Breeze, building your professional brand for workplace success and authenticity. This is one of my favorite sessions to run, especially, especially for women.So often, we are socialized to play small, to not talk about exactly who we are and own it because far too often, we have either been punished for it, overlooked for it, or really challenged by it. And I'm hoping today, we are we are able to dispel, some of that by giving you the confidence to move forward and not just building a brand so that we are gonna set the foundation for today, but executing on that throughout your throughout your career journey. So our time together is short and sweet. We got about forty minutes, so I'm just gonna gonna take us right in. I'm gonna share in a minute a little more about who I am, but one of the important things to know about me is that my master's degree is in counseling. I'm trained and educated as a therapist.

And one of the things that we know from the research is when people have a road map during a course, during a class, during a workshop, it tends to put their mind at ease because you know exactly where we are heading, and then can also hold the facilitator accountable for making sure those learnings came to fruition.

Fruition. So this is also the opportunity where if you're seeing something on the screen where you're not quite sure, is this what I signed up for? Is this what I joined the room for? This is also your opportunity to pop out. No no hard feelings at all. But today, for our learning outcomes, what I'm really hoping you walk away with over the course of the next forty minutes is the ability not just to identify, but to be able to articulate three core values that people come to know you as and come to associate you with, not just down the words and not just because you're telling them these are my core values.

This is how my brand is grounded, but because they're able to see it through your behaviors and actions. I'm also going to give you a template to help out build out that brand plan for the upcoming month. This is gonna be an opportunity to repeat those behaviors to build a habit out of your brand. So a brand isn't just a bunch of colors and logos that we're gonna talk about in in just a couple of minutes. It's so much deeper than that. And in order for us to have a consistent reliable brand, we have to be showing up consistently on a daily basis. And then similarly, I really want us thinking about as a result of identifying, articulating, determining what those core values are, how we can really use that in an effortless way to show up authentically and credibly in a way that also invites others to do the same.

And so with that, I am going to take us right into the introduction of me, and apologies. I'm having just a little bit of struggle with, with the slides and the application, but but I got us. So as I shared and you saw in the opening slide, my name is Katie O'Malley. The picture that you see on the screen here is me around six years old, circa 1988. And as you can tell, I'm a pretty energetic, enthusiastic, bold kiddo. And the truth of the matter is, who we were at six, seven, eight years old, that time before we had enough of of an awareness and a consciousness, for people, for an awareness and consciousness of who we were. But before the world got a hold of us, very likely, the most genuine and authentic version of ourselves.

When I found this picture and I asked my family, you know, was this taken on Halloween? Was I trying to be Debbie Gibson, Madonna, Punky Brewster? And they said, no, sweetheart. This is just how you would try to go to school sometimes. And I do very intentionally try and bring little Katie out to play every day, because the more that we're able to do that, the more genuineness and authenticity and effortlessness it takes to be an effective leader because we're not expending time, effort, and energy trying to be something we're not.

So I still love, a great headband, some bold accessories. I run around in sneakers all day long, and recently just got my bangs back after close to a thirty year hiatus, in part to honor the little girl, but also it's it's on trend right now. So a little bit about me as a human and why the Women in Tech Global Conference selected me to be here with you today. You can see my bachelor's degree is in political science. I worked on John Kerry's campaign for president when I graduated college in 2004 and then transitioned into the nonprofit sector and worked at organizations like the Innocence Project, the AIDS Foundation of Chicago before transitioning into the field of commercial real estate, where I saw a lot of friends having a whole lot of success.

And up until that point, I had never visited with a career coach or a career counselor. And had I visited with them before I made the move from social change work into corporate commercial real estate, they might have said, Katie, there's a core values discrepancy here that you might wanna investigate before you make that transition. I did not do that. And in turn, my time in commercial real estate truly took a negative toll on my mental health and well-being. And I ended up taking a medical leave of absence from work in, 2012 for my mental health, and I realized during that time that this crisis of both identity and career not aligning is not a uniquely Katie O'Malley issue, but something a lot of people struggle with. And that's when I decided at 30 to go back to school and earn my master's degree in counseling so I could help people at the intersection of mental health and work. But it turns out, at least in The United States, insurance companies here are not keen to cover conversations about work because work is not a mental health diagnosis.

