own example includes a substantial caution: he says the early video effort produced no meaningful money for two and a half years. That history explains his tolerance for uncertainty, but it also limits the advice. Exploration is not the same as an immediate commercial solution.

Cook's daily videos represent a narrower kind of experiment. She was testing expression and consistency, not committing to merge every part of her life. The feedback came from people already connected to her work.

That makes the experiment useful evidence rather than a mandate. It suggests that her audience can follow her across formats. It does not yet establish that her audience wants to follow her into the gym.

Integration is not an order to monetize everything

The most useful disagreement arrives when Do asks whether powerlifting costs Cook money or makes her money. It costs money. He wonders how that could change, imagining the appeal of being paid for something she loves.

Cook does not accept the premise automatically. Other activities already pay her. Training can remain a pleasurable expense and a place where she stops treating everything as a commercial endeavor.

This is not resistance to ambition. It is a defense of a particular arrangement of ambition.

She has tried optimizing everything before and is wary of assuming that competence creates an obligation to commercialize. Being good at a sport does not settle whether building a business around it would improve her life.

Integration and monetization are different decisions.

Do acknowledges that his advice is shaped by what worked for him. His movement toward combining more interests produced greater satisfaction, but Cook's satisfaction cannot simply be inferred from his history. The disagreement keeps the conversation from replacing one rigid blueprint with another.

It also clarifies the difference between expression and an offer. Fitness can inform Cook's stories, point of view, or relationship with an audience without becoming a coaching product. Conversely, keeping training private would not erase its importance to her life.

Yet Cook notices a possible restriction of her own making. Because she and her husband look athletic, people sometimes assume they work in fitness. She has taken pride in correcting that assumption: they run a software business.

She begins to wonder whether that correction has become too absolute. Defending her identity as a business owner may have led her to reject any professional role for fitness before considering it.

Do sees an opportunity in the mistaken identity. A person who does not match an audience's expected category has material for a story. The apparent contradiction can reveal more than another conventional professional introduction.

Cook has other examples. People at gyms assume she works there because she is friendly and helpful. At a college where she served on the board, her youthful appearance once led someone to direct her toward an exam rather than her meeting.

The stories make a specific tension visible: apparent youth can be mistaken for inexperience, and an athletic appearance can obscure unrelated expertise. Neither requires Cook to choose between looking the part and doing the work.

For Do, testing that tension still requires judgment. He distinguishes an opportunity that feels frightening because it stretches someone from one that merely offers a shiny escape. Pursuing every possibility can scatter effort until nothing receives enough attention.

His warning is sharp: “Sometimes those opportunities are really the obstacles and not the other way around.”

The practical boundary is therefore not a demand to publish everything. It is a refusal to exclude meaningful parts of a person without examining the reason.

Keep experiments connected to genuine interests, not just apparent market openings.
Distinguish discomfort with exposure from a real lack of fit.
Preserve the right to enjoy an activity without selling it.
Use recurring misperceptions as material for expression rather than automatic instructions.

For Cook, the next possibility is not necessarily a fitness business, a new platform, or a bigger publishing schedule. It is a less defensive relationship with the combination already present: writer, software business owner, people enthusiast, systems thinker, and powerlifter.

A template would make that combination easier to categorize. It would not necessarily make it more valuable.

The mistake is not being difficult to place. It is editing out everything that makes the placement difficult.

