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Our Field Notes series shares in-the-trenches, first-person perspectives from the frontlines of marketing, creativity, and leadership. These reflections are shaped by lived experience and challenge the status quo — offering fresh ways of thinking about the work.
There's a particular kind of discomfort that comes with marketing yourself.
It’s different from a tough client presentation or a failed campaign. It feels more personal. More exposed. And if you've spent years helping other people find and articulate their brand, it can feel quietly humiliating to admit you're stuck on your own.
I've been doing brand strategy for over a decade. And still, when it came time to reposition my own brand, I found myself doing what I always caution clients against: circling, overthinking, confusing spinning wheels with progress.
The shift started after my daughter was born three-and-a-half years ago. Not dramatically — there was no single moment of clarity.
But somewhere in the fog of new parenthood, I started noticing something: a disconnect between who I was becoming and how I was showing up online.
I'd look back at my older content — the high-volume Instagram Stories, the bubbly, relentlessly optimistic voice — and feel something between affection and cringe. That girl had built a real business and for that I was grateful. Her energy had worked. But she didn't feel like me anymore.
Motherhood has a way of burning off whatever isn't essential. Time gets precious fast, and so does your tolerance for anything that feels performative. The guilt-driven self-monitoring that had quietly run my content calendar for years? Gone. What replaced it wasn't a quieter version of the same strategy — it was a fundamentally different one.
Less volume, more intention. Smaller gatherings. Deeper outreach. Collaborations that borrowed trust rather than tried to build it from scratch.
In an era of declining trust and fragmented attention, relationship-based marketing isn't a niche strategy — it's the one that actually works. It always has since time immemorial. And it felt good to get back to basics after a pandemic-fueled online frenzy.
But even as I evolved my approach for clients, my own brand lagged. I knew what I wanted to step into — higher-level strategy, thought partnership, work at the intersection of identity and organizational direction — but my public presence hadn't caught up. I treated myself the way I've seen many leaders treat their personal brand: like a backburner project. Something to get to when the client work slows down. (Narrator voiceover: it will never slow down.)
So I did what I do with clients who are stuck: I treated myself like one.
That means starting inside before touching anything external. My clients come to me at inflection points — a business pivot, a leadership transition, a brand that no longer fits. They're often clear something needs to change, but unclear on what. My job is to find the throughline first, before we ever talk about tactics. Clarity drives everything else.
For myself, that meant sitting with some uncomfortable questions.
→ What had actually changed about how I work and who I work best with?
→ What did I want to be known for… not in an aspirational sense, but a true one?
→ What was I ready to let go of?
The answers pointed toward a split I'd been avoiding: separating my personal brand at quinntempest.com from the community I'd built for women entrepreneurs at Create Your Purpose®. Conceptually, I'd known this for a while. Executing it was another thing entirely. My old instinct would have been to spend months getting it right and polishing every pixel before anything went live. That version of me is gone too.
Instead, I made a decision I've since given to several clients: progress over perfection. I built a one-page landing page for myself, reskinned the existing site’s homepage, launched imperfect, and planned to build from there. An MVP mentality applied not to a product, but to a personal brand in motion.
It was uncomfortable. It still is. There's something uniquely vulnerable about putting an unfinished version of yourself out into a professional world that rewards polish — even if no one but you knows it’s unfinished.
But I've come to think that discomfort is actually the signal, not the obstacle. It means you're in the work — not planning the work, not perfecting the work, but in the messy middle, doing it.
That's the part nobody talks about enough: marketing yourself isn't primarily a creative challenge. It's a psychological one.
The campaign you're running is always, underneath everything, a negotiation between who you've been and who you're becoming.
The most honest thing I can tell you is that I'm still in the middle of it. The sites are live but not finished. The positioning is clearer but still sharpening. And I'm writing this essay — for an organization I respect, with an audience I want to reach — as an act of the very thing I'm describing.
That's not a tidy ending. But I think it might be the point of it all.