Even though work leads to burnout and the symptoms of burnout tend to be identical to anxiety, depression, post traumatic stress, all the way down to our the physical manifestations of heart disease and diabetes, particularly in women. And so because of that, instead of pursuing licensure as a therapist, I got certified as a coach instead. I am a board certified career executive and leadership coach and spent ten years working in higher education at some of the best institutions that the The States have to offer, including the University of Texas at Austin and Chicago Booth School of Business. So I could work with students on understanding their values, their strengths, their talents, and how to create as much alignment as possible between what you're going to come to know as your brand and the environment and role that you're gonna go into next to really cut off that crisis of identity and career at the past.

And while, this was very altruistically motivated, I'm sure many of you can appreciate it is a very small segment of the population that gets to access an education, like that offered at the University of Texas or University of Chicago Booth School of Business. And with that in 2018, I started encourage coaching to ensure that exceptional career and leadership development services were available to everyone. And it turns out, if you have a side hustle and you do what you say you're gonna do for clients and surprise and delight them along the way, after some time and a little bit of pressure, you can convert that into your full time, into your full time gig. And that's how I'm able to be here with you today because in 2022, I went all in on my business, bet on myself. It was the year I was turning 40. And if I said I don't go all in now, when am I gonna do it? Which was very much in alignment with my core value of courage.

And I have now been the founder and principal coach full time for Encourage Coaching for the last three years, and I'm just so delighted to be here with you today. Now with that, this is me more recently. This is also Katie O'Malley. And the reason that I put up two introductory slides, one is a chronology. Right? One is the chronology of where I've been, what I've studied, where I've worked, the types of roles that I've had. But this is about me as a human person. And our humanness, y'all, comes with us everywhere we go. If we don't get to part to compartmentalize it, we have one vessel to go to work with, one vessel to go home with, one vessel to go out into our third spaces and communities with. And so it's also really important to recognize our our identities are not just our careers and our roles and our education and our achievements, but it's also about our values and our strengths.

And the way that I like to think about this is values, really help guiding us in making decision making or making choices effortless, and our strengths help us making our productivity effortless. And if we are enacting our values and our strengths on a day to day basis, this is how people actually come to know us and come to know what our brand or our reputation is. So for me, those values are courage, justice, and learning. The strengths are enthusiasm, imagination, and consistency. I'm gonna break this down a little bit more in a way that is hopefully helpful for your learning in some upcoming slides. But, again, when I made the leap in 2022 to go all in on my business, that was a decision rooted in courage. When I established encourage coaching in 2018, that was very much rooted in my value of justice.

And the thing that prepared me to do both of those was continued education, continued learning, particularly in the areas where I felt least competent and least confident and had to approach with a beginner's mindset how to be a business owner. And so we're gonna dive in in more to this. But as you're thinking about yourself, just remember this dichotomy. Right? We're just one person, and it's this slide, these things that people really associate with your brand and reputation. So what is a brand really? If we were in person or if you are able to come off mute and chat with me, I would ask someone to read this blurb. But, essentially, this is gonna be the shared definition that we use when we're talking about brand for the next twenty five minutes or so, which is the sum total of all visual, nonvisual, verbal and nonverbal, tangible and non tangible elements that allow folks to identify, form, create, and influence hopefully positive associations for a product, service, or entity, a person like you and me, that differentiates us from the competition and creates meaning value and essentially a preference in one's mind.

And so as you're thinking about those first two lines, visual and nonvisual, you can see things in my office, I think, that can help you visualize and see what elements of my brands might be. As I'm speaking to you and communicating, not just through my words, but also my body language, you're getting also a sense of who I am and the tangibles and non tangibles. I got two pups running around in the background. That's something that has become associated with my brand, at least on Instagram, but also more non tangible elements, in in terms of what's going on behind the scenes that you might not be able to see. All of these pieces, the visual, nonvisual, verbal, nonverbal, tangible, non tangible, all of these elements differentiate me and can also differentiate you, whether it be in, marketplace, in your office space, on your team, in your community, even in your home. I want you to think about your brand across all of these different factors, and that's part of the work that I'm gonna be having you do over the course of the next month.

