Nobody refers the 'what'

We pour a fortune of energy into the ‘what’. The job title. The service list. The perfectly worded LinkedIn headline. All of it necessary – and almost all of it forgettable. ‘Business consultant.’ ‘Networking trainer.’ None of it really sticks, because none of it tells anyone why you bother getting out of bed in the morning.

I want to make the case that the most powerful part of your personal brand is the bit most of us skip straight past: not what you do, but why you do it.

Let me start with myself – partly because it’s the example I can vouch for, and partly because it took me an embarrassingly long time to work my own out.

As a kid, I was the one at the family dinner table who never quite got a word in. I grew up assuming people weren’t all that interested in what I had to say, which made the prospect of walking into a room full of strangers roughly my idea of hell. Networking was never going to be my natural habitat.

What I didn’t expect was where that would lead. I didn’t go into networking to fix my own confidence problem. I fell into it because it was the right business at the right time. It was only later – years later – that I realised I’d accidentally built a career helping people who feel exactly the way I once did: Unnatural Networkers who’d rather not, but know they have to.

That’s my why. And it’s done more for how people describe me than any tagline I’ve ever written.

Because notice what happens when someone introduces me. They could say ‘he helps professional services firms win work through referrals’ – which is exactly what I do, and a perfectly decent, repeatable description. But it isn’t the version that travels. The version that travels is ‘he’s the one who actually hates networking and helps you do it anyway.’ That’s the sentence that gets repeated by people who’ve never booked me – because it’s rooted in a why, not just a what.

That’s the part nobody tells you about personal brand. People don’t repeat your what. They repeat your why.

(If this is ringing a bell, it’s because Simon Sinek got there long before me. His Start With Why is still the best thing I’ve read on the subject, and a good chunk of this owes him a debt.)

So how do you find yours? Not with a whiteboard and a brainstorm. You find it by looking backwards.

Think about the stories from your life, especially the early ones, that shaped how you see the world. Look for the thread. There’s usually a reason you ended up doing what you do, even if you’ve never said it out loud. And discuss it with other people if you can – they’ll spot the pattern faster than you will, because you’re far too close to it.

Then boil it down to something simple: doing X, so that Y. The thing you do, and the difference it makes. Share it. Often. And next time someone asks what you do, try telling them how you got into it instead. It’s a far more interesting answer – and it’s the one they’ll pass on for you.

Because that’s all a personal brand really is: not the sentence you write about yourself, but the one other people repeat when you’re not in the room. Give them your what, and they might remember it. Give them your why, and they’ll tell it for you.