Building Your Personal Brand
When things feel fragmented. Part 1 of 2.
Your brand starts with knowing yourself.
Sounds obvious, doesn't it?
But it's so much easier said than done, especially when you represent more than one brand.
Since starting Cantadora two years ago, I've been working with 10+ climate and nature tech founders to build their brands online. The headline message is that to do this work and do it properly, you have to go deep. You need to decide who you want to be, what you want to create, and the digital fingerprint you want to leave: a body of work that's uniquely yours, which you can share better than anyone else.
By now, you and I both know that we should be posting more online to grow. That's why this first edition of Field Notes isn't going to focus on why you should post. Rather, it's going to explore how you can:
Show up online, authentically and with confidence
Get value in the content you're posting outside of vanity metrics
See each piece – or fragment – of yourself as part of a larger body of work
Ready? Let's go.
Book a founder workshop for a 1:1 deep-dive on how to build your brand here.
The portfolio career and the collage identity
Over the weekend, I was struck by this quote (shared in Alicia Kennedy's brilliant newsletter, From the Desk):
"It is a collage experience to be a woman artist or a sociopolitical artist in a capitalist culture." – Lucy Lippard, Issue and Taboo.
I think the same is true not only of creatives, but also modern-day founders and freelancers.
So many of us (50% by 2030, according to the OECD) have built portfolio careers where we might move between three or five different roles in a working week, and our time and attention is pulled in 101 different ways. The way that you show up as a consultant will be very different to how you'd arrive as a mentor or freelance writer.
So, how do you find the throughline and create consistency?
Find your 'zone of genius'
One of the first steps is in locating your zone of genius, where your passions and skills intersect.
Exercise: Take a blank piece of paper and draw two intersecting circles. Take two minutes to write down in the left circle your passions, and in the right circle, your skills. Reflect on what are both skills and passions.
Seeing this written down on paper can bring you closer to finding your personal niche: the fingerprint of impact that's uniquely yours.
You can also get as specific as you like here. If you're the director of a sustainable food company, your passion is in rewilding and you have an MA in Anthropology, how do you bring these together?
Potential Zone of Genius: Sustainable Food x Rewilding x MA in Anthropology
This could form the foundation to your personal niche: sharing anthropic views to rewilding in-line with regenerative farming practices.
Defining your learning question
If your career was a body of work answering a singular question, what would that be?
This question is based on Huddlecraft's 'Learning Question'.
Ideally, this learning question is something that you choose for yourself, and is described as "a thesis question... your own unique course title. It frames your goals, challenges or curiosities as a site for active exploration and response."
Put simply: "It's an itch you have to scratch."
Personally, my learning question for Nipotina (the younger sister of Cantadora) is 'How do we better connect ourselves to the nature on our plate?' For my one-woman product storytelling agency Cantadora, it's 'How do we use storytelling to best grow climate and nature tech solutions?'
Both learning questions are far from perfect but act as guardrails. They might help me decide whether or not to take on a project or where I want to double down. I might also combine them into one overarching learning question: 'How do we use storytelling to connect people back to nature?'
For the above sustainable food director, one potential learning question could be 'What does a 'rewilded' food system look like?'
When you connect your identity to something that is, to some extent, outside of yourself, you can create a brand spacious enough to contain your multitudes.
Cantadora journalling prompts
Try taking half an hour to an hour to journal on these questions stream-of-consciousness style:
If you had to talk for 30 minutes with no prep, what would you talk about? Imagine I airlifted you from your desk and onto a stage then asked you to speak for half an hour. What topic are you choosing?
What do your friends and network always ask you for advice on? This can be very telling as to where they see your expertise!
Where does your passion meet your skillset (your zone of genius)? As described, write as a list or a Venn diagram.
What makes you uniquely placed to talk about your content? You might also include your life events as a timeline.
What's your unique perspective or strongly held opinion? This could be disruptive or aspirational. The most important thing is that this is something you fully believe in.
Seeing your content as a body of work
It's always disheartening to see a post tank, especially when you've poured time into it. It's also baffling when a half-hearted post or quip goes viral when it took just seconds to write. But rather than get stuck on the metrics, it's useful to zoom out for a moment.
Go back to your learning question.
Does your writing answer it in some way?
If you can see how each of your LinkedIn posts, blog posts, newsletters, or Instagram reels contributes to the broader picture, pushing the thesis statement a little further or maybe even challenging it, then amazing! It takes the pressure off from counting the likes or shares, leaving you free to reframe all engagement as purely experimental.
Ultimately, you're building a body of work that could turn into a product, course, or even book. It then doesn't matter if one small fragment 'flops' – as long as it's true to you and provides value, then you're still creating the way you want to do it.
I know it's fashionable to hate on LinkedIn a little/a lot. But, I think that if we start to see our posts as fragments of bigger things – entangled in our working lives, a short-form mode of content that will almost always be seen in bursts – it could be a useful holding space for everything that would otherwise get lost in notes.
Finding your throughline
Once you've found one or two threads that connect your interests, personality, and strength, you can be much clearer on what makes you 'you'. And so, to summarise:
Write down your Learning Question – the big idea that ties your work together
Experiment with posting without overthinking the outcome – see each post as a fragment of a larger part of work
Use your personal story as a compass – your identity is a collage rather than a straight line, and it's allowed to change
Ultimately, this is about knowing your value, moving through the world with more passion, purpose, and integrity, and being at one with all your many facets, even when those might feel fragmented or messy.
Do you identify as a collage founder? I’d love to hear how you’ve navigated showing up online, especially if you have (let’s say) a love-hate relationship with LinkedIn/Instagram.
About me + Cantadora
If you're new here, welcome! I'm Emma – a fractional climate tech marketer and part-time pasta nonna in training.
Thank you so much for reading this First Edition of Field Notes.
– Emma from Cantadora
The concept of a "collage" career or identity really resonates with me. And I absolutely love the perspectives you've shared here, Emma. The learning question has really got me thinking!