TRANSCRIPT

The most natural thing to do and the most difficult thing to do in this world is to know who you are and to be yourself. This is kind of a grieving because it's almost like the old you has to die so the new you can come out. Somewhere along the way, you're like, but that ain't me. I don't fit in that neat little box and I don't want to fit in a box. I want to explode the box. I want to do my thing. I want to break all the rules, right? I totally know who put me in my box. You do? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Jodi, what are we talking about today? We're talking about personal brand Jodi and you are going to tell me everything I'm doing wrong slash how I should think about doing it right. And I'm going to be a willing student. I'm going to hide nothing. I'm going to be completely open with everything. And sometimes you're going to ask me really big questions and I'm going to ask the smaller questions. And sometimes I'm not going to have a clue. And sometimes I'm going to know what I'm talking about. So we're hopefully going to go from there. Okay. That was a long way of saying we're going to talk about you today. Yeah. Yeah. Let's do it. Yes. Which I'm happy to, by the way. Okay. So where do we begin this conversation? Well, I found it really interesting when we talked last time, maybe it was off air and we were talking about the idea of what is a personal brand? What does it mean when someone has one? What does someone think is a personal brand that actually isn't a personal brand at all? And I loved what you said around, you know, a part of the definition that you gave where a personal brand is a king or queen maker because I think that's like that's what it is for me as well it's not the idea that you're out there and you're getting famous and getting likes and getting known in the world it's more that you're getting known for your work because of the difference your work makes for other people because you could also make other people rich and famous and whatever they want to be so I think that I wanted to basically ask you about how I do that or how you would advise someone at my kind of stage, how they would make sure that they are going in that direction for their own brand. Let's rewind a little bit. So if we talk about brand, I really do like Marty Neumeier's definition of brand, which is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or organization. So it's not something that we can hold in control, we can influence, we can nudge a little bit. But we all have then, by that definition, a brand because your parents think something of you. If you have siblings, they think something of you. If you have children, they think something of you. And when enough people come to a similar gut feeling, then you can say that you have a brand. And so in this modern era, I'm not talking about that because obviously everyone has an impression. And if you are like a boy scout or girl scout, always like doing the right thing and have great manners and all kinds of stuff, and you're protecting the environment, lethal trace, that's fantastic. We're talking about like in the 21st century, in the rise of technology, the social platforms that exist and everybody's making media to a degree, then we are able to increase the reach and engagement of that potential gut feeling. And you can have a lot of followers, in my opinion, and not have a very good personal brand. And followers is not a great metric for whether you have any real influence. You can put out some kind of piece of content. And here's the example where you're not in it at all. It's usually referred to as faceless content. It could be that you're writing and doing voiceover or it could just be you're using all AI to generate everything. And so you may have three million followers and no one knows who you are. You can also have an account that curates a lot of like really good viral content. And you have a lot of followers because of that. But again, I still don't know who you are. And you're not able to actually move the needle. So as we were talking about this last time, one thing that we said to try to delineate everyone being having a strong personal brand is if you can, if you can make kings or queens, if you can do that. And what we were talking about in that conversation was by virtue of you being around other people, they become a little bit more influential because of their proximity to you. That's super powerful. Number two, I think a person who has a really strong personal brand is they have the ability to print money, not literally, but figuratively. So what do we mean by that? Outside of the area of the way that you normally make money, do you have the ability to print create additional streams of revenue just because of the amount of followers and the connection that you have with them, their willingness to step up and support you in whatever endeavor that you undertake. I think that's an indicator that you have a really strong personal brand. So let's say you write a book and it's a really best-selling book. But if you say, hey, I'm going to be here to do something different than promoting my book and no one shows up, I would say like you're influential in the old school way, but you're not, in my opinion, you don't really have a great personal brand. I want to put it back into your court and see if you have different points of view on this. Ah, I like both of those. Yeah. King or queen maker, someone being more influential just because of their proximity to you is really cool. And then ability to print money is kind of interesting because I remember a story of a Instagram influencer. I can't remember her name, but she had this big following and then she started this t-shirt brand. She started making t-shirts. And she promoted them on her Instagram and she didn't get enough orders to fulfill the minimum order quantity, which I think was 24. So it was like millions of followers and you couldn't get 24 sales. And she was openly distraught, like on her Instagram. She was like, I can't believe this. I thought you guys supported me. What's the deal with this? And so it's so interesting how you can have all these numbers and these metrics that are overall just vanity metrics if they don't lead to the ability to print money or the ability to sell T-shirts or sell whatever it was. So, yeah, both of those things feel good. good metrics for if you have a personal brand or not. You know, I like this. Okay. If we take a commodity like water and we gave it to a hundred quote unquote personal brand experts and they all wrote their name on it or put their logo on it. Did the value of the water go up? Did it go down or is it neutral? I think that's an indicator because I often talk about what is the value of brand? Well, brand is the amount of money somebody will pay above and beyond its commodity price. I think that's kind of an important metric to talk about. So if I put my name on a bottle, maybe like gross, I don't want Chris's name on my bottle. Or it could be like, oh, yeah, I would prefer that. Now, some people have negative brand value because they have toxic personalities, because they've done something that. is alienating a certain type of protected group or a class of people, or they're just sexist, misogynistic, or whatever it is, or old school, whatever, whatever the term you want to put out there, then we're like, yeah, you're kind of toxic right now. And the classic example of that, I think is, Mr. Yeezy himself, Mr. Kanye West, who pretty much torched billions of dollars, I guess, of value because of the kind of crazy rants he's been saying. Now, he's the guy with nine lives because it seems like he could do no wrong in this world because he can launch his own clothing company and sell a gazillion products. So he still has a very strong personal brand. However, some of it is quite toxic. So everyone, this is Chris Doe Water. it's got his it's got his name on the friend he's approved it he's he's individually signed every single bottle you drink this water and your life will be so much better just because he has verified the quality of the water do you want to buy it normally water like this it's going to cost you two dollars a bottle but this is cristo water this is special so this is six dollars a bottle how many do you want that's That's it, right? Order today. Yeah, something like that. But you know what I would add to that, though? I would want to make sure it's in keeping with the mission. So I could do a couple different things. Number one, I would say like 50% of the profits that we make from this will go towards buying books for kids who need it or maybe towards an education program, scholarships, something around education and helping others grow. have a fair shake at it. Or we're going to donate a certain portion of our courses to people in developing countries. Something like that would make sense. This is Jody's bottle of water. It's going to help you, uh, achieve your personal best. What do we call it? Personal record to PR when you're doing your CrossFit training. So if you want to stay clean and stay hydrated, motivated, this bottle normally sells for $2 and this now sells for 1899. Wow. Okay. But do you, do you come with that bottle or is it just the bottle? No, we have to be able to transfer it. Beautiful. Here's another indicator if you have a strong personal brand is