So if this is a brand, let's get a nice visualization on it, starting with Coca Cola, a highly recognizable brand. And when we think of Coca Cola, we think of what? We think of the color red. We think of effervescence. We think of the words like power, passion, energy, fearlessness, excitement. I can even hear a Coke can opening and the fizz and the bubbles that come along with it. Right? But it's also what we don't think about when we think about a brand like Coca Cola. When you think about Coca Cola, you know, it's about smiles. It's not about anger. It's about safety, not danger. It's, you know, not about aggression or pain, but feeling good as you're moving through the world. And so part of this is gonna come up when we do our values clarification activity, but really trying to hone in and understand what are the three key values that you want associated with you, and then we're gonna determine how people can know these things about you.

So I went ahead and created one for myself. If I were to have a mood board for Katie O'Malley, it might look something like this. Key color being hot pink, My strengths that I introduced to you earlier of imagination, enthusiasm, and consistency. The derailers there are the things that I don't want people to associate with me, which are also in in therapeutic work, what we might call our shadow side, my perfectionism, my anxiety, my ability to form judgments quickly and not always accurately. So wanting to make sure that the way I'm moving through the world isn't elevating perfectionism, anxiety, and judgment, but instead imagination, enthusiasm, and consistency. The values which are core to who I am and have really helped me establish a strong reputation in the coaching space, but also in the Chicago community, are those of courage, justice, and learning. Those three core values that you also saw on my introductory slide. Now I put this together in Canva. You can do it too.

I'm I'm happy to share the link for you to be able to do that. It's just a fun visual exercise and representation to be able to engage in something like this, but this is not where we start. Right? We have to start with an understanding of what is going to be and inform that visual representation. And so what we're gonna do is actually clarify our core values together. So as I've shared and said half a dozen times now, mine are learning, courage, and justice. And I came to those by asking myself these four questions before going through a clarification activity. So as you think about your core values and every time I run this workshop, I do, double check. When was the last time you thought about your core values?

Have you ever discerned or clarified what your core values are? And I have to remember that I work in occupy I I work in a space and occupy a field that's talking about this all the time, which led me to realize I need to share some clarifying questions before folks can actually get to identifying and articulating those values. So the first one I want you to think about, and and this comes through the lens of feedback. What are you known for at work? What are you known for at home? What are you known for socially in a way that fills you with a sense of healthy pride? Not arrogance. Right? But but this sense of of healthy pride. So that's that's one piece to think about. I get feedback all the time on my energy. People say they wanna bottle it and sell it, and that's something that makes me feel really good, that it's, contagious in a really positive way.

The next question I want you to ask yourself, what qualities are you drawn to in others? The things that we like most about others tend to be the things that we are aspiring to be ourselves. Now when we are clarifying our values, I often get the question, Katie, are these aspirational, or is this about the the present moment? And I say make it a both ands. We can have our brand be both rooted in who we are now and also reaching and aspiring towards who we wanna be. That third question, how do you make decisions? What are the things that inform and influence how you make choices? And then, influence how you make choices?

And then also, what are your peak moments? Those moments in your life where you have a really deep sense of pride for something you accomplished, something you achieved. Again, someone reflecting back to you, something that they found just incredibly compelling about a choice that you made or a way that you showed up. And all of these questions can really help us to understand what's driving us to show up in these ways. Now before I go to the next slide where we will do the values clarification activity to start building this brand, I wanna address the question that I know is probably on a lot of your minds, which is, Katie, my values at work are very different than my values at home, and my values at home are different than my values out in out in the social world and out in the community.

What I would suggest to you is no. They are not. The values are not different, but what could be different are the expression of those values in terms of your behaviors. We can only have one set of core values as a human, but those values can show up very differently in different places. So my courage when I am working with a client looks very different than my courage when I am advocating for social change out at Daly Plaza. My learning on behalf of myself can be very different than, the the learning and the knowledge that I'm seeking out in order to better connect with my six year old niece, right, or my 22 year old nephew. And so I want you to think about it in that way. Values travel with us everywhere we go, but their expression, the behaviors can be different.

