Personal Branding for Introverts
Goldie Chan has developed a formula for how to shape the way others experience your expertise
You already have a personal brand. If you exist online, you are already sending signals about who you are and what you value. Maybe you’re like me, and the very idea of it makes your skin crawl. Regardless, if you’re at a point of transition in your career, you need to pay attention to it, to steer it with intention.
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This week, Goldie Chan joins me in the studio. She knows this terrain well. She runs a social strategy company called Warm Robots, and her new book is called Personal Branding for Introverts. No surprise here, Goldie identifies as an introvert. It’s part of what powers her formula for showing up online in ways that shape how she is perceived and convey her expertise.
Goldie starts in a place that feels almost embarrassingly simple. You need a goal. Maybe you want a better job, or you’re eyeing a stretch role. Without that anchor it’s easy to spin your wheels, posting here and there, hoping something sticks and wondering why it all feels scattered.
This episode is full of practical ideas you can actually use, and if you’ve found it here, on my Substack, it’s because you’re part of the community in which I’m most invested. So please, feel free to email me your questions directly. I’m more than two decades in to building my own personal brand, and though the very idea of it still makes me feel squeamish, I understand its value. I attribute most of the best parts of my career to this brand. And I’ve developed strong ideas about how to do it in a focused way, what is valuable versus a waste of time, what to share and what to withhold
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I’ve spent 20+ years covering tech from the inside for BusinessWeek, Fortune, and Wired. My mission is to close the gap between the people building the future—and those of us living it.
The idea that we alredy have a personal brand whether we acknowledge it or not is such an important reframe. For introverts, the pressure to constantly perform can feel exhausting, but having a clear goal makes all the diference. It transforms branding from this nebulous obligation into something more strategic and, honestly, less draining.