Actively managing your personal brand is critical if you want to make a significant impact in the areas of your life important to you. What you say and what you do influences how people perceive you, so take note that your personal branding will determine how successfully you’ll be able to make an impact in life.
Gina Balarin is a hugely successful and well-renowned keynote speaker and marketing expert.
She is equally passionate about speaking as she is about marketing and will use her words, experiences, and services to inspire others to see their own potential.
She has spoken at events, panel discussions, on video and much more all around the world.
She's a director of Verballistics, a specialist communication consultancy that helps software and services companies and their leaders speak right and present more effectively.
It hasn't always been an easy ride, though.
Relatively early in her career, she discovered that she doesn't see things the way most people do.
She gets frustrated when the rules are illogical and things don't make sense. So she started her own company instead.
Now she's an entrepreneur, helping marketers around the world do marketing that they're proud of.
She sits on a couple of boards, has a master's degree in management communications, is a Fellow of the CIM and the MCIM, and is a member of the PSA.
She has written a couple of books, including The Secret Army: Leadership, Marketing and the Power of People, and 200 poems to add to it.
Gina is a hugely successful TEDx speaker, having also featured on numerous television and radio program.
With 20 years of leading marketing experience, Gina is a perfect choice for all manner of speaking events.
With an ability to speak honestly with a human touch, Gina is a revered speaker, often dubbed as a B2B marketing genius who can touch on all subjects.
Mostly, she's just interested in helping people find ways to be prouder of who they are, what they do, and how they make a difference in the world.
How Gina Thinks Of Herself As A Brand
Gina lived in Africa for the first 26 years of her life. Then she moved to the UK for 13 years before coming to Australia just over three years ago. She sees herself as location agnostic because her brand isn't associated with an identity or a location. She's currently based in Queensland, possibly where she'll be for the next few years.
For Gina, the question about how your brand is associated with your location is tricky.
She thinks that if she lived in Africa and had stayed in Africa, the chances are she would have had a brand that made her identify as African.
According to her, the place where you were born greatly influences who you are.
She thinks that there is an awareness in people who've lived in different parts of the world that helps them understand that people are more than just one culture.
Gina mentions, "I guess, while one chooses to define one's own brand, to a certain extent, your brand is defined by your experiences, by where you've lived, by who you've met, by the jobs that you've had, and the friends that you've had."
Because of that, she thinks that her brand as an international speaker has only benefited from working with people on six continents over the years.
It made her realise that there are a lot of cultural variations and nuances.
When I asked Gina if she thinks of herself as a brand or just as Gina, she openly shared that this is the question she struggles with.
Value authenticity is one of her core values, but she finds it tricky to answer whether she considers herself brand Gina or just Gina.
Many speakers like to identify themselves as their brand, so they have a site named after them, so Gina has thought about registering ginabalarin.com.
Why is that? She says, "...because there's something about calling myself brand of my name that feels almost a little bit, I don't know, egotistical to me, and I struggle with that because I am me. No one but me. But by the same token, I don't want to be an aggrandised version of myself. That doesn't sit with my brand value of humility and authenticity."
Gina doesn't want to be seen as arrogant, and there's a little voice that says, "Who are you to say you're amazing?"
Over the years, she accumulated a fair amount of relevant experience, making her trust that she should share her brand with the world.
How Others Perceive Gina
When asked if she'd thought about how others perceived her, Gina shared that her background had actually been on stage ever since.
She's been performing as a dancer on stage since she was seven and had her first leading role as a ballerina at nine.
She thinks that if you've been on stage, you have an awareness that there is a persona that exists in the idealised location that is literally on the platform.
Gina also studied for a Bachelor of Arts degree, originally in drama and linguistics, so she has always been fully aware of what it's been like to be a performer.
It's an advantage for her because it means that you know how you hold and carry yourself and look on stage. But it's also a disadvantage at the same time because there's a tendency for actors and actresses to be one thing in front of a camera and another thing behind it.
