Okay, tell me if this sounds like you.  You've recently started a new business and you're trying to get yourself established. Maybe it's just you on your own, maybe you have a little help, but it's a small enterprise and you feel like you're drowning in all the things you need to do to brand yourself.

Like setting up a website, getting a logo in place, starting social media accounts, and it's like your mind just goes into slow motion. You spend two hours adjusting a button style on your website, or you generate a hundred different AI logos and hate them all. You can't think of any ideas, and it just feels like you're spending an insane amount of time on these tiny things that don't add up to a complete picture.

Everything you try seems wrong or stupid, and before long you're just reaching for your phone or mindlessly scrolling, munching on snacks, basically doing anything but making progress on your branding.  If this all sounds familiar, don't worry. There isn't anything wrong with you. It is so easy to get overwhelmed by options when you're trying to figure out branding, especially if it's for you.

Branding for yourself is always the absolute hardest thing to get right.  So today what I have for you are three really simple pieces of advice for you to deal with this type of brain freeze. 

Number one: make a "What It Is and What It Isn't" list.
Okay, so this first one is the most basic tool that I use in my branding toolkit.

It's super simple, so simple that I can't claim to have invented it because I don't know where it came from. I used it a ton with my colleagues when I worked at HBO. I also used it in college, and I also use it now.  So what is it actually? A "What It Is and What It Isn't" list is a list that clarifies what you're about as a brand...and what you're not about.

These can be your overarching principles that help guide everything from your business name, to the way you talk about yourself, to logos, to color palettes, to content series, and to the prompts that you feed chat GPT.  I know it maybe seems impossible for a list to do all of that, but I promise that this is a tool that's really going to help you.

Here's an example of what I mean. I did a list for Apple because all of us have a sense of who Apple is as a company. 
----------------
APPLE
What it is
innovative
cutting edge
elegance
premium quality

What it isn't
compromising quality to cut costs
confusing user journeys
cluttered layouts
---------------

So under the category of what Apple is, I would put innovative, cutting edge, elegance, premium quality, things like that. And under what it is not, I would put compromising on quality...complex or cluttered design aesthetics. I'd also put confusing and long winded user journeys. 

Okay, I could keep going, but you get the point.  So once you've sat down and made this list for yourself, this is your true north. It's the thing that you use to gut check any piece of creative that you're making for your brand, like your bio, or a description for your website, a social post, a logo, whatever you're making, you can use this list to evaluate if your true north desires are being satisfied.

This is how you help to avoid it. Getting into endless options that look cool and getting distracted by that as opposed to following a certain path that you've defined for yourself. 

Okay, advice number two: Chuck it and Fuck it. 
This is my personal mantra to get myself out of my head when it comes to design.

This is where I want you to give yourself a little bit of tough love. Because there are diminishing returns on the amount of time that you spend refining something for your brand.  I know it feels really important to position yourself perfectly, or to get it just right to have that perfect amount of sex appeal to your graphics.

But the idea that there's one perfect logo to rule them all, it's a red herring. And if you fall for that idea that there's one perfect option, you're just going to end up being more and more delayed. The other thing is that you actually need to test your branding out in real life situations to see if it's going to work.

Using the branding helps inform you about what kind of final decisions you might want to make to it. For example maybe you want to write your sign off a certain way in your emails. Like my sign off in my email list is "Your Design Mom." That's how I branded myself.  And once you have that idea for how you want to do that, you can just go ahead and use it.

Just see if it feels natural and maybe it won't. You might decide that the person you thought you were writing to actually isn't the person who showed up and then you need to change things a little bit.  The other thing is you don't have to be exclusive about certain use cases. You can use them both simultaneously.

But you're not going to know any of that until you actually put yourself out there. To put an even finer point on it, even if you're not 100 percent thrilled with your logo after 100 different iterations and using every AI software known to man, post the freaking thing anyways.  As it sits and you see it in context, you'll come up with more thoughts.

That's going to happen whether you spend 15 minutes on it or 150 minutes.  So you do want to counterbalance for this testing phase that you're going to have to go through once you launch and just get things up. Just get them up.  I know I've been emphasizing that, you have the ability to wiggle and change things as you want to, after you launch them, because I'm trying to make you feel a little bit less anxious about launching.

But I also want to emphasize that most of the time when I push myself to just post, just get it out there, I end up liking it a lot more than I thought I would.  I think that hesitancy that we have to post things or decide on a logo,  it often has a lot to do with how it's scary in general to put yourself out there and to be in a place where people can judge you.

That's why I say the idea that there's one perfect option to rule them all is a red herring...because often what I find is that desire [to have the perfect image] is often just covering up a fear of launching, a fear of being seen.  And we also have to remember that no one is scrutinizing us the way that we are scrutinizing ourselves. Memories are short and whatever you're trying to say to the world, you're going to have to say it over and over and over again...and you're gonna have a million chances to tweak your branding as you continue to do that.  So hopefully all that helps convince you to just post whatever you've got going on.

And if you need a mantra, feel free to use "Chuck it and fuck it!" :)
I find that it makes me laugh and it helps me pull myself back out of the seriousness of it a little bit.

Okay, here's my third and last piece of advice. When in doubt, use a face.
Studies show over and over again that humans respond to and click on faces because we're all just primates in the end.  So if the reason that you're contemplating branding is because you need a social media header or a profile image, I want you to just throw your professional looking profile photo on there as a placeholder, just so you can check it off the list.

It's going to be good enough to start with and probably good in the long run.  Personally, I also get it. I totally get it if you're afraid to put your face on there, because most people have some insecurities about how they show up in a photo, and that's totally normal.  So I've had to give myself this advice quite a bit.

But, the thing about a photo is that there's nothing to think about. You don't have to come up with copy, you don't have to have a perfect business name, it's just you. And in the end, people are showing up for you.

Now, if you feel like you hate all of your photos, and you look terrible or whatever, there's tons of advice out there for how to create a professional looking photo.
I don't want to get in the weeds about that here, but I just want to invite you to revisit advice number two: "Chuck it and Fuck it!"

I have to think somewhere in your phone or in your archives, you have some photo that is at least something that you feel neutral about. Maybe it doesn't make the perfect statement, but you don't feel embarrassed by it. So just use THAT one. 

We have this idea when we start a business that we have to come up with the perfect name and have the perfect image. We have to attract the right people in a certain way. But because it's your personal business, the first clients you're probably going to get are going to be people who already know you or who already know that you're great for whatever it is that you're doing. 

Those people have to know that you, Jane Smith, are the person who's running the business - because that's who they're showing up for.  If you're still feeling a little resistance to showing your photo, just go back and think about the fact that, again, it's a prototype. You're allowed to change this whenever you want to. 

And the point of  getting something and just posting it is to give yourself the space to make these kinds of decisions in a non pressure cooker way.  Satisfy the objective of getting something up there, and then you can have room to think about it and weigh your options.  Okay. That's what I have for you today on the subject of getting out of brain freeze when you're working on your personal branding.

I have a lot more thoughts and tools about personal branding to help you. So I'll be back with some of those in a future episode.