And with that, I wanna spend the next, five or six minutes clarifying our values. So the way this is gonna work, I'd love for you to pull out a piece of scratch paper, a little notepad. If you wanna do it on your phone or device, that is totally welcome. But I want you over the course of the next minute and a half I know it's not a lot of time, but I don't want you to overthink this. Over the course of the next minute and a half, I want you to write down your 10 core values. Now what you see on the screen is a word bank. You do not have to choose from that word bank.

It's just a place to start getting that brain moving after a long day of conference sessions, and giving you perhaps some ideas or stimulating some ideas that might be generated from looking at a list like this. So I'm gonna give you ninety seconds. You are going to jot down your 10 core values. Go ahead and do that right now. Alright. Thirty seconds. Alright. Now if you don't have 10 core values written down, that is okay. You can always come back and replicate this exercise, But we can't move through the world with 10 core values. We would be absolutely paralyzed. I mean, talk about, analysis paralysis. Right? Trying to make a decision. You have 10 competing values. Which direction should you go? 10 is 10 is too many. So what I need you to do now, and there's no right or wrong way to do this, but in the next thirty seconds, I need you to cross off, kick out, remove three of those values.

You're never gonna see them again. You can't come back to them again, at least for the purposes of this exercise, and get yourself down to seven. So we need to go from 10 to seven. Go ahead and do that now for the next thirty seconds. Alright. That is time. I know I am rushing you, but this also helps us to go with our with our gut feeling, which has a whole lot of wisdom that can be very difficult for us to access with our big human brains that we believe to be so smart. Our gut actually has a whole lot of neural activity that is why we get gut feelings in the first place. So now you're down to seven. You are really probably going to him and and groan when I ask you to take this next step, which is removing another three. Seven is still too many. I need you to get it down to four. So in the next thirty seconds, go ahead and get this down to four core values. Alright.

I hope everyone's down to four. And now comes the moment of complete clarity. You either need to remove one more value to get yourself to three or circle the three that are remaining. And once you've done that, I am going to ask you to be courageous and vulnerable at the same time because these two things travel together, and share with this group of 25 folks what are those three core values that you have discerned and want people to associate with you. I'll go first. Oh, Christine. Thank you. Authenticity, learning, and growth health. Yes. It looks like we we might share learning. I'd be curious to hear about that from you. Marjana. Yes. Love, courage, authenticity. We're we're getting some some replication, lots of similar values. Peranita. Joy, independence, compassion. Dianeth, empathy, love, leadership. Lynn, I love this. Encouragement, relationships and religion. RuPaul, empathy, hard work, integrity. Yes.

I love that hard work, and it's rare for me to see that come up, which makes me love it even more. Julie, fairness, authenticity, empathy. Claudia, change, respect, honesty. Y'all, thank you for being so brave to put this into a chat, not be able to explain it, right, among a bunch of a bunch of strangers. And, Perinita, yes, there is a lot of of overlap in the group. And this is something too that I just wanna note When it comes to values, we can be using the same word, but actually understand it very different differently than the other person. Right? So it's important to get curious and not assume just because, oh, where did it go? Marjena and I both share courage that what courage means to us is the same. Or that, Marjena and where did it who is the other?

Christine both share authenticity, that it means the same thing to them. And so this can be a really fun exercise to do with your teams and then share more about what those values mean to you and how they show up in your work, which is the next step that we are going to take. What I would like you to do is, go ahead and click on this link. Go ahead and click on this link and make a copy of the worksheet for yourself. That way, you're not editing over somebody else's work, but make that copy for yourself or download it. And that's what we're gonna be using for the remainder of of our time together today. So now that you've discerned those three those three core values, what comes next?

Well, we do not move through the world, with these core values tattooed on our forehead, nor are we holding a sign that says these are my three core values. People come to associate these values with us, through our behaviors, how we move through the world, how we show up. And so when I think about the value of courage, that is a core value of mine. The way that other people know that it's core to me is because to me, courage is standing up for my authentic self and standing with others in their own authenticity. It is a big reason that I left, that I I left corporate America, higher education, nonprofit because I never felt like I could be completely who I was in an authentic way and get rewarded for it. And so the work that I do now with clients as a career coach and leadership educator is really to help them figure out who they are and to show up in those ways on purpose and with confidence.