That doesn't sit comfortably with her values of authenticity, but that means she's aware of the fact that brand Gina exists in everything that she does.
She also highlights the quote, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit."
That's why Gina tried to be excellent in every interaction. It's a hard ask, but it's a good goal for her.
The Importance Of Reputation
Gina hadn't realise how important one's reputation is as an employee until she was put in an organisation where her colleague was being promoted, and she wasn't.
While they were together, her colleague received two promotions in two and a half years, while she was still sitting there wondering why she wasn't promoted when her work was of the same quality.
It made her very upset, and she demonstrated discomfort in the workplace.
At the time, she hadn't thought much about it, but later she realised that the incident could potentially damage her reputation as a loyal and diligent employee.
Subsequently, someone reached out to Gina and tried to nit-hunt her for a job. It ended up happening, but a few months after she had anticipated.
During those few months, she realised that she had to change her behaviour if she wanted to change how people saw her in the organisation.
What Gina did was she embodied the saying, "Dress for the job you want."
For those three months, she went to the office in suits, which was unheard of because it was where people would wear jeans and jumpers to work most days. It defined the persona and reputation that she wanted to build, which were professionalism, diligence, duty, and responsibility.
When she left the organisation, she did win an award and get a significant increase, which she would never have been able to dream of a couple of years before.
It required a significant prospective change, and Gina stepped into her own courage that if she wanted something, she needed to behave in a way that would show people she was worth it.
She struggled because she would work in her previous organisations and get upset. She would figure out that things were wrong and then leave because it wasn't worth being able to make a change.
The unfortunate thing for Gina is that, as a junior, you don't have that much ability to make change happen.
But now, younger people have more of a voice compared to before.
Gina thinks that if you have people who can help you identify how to use that voice, you can be more of a brand advocate for yourself right from the beginning.
How Gina’s Values & Beliefs Were Established
Gina believes that our values are formed early in life, whether we recognise them or not.
She thinks it's possible to adjust your values if you realise that the ones you have aren't serving you or the people around you.
Gina says, "I do think that the way your parents raised you, the culture you grew up in, and the society that you're a part of gives you a certain set of values that tell you this behaviour is acceptable and this behaviour is unacceptable."
She was very grateful to her parents, who raised her with values that showed great respect for others, the truth, hard work, and yourself.
However, she was required to think differently about the values of self-promotion when she moved from Africa to Europe, and specifically to the United Kingdom.
Gina is very gregarious and outgoing, but she found that the big personality she brought with her everywhere was a little bit too much for people in the UK. They found her overwhelming. That's why she consciously had to change her behaviour so that she wasn't quite as forceful in her personality.
It also made her reflect on how much she was talking and how much she was listening. That's the skill Gina is grateful she learned.
Not necessarily her value changed, but her ability to reflect on other people's perspectives.
Their value is what they bring to the world. It's a different thing from the values that we have. It made her reconsider the Gina brand, which is not about Gina.
It's actually about the people around you and how it's far more important to be someone who brings out the best in others than to be someone comfortable standing up on stage and giving an impromptu speech.
The TEDx presentation was a wonderful experience for Gina because it was simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying. As she mentions, "Having been on stage for many years, being on the TEDx stage was no different. The difference was the level of rigour, expertise, and discipline that was required."
It was the first time she recorded and watched herself giving a presentation. It was shocking for her. She figured out that you have no idea how many bad habits you have until you realise how badly you need to be brilliant.
Gina says that she was an okay speaker but not a brilliant one.
Preparing for a TEDx talk, she spent about 40 to 60 hours of rehearsal for a 17-minute speech, forcing her to consider what a great speaker is and how she could be closer to that vision of greatness.
Gina said it was not easy, but it was well worth it because she learned a lot.
She believes that every speaker should admit they're not perfect because there is always room for improvement.
