The Sky is the Limit
“The thing about personal branding is that subjectivity is the biggest impediment to brand manifestation when you yourself are the content, or part of the content. You can’t do it on your own. It is the equivalent of trying to be your own therapist.”
SHERI is a dedicated, rigorous, and deeply rewarding guide to one’s consciousness, or inner self. The SHERI online spiritual healing and awakening courses are guided tours of several spiritual awareness strategies, steps, platforms and practices. I guide my followers and subscribers through an educational, insightful, confrontational, and sometimes (at first) elusive tour of their own mind and spirit and help them align themselves to their life’s purpose. Since producing and publishing my content, I have a sense of personal and professional legitimacy in regard to my brand and my identity as an expert in this field of personal development and enlightenment.
But the funny-not-so-funny thing is, it almost didn’t happen. You see, early on in the conception and creation of SHERI, I actually thought that it would be not only possible, but actually preferable, and smarter, to do it all on my own.
They say, “the sky’s the limit,” you know? And that’s true. It is. However, the sky is an infinite space. Yet, individual capacities are finite, limited resources. A plane can fly 35,000 feet but not much higher than that before it loses contact with ground control, among other deleterious prospects. The sky’s the limit is true, but how far up do you go before you have to say, “Okay, this is where I can’t go any further, can’t do anymore, can’t help anymore. This is where I ask for help.” At some point when I was working with a graphic designer I’d hired and trying to write the course descriptions for my website by myself I realized that I had reached my 35,000 feet. If this was going to look professional, I was going to have to reach out to professional writers, brand development experts, and public relations machinery. I found all of that in Universal Admedia.
I cannot overstate how important it was to hire a branding agency to develop my product and how grateful I am that I chose one so well-suited for the concept behind the SHERI brand.
I had a lot of fears -- What about my legal claims to ownership of my brand and its content? Would anyone at the agency even understand the nuances of higher consciousness, meditation, lucid dreaming, and other esoteric elements of my brand of personal development to convey or promote its meaning? -- and even more cynicism. Prior to immersing myself in the kinds of self-awareness and higher-consciousness perspectives, methodologies, and rituals that I promote, I was myself in the marketing world, working as an account manager, the liaison between countless established brands and the elite advertising agencies who represent them. I knew -- or so I thought -- the strings behind the curtain that is branding, marketing, PR, and advertising, and little of it seemed genuine or authentic, nor anything someone with my background couldn’t come up with on my own.
Except the thing about personal branding is that subjectivity is the biggest impediment to brand manifestation when you yourself are the content, or part of the content. You can’t do it on your own. It is the equivalent of trying to be your own therapist.
Once I realized that I was in the way of seeing my own brand clearly, that I was actually my own blind spot, I knew that I had to find an agency, and the right one. As a woman of color, I wanted an agency that was diverse in terms of race, culture and gender. I wanted a boutique agency that was not risk-averse or so embedded in what’s trending that they were closed to anything new. As a bilingual, world-traveling person I wanted an agency that had a global perspective. And, of course, they had to be as business savvy as they were creative. Today I am the proud owner of a brand, a business, and a refreshingly inspired outlook on how important well-honed personal branding can be.