that you have enough assets, brand assets that are part of who you are that once transferred or collaborating with another brand, create greater value. The example here would be the collab that happened between Supreme and Louis Vuitton. both highly sought after brands, when they collaborated, that merger, that collab project became more valuable than individual participants. So to this very day, if you were to find something on a secondhand site, a Supreme LV piece, it sells for more than what the LV equivalent new today is, which is pretty wild to me. It's always like, I think about this in vegetables a lot, because like a vegetable is just a vegetable, but as soon as it's like chopped and it's in a can, or as soon as it's like in syrup or it's got salt added or something, it's like it then costs more just because it's not just in its purest form. But I love the idea that someone with a strong personal brand could take something like water or a vegetable or something really, really basic in its purest form and then add value just because of who they are. It's like they're the salt, they're the syrup, they're the can. but they're just the person who's doing other stuff and then putting their name to it. You're familiar with Rory Sutherland, right? Yeah. So he has this line says, we don't value things. We value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology. So it's all about what we think of something versus what it actually is. So water is water is water. Maybe the pH balance is a little bit different, but we're buying so much more than the water. We're buying what it means to us and what kind of world we want to live in. So at CoachFox, my company, we had something similar where we were all about talking on the homepage about how easy it was to set up And how it took hardly any time. And then we realized that actually the type of customers that we really like and really want, like coaches with content, they like the idea that they create something of value and it does take them a little bit longer. Like they're okay. They're not scared about putting the time in because they're like, no, I've already written a book. I've already done all this stuff. I've already put, I identify as being the kind of person who spends time time is conscientious and has a high attention to detail so that doesn't scare me and almost the idea that something is quick and easy makes them think like oh no that's not for me and that's crazy because you always think oh make it faster and make it cheaper and make it more available but some people don't want that at all the perception thing really changed that for Yeah. The concrete example would be something like this. And somebody sent this to me the other day. They said it's like 99% germ-free versus contains 1% germ. Yeah. Like, which one would you prefer? It's like, that's just kind of fuzzy, weird math, right? It's like, I would prefer the one that is 99% germ free versus the one that says contains 1% germ, even though mathematically it's the same. So that's about framing and positioning there. Now that we have some kind of understanding, and maybe if you're listening to this, you're like, hey, I have different points. Go ahead, leave it in the comments. We'll check it out. And we're just still evolving in our understanding of this. And I'm open to changing my mind or adding to how we define things. So let's get back to you, Jody. How do we tackle this? So if you were talking to someone who was about my level of like online stuff, as in they've done some business stuff, they've maybe sold a company, they've built some business experience through that, and maybe they're on their second one, but also they've been kind of building their online presence, like I guess kind of gradually. So I think I'm about... 50,000 followers across like everything and get messages quite a lot, get inbound stuff, definitely have built a coach box through people who like we track where people come from and a lot of people just say Jodie on Forbes or Jodie on Instagram or LinkedIn or wherever. So I I think that it feels like a really good moment to be like, okay, how do we get like really intentional about this? How do we take where I'm at right now, pull the good stuff and the good stuff I'm doing and the good stuff is there and expand that and anything I'm doing or focusing on that hasn't got a benefit, just like stop it. Because I think I feel really, really clear that I don't just want to be busy with this. I just want to follow, have you heard of the law of least effort? No. I love it. this idea of the law of least effort, because it just means you find what feels effortless to you. And then you go in that direction, you double down on that. And then that means that you can outproduce and you can get outsized returns because it feels so natural. And at one point, I would say that writing was that writing was my law of least effort. And I wrote a lot of books and articles and things. But now it's maybe, maybe it's not so much that maybe it's something else. So I want to go in the direction of my law of least effort in order to be consistently high quality with the stuff I'm doing in the direction of growing a personal brand to the definition that we've just created. So there's a couple of things we need to do here. We have to talk about some of my favorite things to talk about around personal branding. There's such a thing as performance marketing, where you're going to measure your effort against a result. There's an ROI, a ROAS, return on advertising spend, something like that. And we could look at direct marketing, paid advertising, all that kind of stuff. It's like money in, money out. And as long as you make more money than you spend, you're going to keep doing that. I put personal branding in the branding category, which is there's no clear return on investment of time, energy. And if we're talking about like trying to get a return because we want to help to fuel the awareness around our business endeavors, then you should pursue marketing and advertising. And that's really good. And you should do that. And you need to make money. So what I'm talking about is something quite different, which is like, who are you in this world? Who are you meant to be? I hope I get this quote right. But this is a Picasso quote, which is like the meaning of life is to discover your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away. And so I think this is way more in alignment with what I think about. So if you're early in your career, in your life, and you're still figuring things out, trying to make a living, paying off your student loans, then you got to go do that. And that's cool. And sometimes you do both. But really, this is about it's kind of an odd thing for me to say this. The most natural thing to do and the most difficult thing to do in this world is to know who you are and to be yourself. Because everything and everyone is pulling you in a thousand different directions. Jodi, you shouldn't wear your hair like that. Don't you know girls shouldn't be? have hair that short and you know muscles don't look on women and maybe you should just like be chill and you know find a good man and just not do anything with your life you know whoever writes these ideas and gives it to you and say this is supposed to be your life and somewhere along the way you're like but that ain't me i don't fit in that neat little box and i don't want to fit in a box i want to explode the box i want to do my thing i want to break all the rules right And then you start to find yourself. And I think it's a beautiful thing. And I think the problem is so many people don't understand the box they're in, who put them in there, and they don't know that there's another way. So they're going to go to their grave thinking, this is my life. I did my duty. And that was it. I totally know who put me in my box. you do oh yeah don't tell us who put you in your box yet tell us what the box looks like first oh okay the box looks like follow the education conveyor belt go to college university get a good degree get a good job and then work up that job ladder until you retire take holidays when you retire travel exercise when work doesn't get in the way, exercise when you can create time when you've done all your work, and then have kids live in a detached house and watch other people do cool stuff and focus on what you need to be doing. That's the box. I think that's a pretty standard box that a lot of people feel like they have to fit in. But even the entrepreneur box, even the space that we're in right now, there's also a box and that box is Make your YouTube videos a certain way. Show up on the platforms that are cool at the time. Don't join one too early. Join it at the, like, don't be a first mover because it's too risky. Be someone who joins something when everyone else is joining it. Follow the blueprint of the people that you see making the videos about how to do it on YouTube. Don't run your own experiments because it probably won't work. Hire a consultant when you need the help. Because it's work for them and what worked for them will probably work for you. Like don't test stuff out on your own. Make sure you're following someone else's template for it. I'm less familiar with that coach or entrepreneurial box. Yeah. And some of it sounds familiar and some of it sounds like, oh, that's pretty