Values Tested & Morality Intact
When asked if her values had been tested and if she had to make changes to keep her values and morality intact, Gina reflected not only on her values but also on why scenarios had changed.
In the past, she didn't realise that her values were being violated.
But retrospectively, as she looks back at those scenarios, she now realises it's no wonder they couldn't work together. There are circumstances where this has happened, and it's happened sadly more than once with clients she works with.
She realised that while her values of hard work, dedication, and service are key to who she is and how she brings value to the world, this perception was not reciprocated.
It's sad for Gina to figure out that one of the organisations she worked for treated their employees like disposable assets rather than something you would want as fixed full-time employees.
She says, "They would treat people poorly until they literally burned out, throw them away, and find someone else."
For her, that was a massive violation of values. It made her realise that there wasn't mutual respect and a sense of care or authenticity in the sense of who they stood for and cared for. That was a big wake-up call, and it made Gina appreciate the nature of the people she works with, but then it stopped because they were taking advantage of her, and that's not okay.
She hopes that someone will come to her and do the same thing if that happens to her.
Gina recalled an experience when she worked for an organisation, working with their clients. She was almost a part of the extended team, and it was an interesting dynamic to be part of a team and not have a team.
In the coaching world, Gina sees organisations from the outside and observes where senior marketers have their own challenges.
She's incredibly grateful to work for organisations that give their people the time and the finance to be able to say, "Go, coach and train yourself. Find someone who can help you go through this organisational challenge."
It also reveals to her what's happening behind these organisations' scenes.
For Gina, it's nice to be able to look from the outside in rather than be in an organisation where you don't have any choice over what happens to who you report to or who reports to you to a large extent.
Gina shares an experience where she once read a wonderful description that a team wrote about her.
She thought to herself, "Wow, that's a pretty accomplished person. She sounds pretty awesome."
It almost took her a minute to realise that the team was talking about her. But before that, she made friends on LinkedIn that she had never met in real life, yet they became her friends and colleagues.
People have reflected and said to her, "Oh, yes, Gina. You do this because you're always like this," or "Yes, but that's just the way you are."
For Gina, that was the unconscious reflection: "Hey, there is a brand. It's a brand I've put out there into the world."
It's a brand that, for Gina, is incredibly valuable and meaningful to get reflected on.
It's not just a persona. It's not just an identity that she's putting out there. They are more than the sum of their parts.
She thinks the lesson for others in this is that we don't just have to portray a fraction of ourselves because the world is becoming far more open to realising that humans are a full spectrum.
We have highs and lows. We have good and bad days. We have triumphs and we have disasters.
We need to treat those two impostors just the same as Rudyard Kipling would tell us.
Gina believes that if we can reflect on our entire being and show parts of ourselves, reflect on them, and improve the bits of ourselves that we don't like, our brand is not static.
We don't end up with a caricature of ourselves. Instead, we end up being able to share more of ourselves with the rest of the world.
She thinks that in these post-COVID days, people are far more open and responsive to a full person.
The Impact of Relevance
Gina says that one of the things she has enjoyed about my book is the reflection that brand is a conscious activity and that you can build a brand from any age to any age.
She finds it intriguing to think about the career spectrum from when you first start a job to when you decide to retire. You can say that you have relevance to different people across the world.
You talk about relevance in your community, relevance in your society, relevance in your country, relevance in your job or with your employers.
The challenge for Gina has always been to identify that you can only have a certain amount of relevance at any time. That requires focus, and being able to focus requires a certain amount of discipline.
It also helps her understand why other elements of her brand wouldn't have been at the fore if she were purely focused on building a community.
Gina believes it's important to acknowledge that people will see different parts of you depending on the context in which they observe you. Your brand will be somewhat different depending on who you work with.
For Gina, the element of brand relevance is that we are all multifaceted. We can pick and choose which facets of that light we want to shine on.
She thinks that to be a properly whole and holistic brand, it's important to realise that you as a brand are all of these things together and that every person you touch has the same facets of their personality.
