Key Takeaways:
- Like how brand expression makes business easier, self-expression can help make many aspects of life easier
- Developing our self-expression can improve our relationships with others, give us more authority, and make us feel more confident in our skin.
- Lesson 1: We must understand who we are and where we come from before we can be self-expressed.
- Lesson 2: Speaking to be understood is more important than speaking our minds.
- Lesson 3: Visual design is a social language so we should be intentional in what we wear.
- Self-expression brings alignment to our outer and inner worlds.
The Value of Brand Expression
“Having a great brand means you get to play the game of capitalism on easy mode” – Matt Johnson
While it might not directly generate sales, branding can help create consumer trust and awareness while nudging someone into buying. This is why brands like Apple and Disney spend so much money on branding. Brand building can be worth a lot.
It’s no coincidence that the most valuable brands evoke specific thoughts and emotions. Teams of brand experts scrutinize the smallest details of assets like names or logos to help these organizations achieve the desired reaction from the audience. They focus on ensuring their organization has a strong and consistent brand expression.
Similar to how brand expression makes things easier for businesses, great self-expression can make life easier for individuals.
Why should we take lessons from Brand Expression for Self-Expression?
“I’m an expressionist at the heart of things… all I cared about was the moment – right place, right time, right thing, right people, that’s a hard thing to do.” – Childish Gambino (Donald Glover) talking about the creation of This is America
So what exactly is brand expression? In short, it’s how a brand conveys its identity, values, personality, and message to the outside world. Consistency in expression makes brands easier to understand and helps to increase how much someone thinks about what it represent.
There are many resources put toward helping brands develop their expression but what about individuals? Self-help authors touch on the subject but most don’t provide sophisticated tools and processes. Many follow the line of thinking that self-expression should be intrinsic and shouldn’t need to be taught. I would argue that this belief has hampered our ability to communicate and be understood. Like brands, each individual’s self-expression is different but that doesn’t mean the process of becoming more expressed needs to be. There are many things individuals can learn from how brands develop their expression.
As Donald Glover succinctly put it, expression is about the “right place, right time, right thing, right people”. Taking time to understand ourselves better and figuring out how to communicate it at the right moment would make life easier. Consistently doing this can improve our relationships with others, give us more authority, and make us feel more confident in our skin.
From my experience helping to build brands ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies, I have put together three lessons about self-expression from the world of brands.
1. Start Self-Expression Inside Out
Great brands understand where they come from and who they want to be. Before any work gets done in developing their expression, these brands explore their makeup and history to figure out how to put it in a narrative that will resonate most with their audience. For humans to be more self-expressed, we too need to take the time to understand ourselves and our stories.
This means the first step of self-expression is to turn inwards. Before we can express who we are, we must know who we are. Exploring our past and understanding how key events have affected our lives, from what we do for work to what we do for fun, would be incredibly helpful when connecting with others and expressing ourselves more clearly.
Action: An exercise you can do to understand yourself better is to create a Table of Contents for your life. Which years would you group into a chapter? What would you name the chapter? What is the name of the book of your life so far? Doing this exercise will help you make sense of who you are today and let you communicate it more clearly to others.
2. Speak to be Understood
Being authentic is hard. We might have an understanding of ourselves but acting in a way that is reflective of it is uncomfortable. Many of us learned from a young age to hide our personality because of the belief that it pushes others away. While there might be pieces of our personality that could create tensions with others, these usually come from a mismatch of environment more than something truly shameful. Many of the parts we reject in ourselves are the same ones that will draw others to us.
Human beings are complex. Our personalities include many layers that show up differently across our different relationships. The goal is to understand ourselves well enough to know which parts of us will resonate with who. This is one thing many brands do well. They research their audience to ensure their brand resonates before choosing how to express themselves. Brands have a public image, but they know how they communicate it could be different depending on who they are speaking with. This maximizes the impact of communication and helps ensure their value is understood.
For individuals, authenticity can be perceived as “everything about me all at once”. I would argue true authenticity is knowing and expressing what part of us is more appropriate for each context. This doesn’t mean hiding who we are or misguiding someone. It’s more about being intentional with how we communicate. The goal of authenticity and being strategic in self-expression is communicating to be understood instead of just speaking our minds carelessly.
Action: Look at some of your key relationships. This could be anything employee, manager, husband, wife, partner, child, parent, community leader, etc. What role are you playing there? What traits show up in this role that are less prevalent elsewhere? Why do you play this role and what does it mean to you? Asking these questions could help you better understand the different parts of your personality.
3. Visual Design is a Social Language
Brands spend so much time choosing typefaces, colours, and logos to make sure these visual cues align with what they represent and will resonate with who they’re speaking with. The best ones understand that the visual design is in itself a language. They know that how they show up visually is a way of communicating with their audience. For individuals, understanding how we present ourselves visually could help our self-expression as well.
Derek Guy, known as “the Menswear Guy” (@Dieworkwear), has stated that we should view clothing as a social language. To dress in a way that is more aligned with our inner selves, we must establish what we are trying to communicate. For example, a leather jacket originates from military wear and has a style that conveys traits like strength or rebellion. Alternatively, a trench coat conveys traits like elegance and class even though it also originally comes from the military. Choosing between these two pieces will send different messages to everyone you meet.
Every sartorial choice says something about us. Even not caring or dressing sloppily signifies who we are to the world. Being more intentional in our visual presentation is an important step in our expression. So the next time you dress yourself, think about what messages you might be sending and if that aligns with who you are and where you’re going.
Action: Ask yourself questions about what you’re wearing. What are you wearing right now? Why did you put this on? What message are you sending to others when they see you in this? Does that align with who you are and what you want to express? Clothing is one of the only choices we make daily so being intentional about why we make specific choices is important in understanding our self-expression.
The Value of Self-Expression
Organizations spend significant time and resources ensuring their brands are intentional. Individuals should too. Understanding who we are and being thoughtful about how we present ourselves is an act of connection and authenticity. Self-expression improves our relationships by helping us understand who we are to others and speak to be understood. It also makes us more confident and authoritative when we are more intentional with our visual and verbal decisions.
Ultimately, self-expression creates alignment between our inner and outer worlds. The more aligned we are, the easier life gets.
Interested in reading more? Check out my article How Creative Strategists Can Be Courageous in Curiosity and How to Use Working Models to Understand Relationship Conflict.