avant-garde, but okay. All right. So that's the box. There's two boxes that you've defined for us. who put you in that box i think the first box is a schooling system potentially the united kingdom but i think that it's anyone anyone was put in a box by their own country because everyone grows up being pretty much indoctrinated that their country is the best one in the world like obviously americans have that but like french people like i i say to french people like so what did you learn about like france and stuff and they're like oh well the the two richest the richest man and the richest woman in the world are french the french revolution the french i don't know french press french kiss french whatever fries yeah french fries yeah sure but like everyone gets that and the uk gets it because it's like well we're on gmt we're the middle of the world with the financial capital of the world with the british the british empire like every single country gets like tells their people this is the only country that matters and so that's a box that you put in the box that your country has given you and then um i think the third one is disney movies I think I grew up watching Disney movies where the role of a woman was to be saved or it was to find a man to live happily ever after, to have people who didn't want them to do well, like they've got ugly stepsisters or they've got like someone in their... in their over their shoulder who's just trying to pull them down and they have to impress that person and then they've got some kind of character it's the standard hero hero's journey but they've got some some kind of grandmother willow character who's trying to get them on their path and trying to get them to understand their powers they have to go away and they have to come back but when they come back it's like they settle so you've got a brief period of exploration but then you ultimately settle so the disney movie box is being saved finding a man and and tending towards settling. Whereas like my Disney pretty is Moana because I tend towards exploring, not tending towards settling. So yeah, people put us all in boxes. I don't think society necessarily has a nefarious plan for you to try to artificially hold you back. I think they want you to do well because when it's citizen do well, then everything works. But these are like really kind of maybe old fashioned, outdated ideas. And so in their, their effort to protect you, they actually hold you back. And if we think about it, some part of parenting is, or at least mirrors that, like, be careful of like talking to those people, or they might take advantage of you or don't use those drugs or don't run with scissors. And they're trying to protect you look both ways before you cross the street. And before you know it, these little kind of semi harmless things turn into kind of a a prison cell for your mind and then you think oh I can't trust people and it's always dangerous running with sharp things and maybe you shouldn't ever color out the lines and eventually that just becomes your entire life I think my parents put me out of the boxes more than they put me in the box I feel like my family mantra growing up was kind of yeah why not or like sure go for it that kind of thing definitely there was actually one time at sixth form i was choosing my a-level subjects so the exams that you do in the uk when you're like 17 and 18 and my mom and i went to the sixth form open day and we went into the economics classroom and there was some of the older students one of the older students was there and he was talking to us about like oh do you think you want to take economics and what you want to do and he said to both of us like oh um normally boys take economics and girls take business studies so like you might want to take business studies and me and my mom just looked at each other being like they don't know us so i think i think there and then my mom decided that i was going to take economics um and actually i did really badly in economics and i should have taken business studies I made the wrong decision. He was right. But yeah, it was like a it was like a red rag to a bull. It was like, no, you've got to like, this is not the way this is not the way of doing this. Okay, so Jodi, if we're sitting here talking about helping you to figure out who you're supposed to be in this lifetime, what makes you uniquely you the thing that you're most naturally able to do. Is that the pursuit that we're going to go down? I feel like I have an idea of that. I feel like I don't totally know how to translate that to a personal brand online presence in the best way. Or more like I have a theory and I want to get a second opinion or get the ideas. I really love the question. What would you do if you were me? I always feel like everyone should ask that to their closest friends because their closest friends probably want to tell them just like what they think and the people who want the best for you and who are smart people probably do have really good ideas and would answer that question really well. So I love it when people ask me that question and I like asking it of other people and so I kind of want to ask you so I feel like that's the that's the big question the what would you do if you were me question. Before I answer that question, because it's a hard question, I'm going to stall a little bit here. Okay. Yeah. I want to just first say for everyone who's listening or watching this video is there's no such thing as the best way. There's just a way and a way is your way. Whatever feels most natural to you in the time in which you are ready to take take part in all of this stuff. If you are a person who has done a lot of introspective work, been coached, taught, mentored, gone to see a therapist, you start to have a pretty good dialogue with yourself. You know your wants, your takes, your values, your belief systems. Maybe you don't know everything, but you know enough. And I think that's a good place for us to start. And if I were you, the little that I know about you, you like to write, you like to travel, you're a bit of a nomad. and you love fitness for whatever reason, you really like fitness. And I start to think like, where do all those things overlap? Because when I stack my passions, my hobbies, my interests and the things I'm good at, I become like super powerful. There's a term that I've learned from people in the fitness space. I think it's called stacking. where you take different supplements in a certain way that really optimizes your nutrition and your health and your physical fitness. If you're able to take as much of you as possible to put into the things that you do in the kind of the best possible hybrid, that would be you living in your purpose, exploring your gift and sharing with the world. Do you think you know what that is? Yeah, I think my stack is... Yeah, really like writing, have an outlet for writing in a way that I could, like if I wanted to sit on my Forbes column and just write article after article after article, I could probably do like 10 a day and just keep going with that. Wow. and then i really like stuff like this like being on camera chatting about interesting stuff with interesting people that's a really big interest that i feel like i don't know how good i am at it but i feel like i'm getting better at it as i do more of it and then after that it's a like a massive interest in people i just really i think i'm about 100 extrovert and i just really like people and understanding them and talking to them i have quite like I'm really big on systems processes principles values the idea that if you have this set of rules that you live your life by you can just take all thinking out of it and you can just live by those rules forever and ever and ever and then you you get to all your goals because you're just following them almost robotic like but in a way that feels really good and I really like the intersection of creativity and systems because I feel like I put systems around my creativity which allows me to be more creative. Like I always wake up with a plan but I'll kind of plan, I'll put like an hour of boredom in my calendar or an hour of staring into space or an hour of like creative work and I'm okay with creativity being in a box kind of. And what else is in my stack? Now, just for clarification, it doesn't have to be anything you're good at. It just could be something that you're really interested in. Oh, okay. And then I'm really interested. I'm just interested in AI. Like at the moment, that's where I'm geeking out. But I think I'm interested in it through the lens of if you've got superpowers right now, whatever your kind of stack is, the idea that you could combine it with technology to outproduce using that, to take what you're doing right now and basically take over the world in a really positive way. I'm fascinated with that. I feel like I talked to so many people about just applications of AI and they're using it to automate or eliminate or delegate the stuff that they actually really like doing. And I'm like, why are you doing that? Like get rid of the stuff you don't want to do so that you can do more of the stuff that you do want to do, but then figure out what that is first and then automate the rest. So that's, that's the center of my work at the moment. What do you do for fun? these are very work related things everything