So for Gina, we need to use the brand with an element of caution. Just because we see someone whose brand we don't like doesn't mean that their whole personality is that.
We've only seen one tiny little facet of their personality, and perhaps if we rotated them 360 degrees or even 50 degrees, we'd see them in a whole new light.
What Gina would advise for those brands that are a little bit edgy is to be kind about the way they do things, whatever it might be.
You can be edgy. You can be quirky. You can be different. You can even be bizarre if you want, but, whatever you do, be kind.
Mentoring & Being Supported
Gina recalls that at an early age, she identified with a song. That song was ‘The Greatest Love of All’ by Whitney Houston.
She mentions, "And there's a line in that, which is, ‘I never found anyone who fulfilled my need, a lonely place to be, and so I learned to depend on me.’"
Gina finds it sad that, as a kid, you don't identify with a mentor. She suspects that it's because there weren't that many wonderful female mentors as a kid born in the 80s.
We didn't have female presidents and prime ministers. We didn't have that many female CEOs.
Those in positions of power were often less kind to people than they needed to be because they had to do what they had to do to exist in a man's world.
Gina didn't find that there were mentors in an outside context, and so in a work environment, she figured there wasn't anyone who would be there for her.
In retrospect, she thinks that saying she didn't have any mentors was wrong.
One of Gina's first full-time jobs was in an organisation where she could do what Dan Pinks calls AMP, which means autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
There was a wonderful man who helped her do everything she needed.
He gave her autonomy. She had the mastery. She was able to demonstrate purpose.
Without thinking about it, that's actually a mentorship, and what subsequently happened is that Gina then expected every employer to give her autonomy, mastery, and purpose moving forward.
When she couldn't achieve those, she was frustrated because she had such high expectations.
Gina realised that if you don't have mentors, you need to ask for them and find them. You need to look for them. You need to find them.
She also discovers that she has a group of mutual mentors who tell each other what's great and, at the same time, point out where they need to improve and how to make things better.
That has been incredibly helpful moving forward.
Gina believes that the role of mentorship is incredibly important, so she has also acted as a mentor for junior marketers in the past.
It's an incredibly rewarding experience for her, and she would encourage anyone to be a mentor as well as look for a mentor.
It's because the process of reflecting on who you are and how you behave in a work context or any other context is important for your personal and professional development.
Directorship & Branding
For Gina, Verballistics, which means making your words go mental, is a lovely idea. But in a way, it's a placeholder and a company name.
She hasn't invested in the brand because she doesn't expect it to become something that dominates the world.
She thought that it was never going to be a Coca-Cola or going to be one of the big four accounting firms.
It's enough that it is identifiable as something that has to do with words and has to do with meaning.
The challenge that Gina has is that the brand "Gina" is more than the sum of Verballistics parts.
Verballistics is a marketing agency that does content and marketing strategy.
It is about the corporate existence of a company that serves b2b organisations, predominantly software as a service or services organisations.
But Gina is more than that. She is a coach, a speaker, and a writer of various things.
She is someone who can help people understand words and figure out how they need to change the way they see words, how they use words, and how they tell stories.
So Gina struggles to put all the elements of a person and a persona into a company.
She says, "It's easy enough if your company has 10,000 or 50,000 employees that you do all of these various things because you have a division for each thing. But how do you divide Gina Balarin into a series of divisions? You can't."
For Gina, she is not the kind of person who segments herself into different categories depending on what people need.
She has struggled with the idea of separating the Gina Balarin brand from the Verballistics brand.
She mentions she is yet to be able to find something that she's really comfortable with as a solution.
Final Thoughts & Conclusions
I want to express my gratitude to Gina Balarin for sharing some fabulous insights, not only from the perspective of branding but also of reputation and values.
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If you'd like to learn more about developing your personal brand, please get in touch or grab a copy of Brand New Brand You.