And so I want you to think about for yourself for that first value that you named, whether it's impact, joy, change, fairness, what are the one or two associated behaviors at a at a really high level that folks would say, yeah. That's how I know Claudia. She is an agent of change, or that's how I know Nikki. All about all about impact. Just take a minute and jot down some ideas. I encourage you to do the same for the other two values as well. For me, those other two are justice and learning. For me, justice is all about the pursuit of fairness and equity. When I worked in either nonprofit, higher education, corporate America, it was about standing up for gender equity in the office, both in terms of reducing discrimination and harassment, but also elevating pay, equal pay for for equal work, but also choosing to never look away.

And what I mean by that is living in a big city. I see some of you, a lot of you coming in, today from San Francisco. Francisco. I know at least in Chicago, we have a lot of folks who are experiencing homelessness right now, and it can be really easy to look away from them to not recognize their humanity As justice, as it being a core value of mine, I make the choice to never look away, make eye contact, be in conversation.

To me, giving someone else human dignity is one of the ways that I can pursue justice as as an individual. And then finally, learning always about engaging my curiosity. Typically, that looks like not going down necessarily a Wikipedia rabbit hole, but a rabbit hole of learning that takes me pretty far from the original place that I started, but also practicing humility. I have expertise in a very small niche area of all the things that there are to know in the world. And so when someone shares something with me that I might, on its face, disagree with, I have to practice humility in saying, I don't actually understand this enough to be able to disagree with it. Let me get curious and learn more about it. So wanting you to just take another minute, jot down some ideas, and then I'm gonna go ahead and give you the last piece of of actually homework because we won't have time to do it today.

But it really gets into the multidimensionality of our of our lives and where we can bring this brand that's not just to work. So take the next thirty seconds or so. Alright. Now that you have the larger umbrella behaviors that are associated with the values that you've identified for yourself, I I encourage you to think about the associated behaviors, right, for these three core values that are never gonna change. The core I mean, let me let me restate. They can change over time because we are humans, and we are dynamic and constantly growing and evolving, but they don't change from context to context or environment to environment. So the question then becomes, alright. In my career, in my workplace, what does courage look like? What does justice look like?

What does learning look like from a behavioral perspective? How will people know at work that these are my core values and that they can rely on me to consistently show up in these ways? One of the most undervalued yet most important qualities of a leader is consistency. It gets straight to our ability to have psychological safety on teams and with organizations when we know that leader is going to show up in a consistent way. But we never see about it or read about it in the literature or in Fast Company because consistency is not super sexy, and it doesn't sell clicks. But I am here to tell you, if you really want to advance and succeed as a leader, getting consistency in these area in these behavioral areas that align with your core values will be essential.

Also, want you to think of it in terms of your relationships or your community. When I think about courage in terms of my community or my relationships, I think about it in terms of my families, friends, the associations that I'm involved in, how do I behave in ways that align with those values. Same with finances. This is what can help make decision making really effort effortless, y'all. Does this financial decision align with courage, justice, and learning for myself? If it doesn't, it makes it pretty easy to say no. And right now, coming off of a divorce and the most challenging financial negotiation of my life, I need to have the courage to say no to more shiny things, as this has become a rebuilding year for me. Also wanna throw in well-being and, of course, social media.

So social media being a space where we interact digitally, virtually with one another, but that's still a big part of where our brand is. And if you were to check out my LinkedIn, or my Instagram at encourage coach Chicago, I think you would very much see the the themes of courage, learning, and justice coming through. So for each of these, think about one behavior that you can enact. And for the next five weeks, from Memorial Day through the July, I want you picking one of these dimensions a week to really practice those behaviors because a brand does not come into being overnight nor does a reputation. It's something that we build over time, and we have to build the behavioral habits and have that consistency for people to see us in these ways. And with that, it has been a pleasure spending the lab.