for fun i for fun i work and for fun i train so it's like yes it's basically three things it's my profession it's my obsession and it's decompression so my profession is the work i do like cookbooks and my column my obsession is powerlifting and training and everything around that and then my decompression is like hanging out with friends going for walks traveling to new cities and being in a different place all the time but i feel like i only need these three things in my life and i love every day now here's the challenging part if i were you i would make a long list of everything that i love things that give me joy things that i'm good at things that i'm experienced in doing and just a couple of weird things to throw in there just for fun that would work really hard to see how many of those things i could stack together to say my life would be a dream if i just did this that's the hardest part to find that creative overlap because i can create different verticals for you to do, but that's not really all of you. And for me, just as the example is, there's lots of things I'm really interested in and I'm discovering every single day, the more of me that I put in it, the more people love it because every dimension that you add to your stack makes you that much more unique, exponentially more unique. There's a trait. And then if you do the trait to the sixth power, then it becomes really interesting. Now you become one in one trillion or something like that. And that's what we're looking for. So my example would be, okay, I study graphic design. I love talking about business. I'm an introvert and I used to produce videos, music videos and make motion graphics. I love comic books, skateboarding, mixed martial arts. There's a part of me that likes theater a little bit. Like in particular, like stand up comedy and performance. I like debate. I love learning. I like to read books and I like to talk to people who have profound ideas. I'm fascinated by philosophy. And most of all, I love to teach. I also like learning about systems and seeing if I can break the system and reorganize it. And once I'm done with that, then I'm bored. And so for me, social media has been a system to understand, to break and to figure out and then put back together. I know if you know this, did you watch Heroes, the TV show? It was good for a couple of seasons. Okay. There's a character, unfortunately, he's an evil character. I think his name was Skyler and Skyler had the ability to look at any hero. Unfortunately, he has to kill them, but explore how their powers work by probing their brain with his finger and then adopting their power. So he's one of the most powerful villains in the storyline because you have to be careful around him. He will steal your power. So I kind of look at it like that. I want to break something apart, study it and know how it works and reconfigure it and incorporate it into myself. But I would tell people the beautiful part about the way I do it is no one's harmed. I didn't kill anybody. No laws were broken. But I get to absorb this. And I think there's something about me that loves to figure out the game. Playing the game long term isn't that interesting to me. But figuring out how to win the game is very interesting to me. So what does that look like? So it wasn't until I started making content on YouTube that allowed me to bring as many of those skill sets together as possible, those hobbies and interests. When you've got a job to do, Lowe's knows how to help you keep it moving. My Lowe's Pro Rewards members save more with member volume discounts on eligible orders through a quote of $2,000 or more. Plus, save time with job site delivery on select purchases. Not a member? Join for free today. Exclusions, more terms, and restrictions apply. Can't be combined with any other discount, including but not limited to contract and or special pricing. Loyalty programs subject to terms and conditions. Details at lowes.com slash terms. Subject to change. So when did you discover this? When were you so sure that this was your stack and you knew how to deliver it to the world? I'll tell you how I know it wasn't it when I felt like I was living a fractured life. Like there was the me who showed up to teach classes at Art Center, who got paid very little bit of money, who worked really hard at it, got great fulfillment, but wasn't rewarded for it. And I had to still work under rules. Now, there aren't a lot of rules teaching at an art school, but there are still rules, rubrics that you needed to follow and thinking about who taught before you, who's going to teach after you so that there's a seamless transition from one class to the next. but i don't fit in that box so i know if i do my thing i'm probably going to break what happens before and after which oftentimes i did in just a few months we're going to hit our 400th episode of this podcast and before we get there we want to take a moment to really listen to you our loyal listeners if you're open to chatting with my producer rich cardona or someone on his team we'd love to hear from you just fill out the short form in the show notes it takes less than 20 seconds When I was doing commercial work, like literally making commercials and music videos, I was compensated really well, but it was soul sucking work at some point because I don't feel like I could play. There was this whole pitching process and then, oh, we don't think someone's going to approve this. So let's change this and let's change that. And you're just trying to make something good and survive this kind of the gauntlet of decision makers and middle management. Not a lot of fun there. And I'm just trying to find a different way. And I kind of run into it almost by pure luck that a friend of mine says, let's make videos together. I'm like, I don't know about that idea. But what he did was he gave me space to play, to explore and to awaken something that had long buried inside of myself. And that's just this playful spirit that I've had for a really long time, but buried because I was so self-conscious, so socially awkward and for some point bullied for who I was. And so that part was repressed for a really long time. And so 40 years of that. And then all of a sudden you open up that can, the Pandora's box or whatever, and then The real Chris gets to play. So, you know, the interesting thing is when people leave this comment on our YouTube channel, it's like, man, I've been here for years. I love how you've changed over the years. And I would say, friend, thank you for being here for the entire journey. I've not changed at all. I've just shown you more of who I truly am. So I really like what you said about a friend suggested that you show up on YouTube and you do some videos together. And you said, I don't know about that idea because when we recorded our second podcast episode together and we talked about your success system and that was the trigger moment, it was someone else going, hey, Chris, you should do some, you should speak on stage. Hey, Chris, you should record some videos. Hey, Chris, you should do this. It's always met with a hair. I don't know about that idea from you. And then that's the start of your success system that then turns into something else. I wonder if there's any more of those orbiting you right now. Any, hey, Chris, we should do this type things that you're resisting right now. There's always those things that are circling around you. And sometimes you do need to recognize that was the fool's errand. Do not go down that path. That's people who have shiny object syndrome where everything looks good and everything can work. And then you explore too much, not do anything with it. You don't do anything well. So it's like you have to decide when it's a challenge, like a real challenge, because you're afraid to take a move versus the distraction. Sometimes those opportunities are really the obstacles and not the other way around. And so we have to be kind of careful. And I've had moments in my life where let's try that idea. Let's try this idea. And you don't do anything wrong. to the degree in which it needs to be done and you spread yourself so thin that you look back on that time and you say wow what a hot mess that was and so we need to like exercise a certain amount of bravery and have courage to try things that we're really scared of and also to say no to a lot of things that seem like oh that's a that's a quick way out of this and it's hard to tell in the moment So I like the idea that you've got all these different parts of you all around. And then the time when it feels the most aligned, when it feels most like, yes, this is brand me is when you combine them in which is possible and you don't leave anything out. And you're never like, cause you're always one person. Like I don't really believe in the work-life balance and you're a different person then and a different person then. It's like, no, I'm me all the time. And that's it. I feel like at the moment, so we've got the, so we have coach box, but we also have a community on the side of it. And that community, I feel like, is where so many of these things combined. And I probably hadn't realized it before, but because it's a community of coaches and I really like hanging out with coaches because often they're very self-aware and very open to like debate and discussion and don't really like small