What is Your Brand?
Those familiar with this enterprise know when you see the A Conscious Life Hypnotherapy logo it is immediately associated with hypnotherapist Isaiah McGee’s hypnotherapy practice. I could put just the logo in a subject line and receive just as many email openings as with a compelling subject title because the growing audience knows the nature of what will be received when the Conscious Flyer Newsletter, the newsletter of A Conscious Life Hypnotherapy, arrives in Inboxes. From this long-standing brand, one comes to expect clear, no-nonsense, unrelenting practical empowerment presented from a revolutionary pragmatic perspective. So, the question is, “what is your brand?” That question has deeper implications than just the possibility of a professional or commercial context or viability.
The Conscious Life brand logo has been the same for decades – I came up with the design one 85-degree soon to be 98-degree, 6 am, early ‘90’s morning in a valley condo where I used to reside. (Those familiar with the United States’ Southern California valley basin of Woodland Hills know that it is not uncommon to have 98-degree summer mornings).
The design was designed to capture the idea of engulfing the world in a conscious sense of its genuine identity of well-being – amid whatever absorbed mental programming that says otherwise. I have had a few branding experts and graphic artist suggest an update to this original design (which I never close the door to) however its eponymous relevance has never waned or changed so the logo hasn’t thus far either (but I’m open – even the American-origin, decades-old fast-food chain, Burger King is currently rolling out an update to its indelible brand).
But there’s something more penetrating about a brand. It represents an internal idea about something; a thought paradigm captured in an aesthetic. Upon further reflection on the idea of what a brand is and does, I began recognizing a brand’s deeper implications. I begin to consider that we are always ‘branding’ ourselves.
Whether you have a company or commercial brand is really not the point as your very thought paradigm – the aggregate content nature of what you think about life and yourself – is your brand. When you think about it, when people think of you, they think of your ‘brand.’
Some people’s brand ward people off. Perhaps it is caustic, bitter, resentful, angry or pessimistic. On the other hand, perhaps via your thought paradigm regarding life, you have a warm, light, welcoming personal brand. Its less about personality – although like an outer aesthetic – your personality is informed by your thought-brand for sure. Your personal brand more relevantly reveals and reflects what you think about yourself and the world, projecting your way of being in the world.
If you desire your thought-brand to reflect an increasingly more nourishing, empowered relationship to self and the world, it is less about portraying a “positive” attitude and more relevantly about examining the programming you’ve absorbed that is contrary to a more nourishing empowered relationship to existence.
You are not what you have been through, you are the aggregate of the associations you have chosen to make of it. The operative word in that transforming last sentence is, “chosen” – we indeed, however subconsciously, choose what associations we make about ourselves and the world.
Choosing is not merely an intellectual exercise – as the understandable argument, “easier said than done” would indicate. Choosing an attitude is not the same as choosing an association. (There currently is a popular American TV series dramady airing, “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” with an episode that focused on “choosing to be ‘happy’” wherein the oft put-upon title character is fighting a futile battle to maintain that choice – precisely because the character is attempting to change only an attitude).
To be perfectly honest, there is a bit of a Catch-22 dynamic at play when it comes to choosing an association about the experiences one weathers. Though you have the autonomy to choose what association you make about yourself and/or the world regarding a matter – very often what makes our default association what it is about a matter, is the mental programming absorbed causing it to be a default association.
However, awareness of this dynamic enables you to no longer be an unconscious, unwitting victim of its device and can empower you to more conscientiously exercise (leverage) your autonomy (independence) deciding intentionally what association you will make about a matter.
Been abused? Denial is not the choice association to make but deciding to recognize that abuse is the perpetrator’s compromised sense of self and not the abused is an empowered choice association that liberates you from enacting the victim narrative and everything that goes along with that association.
Experience money woes? Decide not to associate your self-esteem with self-judgment regarding it promoting the esteem that is leveraged into making constructive changes about it.
Relationship struggles? Decide to associate it with learning to grow rather than failure. Career challenges? Associate that with reflection rather than futility.
Personal attitudes reflect associations – they are not arbitrary mental exercises (though many people who misunderstand this reality treat them as such). As you exercise your power to choose the empowering associations you will assign to self or matters, you cultivate a healthy “self-brand” – relationship with yourself – and it automatically becomes the authentic brand you project.
We all move through Life branding ourselves and others and the associations you decide to make will determine those brands.
What is your brand?
Hypnotherapist Isaiah McGee, C.Ht., virtually consults and counsels around the globe empowering the support that nourishes well-being. Through his 14-year hypnotherapy practice, A Conscious Life Hypnotherapy, Isaiah pragmatically and effectively supports individuals and companies in the realignment of the subconscious associations that promote well-being in every area of living. He is the recipient of the 2020 Global Health & Pharma Healthcare & Pharmaceutical Award for most Empowering Hypnotherapy Provider – USA, and can be reached at info@aconsciouslifenow.com or signup for the Conscious Flyer newsletter at bottom of home page, www.aconsciouslifenow.com