talk. And so it's like, I feel that kind of my kind of people, but they're all in the community. And then also because we're talking about how to use something that feels relatively new and how to apply it, there's an element of like figuring stuff out and learning stuff together. And then I learn stuff and then share what I learned with those people. So that's like a, that's my favorite kind of teaching the kind where it's not from a textbook. It's just from here. I've learned this thing. Here's how you can do it too. Like from a straight away point of view, not like a, here's what I did a year ago, but here's what I did like five minutes ago. And then also because I'm chatting to them all the time because I love people and I like hearing their stories, I then write them up as like case studies and I share their stories and I promote them online. So then they love it more and then they get more involved and then they, it feels like that's a really nice, like some of our customers, I feel like they're also my friends because of how much I know about their world and how much I know how to kind of help them. But then something I realized the other day was that for the last 30 days, that was the last day, actually the last day today, I've been doing like a 30 day challenge on YouTube that was like a get over perfectionism. Don't feel like your videos have to be perfect. Just make a video a day and share them. And I did a Q and A for Coachbox customers last week. And on there, there was like five people who said, oh, I, this video, this YouTube video that you did the other day. And I'm like, hang on, you're watching this. And it's like all my YouTube subscribers are also my customers as well. So it's like those two, I didn't realize that those two worlds were combining, but that felt really cool because then it's like stacking up the same people with different stuff and getting more close to them. So maybe there's something in that because it fits all those, it fits that criteria of like lots of me into one thing that then means it's more valuable that then means it grows so i drew on my notebook here let's have any bubbles here at least 10 bubbles of the things that you said that you're interested in or that you're good at so i'll tell you we can run the test right now when you're training to do weightlifting for a competition how much of you showing up for that of the 10 bubbles you think for powerlifting yeah quite a lot of them because okay tell me which ones i don't know which bowls you've got down so it's it's like it's like exertion or it's kind of self-development in some way which i guess crosses over both business and sport i don't think the teaching element comes into there because i don't really teach other people stuff although i probably pass on like the mindset lessons um visualization is a real big part of my training because i'll visualize every single lift before i do it and i use that one of those things you said before by the way no i don't know i'll go over the list okay i believe you training only fulfills one or two of those 10 bubbles yeah does it does your training involve ai no does your training involve writing No. Does your training involve a system? Possibly. Yeah, massively. Probably not automation. Unless you're making content about this training thing I haven't seen, no. No. What level of creativity are you bringing to training? I don't know. Are you creating space to be around lots of people as an extrovert? Yeah, I have a lot. Are you using your skills as an entrepreneur while you're training? No. Empower lifting? No. That's what I mean. Yeah. Right. So like, that's your craft. That's what you like to do. But it's not brought in like you. You say you love to travel to something. Put that there. So what we're looking for is a way to bring this together. And I'll show you what I was thinking. Okay. I'm not saying this is what you should do tomorrow because it's probably a really bad idea. Put that out there. Okay. Let's say we want to build everything around your train. Why aren't you making content that uses AI? That then you have meetups where people train and learn with you, these coaches, because that involves the extroverted extracurricular activities that you like to do. So you're like for me, I'm an introvert. So the idea of like being around lots of people is not one of my fun things to do on any given day. But what if you traveled from city to city? As part of a circuit where you're training, come train and coach and learn AI with me. We're going to get shredded and we're going to shred the machine too. Maybe there's some metaphors or mixed metaphors that we can use. And we're all going to publish or write an article about this or Forbes is going to be, you know, there's all these things that you bring together. So it's like your best day ever. every day of your life i feel like i live the best day ever every day of my life but my work and fitness are like more yeah but work and fitness are kind of separate i don't know so the business even though it's coaches they're not fitness coaches they're not health coaches they're like business coaches marketing coaches everything else so it's not like as that's not super aligned but then well wait hold on hold on hold on The one rule of brainstorming, you already know this, is no buts, just yes and. You're giving me a lot of but right now. And if we say, like if you went travel back in time, you told young Chris before you started making YouTube videos, these things aren't really aligned, Chris, doing this and that. I'm like, oh, yeah, you're right. I shouldn't do that, huh? then I wouldn't be here. And I didn't know that these worlds are going to overlap, but I just had to take that stupid first step in the theme of being stupid. Like, I don't know where it's going to go. And it's horribly uncomfortable. There's no business here because for two and a half years, we didn't make any real money. And then it clicks. You have to just leave room for the possibility that wouldn't be great if this were a thing. Yeah. I like that. I like that a little bit. Okay. So you do power lifting and you really enjoy that, right? Is this a hobby that costs you money or makes you money? Costs me money. So how can we make it make you money? Do I need it to make me money? Wouldn't life be better if the things you love paid you? But I guess they do, but they're just different things I love. Yeah, maybe. Oh, I don't know. I don't know about that. Okay, okay. Well, here's another way of looking at it. Yeah. I wish I was really good at skateboarding so I can be a professional skateboarder, but I'm not. But I imagine the people who are really good at a sport or playing chess or doing some human thing, some human feat, and they got paid for it, were celebrated for it and loved for it, they're living their best life. They found the one thing they can do better than most people on earth and they're taking it all the way. So I guess I think of powerlifting as a fun way to lose money. And I think of other things as making me money. So I never feel like... powerlifting or just lifting or fitness in general has to make me money because other things make me money and therefore I do that for fun and I completely switch off to it being commercial endeavor and then it means that those two worlds don't have to collide but maybe but I'm open to that being not the best way to thinking about thinking about it and I don't know I feel like in the past I've been definitely guilty of trying to optimize everything and trying to think, okay, because I'm good at this sport thing, then I should optimize that and I should do this and I should do that. But then not always knowing if that's really the route I wanted to take. Okay. I do want to throw this out there. It's just something I heard Blair N say, which is all strategy is autobiographical. OK, I'm going to tell you what works for me. And they're like, well, Doug, because it works for you. I'm like, I don't know what else to tell you, because if it didn't work for me, I wouldn't tell you that it works. Right. So here's how it goes. And I'm going to just accelerate this through the timeline so you can see the progression. First, I show up literally wearing a tie and shirt talking about business principles on a YouTube video, sometimes about creativity. And I'm using Keynote a little bit. And if we start to step through all the iterations of me, now I show up in a skirt with a baseball cap, saying outrageous things all over the world in front of strangers and friends. And sometimes doing slightly awkward comedy in front of everybody, sometimes to a room of 12 people, sometimes to a room of 1,200 people. And I'm doing a little improv, making little jokes and throwing little side eyes at people. And I'm loving every minute of it. So there's this progression of how many different things can I bring into it? So now I can bring my interest in fashion, my love for comics and movies and cinema, and I can bring it all together. And it was tested a couple of years back when I was speaking to a room full of people in real estate and finance when I was telling them about my love for these Marvel characters and how they shaped my life and the meaning that they bring to me. And I was just like ready for like the worst possible reaction, which is, hey, who let the nerd in the room get rid of this dude? But instead I saw their inner child come out. It's like, I love those characters. That's what that story was all about. That's how I knew like, I'm onto something here. So the more that I can bring that into the conversation, I give people in the audience ways to jump into the story and see themselves somewhere in there. And it's just me sprinkling all the kinds of things I'm interested in. And then you enroll people in that. I think that's the coolest part. So if I were you, Jody, what I would do is figure out a way that I can write about the overlap between business AI systems and fitness and training and design it so that I can perform great content and create excuses for coaches or entrepreneurs who are somewhat interested in fitness, get more excited about fitness and business together so they can do more good in the world and also to be healthier. I wonder if something that has happened fairly recently has almost become something that I've assigned an identity or a meaning to when it shouldn't be. And that's that very often, because I run Coachbox with my husband who's in CrossFit and I am in powerlifting. So we often like, we kind of look like, like people often think that we work in fitness and they will assume that we work in fitness and we'll turn up to an event and they're like, oh, you're with Gymshark. And it's like, oh no, we run a software company. And it's like, it's, but hang on you look like you work in fitness and you don't and i almost wonder if i've seen that as a bit of a source of pride like it's in oh the goal is to look like you work in fitness but you don't and that's cool because i like that as a as a kind of goal for life but i wonder if i'm almost taking it too far and i'm like no no i really don't work in fitness and then it means i've closed off the idea that it could be involved in work at all hmm So people are reading you in a certain way and putting you in a box and you're like, wait a minute, do I need to be aware of this? I don't want to show up in the world? Kind of. Yeah, I guess so. So if I'm being put into a box of, oh, I'm assuming you work in fitness because you're in shape. And I'm like, no, you can be in shape and run a software company. Like not every successful business owner has to be like disgusting. Yeah. Doesn't work like that anymore. Okay. There's a lot you can do with this, by the way. Yeah. Okay. So I think there's something in the idea that I'm like, I fundamentally believe that you don't have to work in fitness to look like you work in fitness yes and if you work in fitness maybe you shouldn't look like you work in fitness yeah so i like smashing stereotypes i really do i like to play with people's perception of who i should be and i like to push the buttons a little bit because i i want them to challenge their own thinking So you have a classic case of mistaken identity. You just need to embrace it. How? How do I do that? Okay. What you do is you take a negative and you turn it into a positive. So what are some of the things that people say to you about a mistaken identity? Like who do they presume you to be? What are the kind of things they say? and people in gyms often think I work there because I'll just someone will come in and they'll be lost and I'll be like hey how's it going and they'll be like oh do you work here and I'm like oh no and I actually only joined yesterday but I just like I'm just friendly I just want to help and something like that Yeah, okay. Do you ever play a joke on them? Like, yes, I do. What do you need? Yeah, I've signed up. I've actually sold memberships before to those kind of people because I'm like, oh, do you need a day pass? Do you want to join for a month or whatever? And then after that, they realize that I'm not, I don't actually work there. People always ask me if I've just been for a run. And I'm like, no, I just wear workout stuff all the time. Believe it or not, I've been asked that question too. Yes. Different. Well, story for a different day. Okay. What else? This doesn't really happen anymore. But when I used to be, I used to live in Birmingham, UK, and I was on the board for a couple of different charities. And I was on the board for a college. And when I turn up at the board meetings for the college, and I was like 25, and and people would assume I was a student at the college and they would directly one time I got directed into an exam hall instead of my board meeting I thought I was like what am I doing here but it's because they genuinely thought I was 18 and they thought I was sitting an exam so maybe I could have played with that and actually sat the exam and then yeah those I think they're the main they're the main ones it's kind of it's like looking it's looking young and looking sporty And that's the mistake. And that's the overall mistaken identity. But I feel like looking young can often come with being like inexperienced. I think when I started a social media agency and I was 22, but I looked like 12, but that was kind of okay because it was this new field and you almost expected someone who looked 12 to be talking to you about social media in 2011. So that felt like I could embrace that and be like, yeah, but I can speak this language and I can speak your language at the same time. So I, I feel like that mistaken identity, I embraced and turned into a positive, but maybe I just haven't figured out how to do it with the health fitness stuff yet. Okay. I'll share an idea with you. There was a company when I was doing client work that had like, there was like a really boring category called IT expense management. took me a while to learn about what they do basically they make sure that people who no longer work in the company you're still not paying for their phone bill or whatever it is right so they what they do isn't sexy but they save people money and they think that's pretty sexy and we went through this whole like deep dive and trying to understand the character and the voice of the brand and i'm like oh my god you celebrate the people who are often the the most appreciated in an organization, IT people. Because you know, IT people are the kind of people you only blame when things go wrong. And when things are right, you just say, of course, it's supposed to work that way. So we need to celebrate them. And so we were starting to talk about like, in every modern company, the IT people, the CTO, they're not just the heroes of the superheroes of the company and they're so misunderstood and underappreciated and so one of the lines that we came up for them is with their software with their service you have super fiscal vision or something like that or fiscal fitness and so we're playing around with words and kind of like there's this exercise i do with people i'll just say tell people what you do But literally hold your tongue while you're talking. And you say it the wrong way. What else could that sound like? So you want to mishear words and play. So I think it's a beautiful thing if you walk around in your tank top and people are like, oh, you're like the gym shark brat or you're like a gym bro or whatever they call women, you know, or, you know, whatever kind of derogatory dismissive thing that they say that you take that and you flip it and you make it an advantage. That's the beauty of working on your personal brand. So I acknowledge that, but yes, and, and it upset your expectation. I disrupt it. Things like six pack or I give you delts or whatever it is, you know, or I'm, I make sure your company's juiced up on whatever it is. I'm glad you asked. So you play with it. You absorb it. And you could take something like, yes, we're all about HGH and PEDs. And then you just change the acronym. There's something about the idea that coaches using AI are kind of on steroids. There's something there. Yes, there's something there. That expression, on steroids. Or like it's your performance enhancer or like, but then that's quite, I mean, and yes, and. Thanks for following the rules. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Something to do with sport, health, fitness. It's like peak performance. I bet you if you jumped into one of your AI engines and said, I want you to work with this acronym and make it mean something like this. Give me every version you can come up with. It'd give you some versions, but it's the intentionality behind this, where you take a stereotype, something that could be seen as negative, and you modify it somehow. And that becomes a really ownable thing that is very memorable. And that's what we're looking for. So I think I might have it, maybe. What is it? So I heard someone say the other day, the idea that the more we use AI, the more time we've got to be interesting because all our boring work is being done by the robots. And I love that. But I also think that I, the reason I look this way is because I train so much like I train cardio and weight, like once each per day. But the reason I can do that is because I have figured out how to use AI in my business. So it's almost like a, you can look, you can also look like you work in fitness, right? If you do this, this stuff, it's not necessarily about the kind of performance enhancing or anything like that. It's more about the time. It's like the time that you have available because the biggest reason people have for not focusing on their health is that they don't have time. But now you can have the time. So I feel like it's almost it's not it's not necessarily that sport is part of my work. It's that I have time to do sport because I've got AI helping me with my work. And I love the idea that we could do this actually in the Coachbox community because sometimes I'll set up in a new city like I just got to Dubai and I'm messaging in the community and I'm like, hey, who's in Dubai right now? And then I meet people there. But I love the idea that when we meet up, we talk about how we're just hanging out and our AIs are talking to like people on our websites and like our funnels are all working in the background and we're doing that. So it's almost like this separation of here's us online and our internet world and our AIs and here's us in real life just hanging out because now we've got time to be interesting and now we've got time to just play. So usually these ideas are hard to come by. They don't just miraculously appear in one conversation. that tonight when you go to bed and you're like, what the hell do I do with this? And you just cook on it for a while. And maybe when you're doing your 1000 squat or whatever you're going to do, like, wait a minute, I think I got it. It's this weird thing. And then it'll just be the most obvious thing. You slap yourself in the head. Like, why did I think of this earlier? Then you know you got it. And then you play with it and you massage it and you hammer it. And then you try it on for size in a bunch of different ways. And then When you know you got it, you're like, this is it. I can build my entire identity around this. This becomes a very quick story that can tell to people. And it's like one of these repeatable stories. So when I talk about personal branding, before anybody knows anything about you, the first thing they know is your name. You're Jody Cook, I'm Chris Doe. But that doesn't mean anything to anybody unless you're like Cher or Madonna or The Edge or whatever, one of those. But you know what? Those are names they made up. Lady Gaga is not her real name. So I'm like, is it reserved only for pop singers? We can't you and I come up with our own nickname that then becomes this identity that is really clear because there was a name that were given by our parents, which has meaning in itself. But what if we come up with our own name, like The Rock or Stone Cold? or the snake it would say something about who we are and it would be this very portable efficient delivery vehicle for what our essence is so that's why i like go around i'm like yeah i'm a lot of introvert like i understand i think i know what that means but let's have a conversation around that you're like the loudest introvert i know i'm like great it's working for me and so everybody should start to think about like once they figure out who they are And an identity, they can then reveal all of themselves or as much of themselves as possible to use that. And it usually works better when you take a negative and you turn it into a positive. Because everybody can say positive things like, I'm creatively innovative. I'm like, boring. But when you can take something like that's PED or HGH or one of these other things or on steroids, something. And you use a little spark of imagination and creativity and you mix it up. Maybe it's not the... like brand new to the world but it's kind of brand new to your space which is good enough that's what i would do if i were you jody cook thank you so much right i'm gonna think about this when i'm doing my thousand squat the answer is gonna come to me you're 199. wait i got it yep it's gonna happen yeah amazing yeah I think so. You could talk about reps. You could talk about personal bests, PRs, personal record. There's a lot of sports, fitness, personal training, weightlifting things, powerlifting that you can use. And then you can build a whole system around this. Okay. Like everything you teach can fit into this theme once you have that core idea. So the main, I feel like the main message is, that I've got. Yeah, it'll come out. It'll for sure come out. The main message is take everything that you love, everything that you're interested in, everything that you do, take your stats, figure out the ones that aren't involved in your world right now and figure out how they could be because the intersection of all those amazing things is what creates your personal brand. And then it's basically being more you. But not leaving out anything, even when you think you've got a reason for leaving it out, because the reason that you've got for leaving it out is probably stupid and potentially wrong. But also on the, as a kind of yes and to that, it's, there is no right way to do this. You could make anything work. You just need to pick it and go in that direction and not give up along the way. Yeah. There was a, there's an artist who sent me some handmade art And he wrote this story and it was all handwritten. It was really amazing. And he had this line that I thought was so amazing. He said, beautiful, be you till full. Be you till full. I'm like, oh, you clever guy, you. That's what I'm trying to get people to do is to be the most you that they can be, the you is you. And when you can do that, forget about the branding thing. Forget about like how this impacts your business, but you're going to live such a fulfilled life then how could you not be successful? Like, of course you would be because you're doing the one thing better than anybody else in the world can do. And only you can do. But instead, we're so busy trying to be someone else. This is really funny. The phrase be more you, I've been writing down everywhere recently. It's actually on my very new YouTube channel. The banner says be more you. But maybe I was apparently being more you myself. or I thought I was good advice but now you've taken it to the next up level yeah for sure yes I want you to reflect on our conversation the last hour or so and tell me what was going on in your mind from where we started to where we are I went through different phases of emotions I think firstly I was like oh I don't know what we're going to talk about and then I when you first went down the route of I felt a huge resistance. I felt like, oh, he doesn't get it. These things are separate. No, no, no, that's not what I want to do. But there was definitely a, I probably felt it in my body, like quite like a, oh no, that's not really the thing. And then I feel like I understood what you meant with the context. And then I feel like the, I feel like my mind opened more to it. And then I felt like there was a way forward. I got a strong sense that there was a way forward and I just didn't know it yet. And that's where I am right now. So we've been on a journey. I've been on a personal journey in the last hour for sure. Do you know what the five stages of grieving are? No. The first one's denial. I think the second one's anger. I think the third one might be bargaining. And the fourth stage is depression. And the fifth stage is acceptance. Yeah. I tell people the faster you can get to acceptance, the less painful this will be, the more growth that you'll have and the happier you'll be at the end of it. A lot of people get stuck in denial and anger. They can't move beyond that. So it's like, if we look at the arc of any kind of coaching, I think it goes in a similar process. Like I don't need this. I don't want this. Second is who are you to tell me these kinds of things? This will never work. Well, I will do this if you let me do that. And oh, that sounds so far away. I'll never be able to do it. And then I'll try it. So when we were reflecting earlier on our second ever podcast conversation together, you're like, tell me what the secret sauce is. My whole thing has been when I'm in front of somebody that I trust and they tell me to do something crazy, I just try to skip to. OK. And I think that's just if I ever have any secret sauce, I'd be just like one of my secret sauces, which is I'm scared. Let's go. But usually people get stuck in that whole resistance. And it is, even though it's the stages of grieving, this is kind of a grieving because it's almost like the old you has to die. So the new you can come out. So it's still a loss. It's still a loss grieving process. We just might not see it like that because it's still us. But we're still alive. It's just like former us is going. Yeah. And a lot of stories are like that. Jesus was one of them, had to die to be reborn. Neil had to die to be reborn. There's something about the death of our old identity that gives life to our new identity. I look forward to seeing what you come up with. And I'm not just saying that to Jody Cook. I'm saying that to everyone who can hear this and watch this. Hopefully you got some value from this conversation and you can see yourself maybe in our discussion here. I'm going to tell you this thing. I can't promise you that you'll find it, but if you put in the effort, the probability goes up much more. And if you do find it, this gift that you were given, this gift that you were born with, and you're able to live it and express it, I just think you're going to be at different planes of joy, of fulfillment, and you're going to be the wealthiest you've ever been in your life. And I wish that for all of you.

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Topic: PERSONAL BRANDING

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