One thing I learnt very early when I started intentionally building my brand online was this:
You may need to remove some familiarity around you.
And no, I don’t mean wake up tomorrow and cut off your family and friends because you have decided you are now a “brand.”
I mean you need to become intentional about what you see, who you interact with, what conversations surround you and what your digital environment is feeding you.
There was a point when I literally rebranded my contact list.
I needed new energy.
I needed new conversations.
I needed to open WhatsApp and see different status updates.
I needed to interact with people building things I had never built.
I needed to reply to conversations that stretched me.
I needed to see opportunities, ideas and ways of thinking that were not already familiar to me.
And it helped me tremendously.
Because sometimes you are trying to build a new version of yourself while being completely surrounded by people, conversations and environments that only reinforce the old version of you.
▪️ Curate your environment before you complain about your motivation.
Whenever I am preparing myself for something, I intentionally start putting myself in proximity — even digitally — to people who are already there.
If I am looking at joining a particular professional council or pursuing a certain opportunity, I want to start seeing people who have done it.
I want to understand how they speak about it.
I want to see what they are reading.
I want to understand their journeys.
I want my environment to start making that destination feel normal and possible.
Not because proximity magically gives you somebody else’s success.
You still have to do the work.
But your environment affects what you repeatedly see, think about and eventually pursue.
▪️ Understand that familiarity can distort how people perceive your value.
This was a big lesson for me.
Platforms like Facebook are often built initially around familiarity.
That’s your cousin.
That’s somebody you went to school with.
That’s somebody from church.
That’s your former colleague.
That’s somebody from your neighbourhood.
They didn’t necessarily follow you because of your expertise.
They already knew you.
So when you start building something professionally, some people continue consuming your work through the lens of the person they have always known.
To them, maybe:
“Nicole just posts a lot.”
They don’t necessarily see strategy.
They don’t see the hours of research.
They don’t see the audience being built.
They don’t see the consultancy.
They don’t see the programmes.
They don’t see the invitations that come from that visibility.
They don’t see the opportunities created through those posts.
They see Nicole whom they know.
And familiarity can sometimes struggle to translate what you are doing into commercial value.
▪️ This is why you need audiences that discover your work before they discover your familiarity.
Someone who has never met me can come across my content and immediately categorise me according to what they see.
Writer. Career professional. Consultant. Speaker. Mentor. Programme builder.
They have no childhood version of me competing with what is in front of them.
They don’t know the little Sunday school girl.
They meet the work first.
And sometimes that person will value your work very differently from someone who has known you for twenty years.
That doesn’t make the familiar person bad.
It is simply human psychology.
▪️ Do not build your entire brand for people who already know you.
This is one of the biggest mistakes I think people make online.
You post and immediately imagine what your friends will say.
What will people from church think?
What will my former classmates think?
What will my relatives say?
You become embarrassed to consistently talk about your work because “these people already know me.”
Meanwhile, the person your work is supposed to reach doesn’t know you yet.
Build for them too.
▪️ Your social media connections need to become intentional.
I worked on my Facebook intentionally.
LinkedIn? I built that network hand by hand.
Connection by connection.
Conversation by conversation.
I have approached TikTok and Instagram with the same understanding.
Not every platform has grown at the same speed, and not every platform serves me in the same way.
But I stopped treating my social media simply as somewhere I happened to have an account.
If you are serious about building a brand, your digital presence eventually has to become an asset.
▪️ Your audience needs to understand what you do.
Posting consistently is not enough.
Someone should spend a few minutes on your page and begin to understand:
What do you know?
What do you do?
What problems can you solve?
What conversations do you own?
What should someone contact you for?
What opportunities make sense for you?
If people consume your content every day but still cannot explain what you actually do, you may have visibility without positioning.
And that matters commercially.
Because familiarity can produce some very interesting offers.
Someone who knows you from a familiar setting can approach you and say:
“Nicole, we have a group of ladies we want you to empower. Come and spend the whole day with us. We will give you lunch.”
Lunch.
For a whole day.
And sometimes it isn’t even disrespect.
They genuinely haven’t translated your work into value.
They still see the familiar person.
They haven’t calculated preparation time.
They haven’t considered intellectual property.
They haven’t considered experience.
They haven’t considered the audience you have built.
They haven’t considered the value attached to having you in that room.
In their mind:
“Ah, Nicole is good at talking. Let’s invite her.”
And this is where you also have a responsibility to reposition yourself.
▪️ Don’t become angry with people for valuing you at the level at which you have presented yourself to them.
Sometimes the market needs to be educated.
Package your services.
Define your offers.
Communicate your expertise.
Show your work.
Document your results.
Build social proof.
Have professional photographs.
Have a proper biography.
Have your speaking topics ready.
Know your rates.
Know what is complimentary and what is commercial.
And learn to say:
“Thank you for thinking of me. Here is how I structure my speaking engagements.”
No offence.
No long explanation.
No embarrassment about charging.
Just professionalism.
▪️ And finally, build beyond familiarity.
You need people in your ecosystem who have never known the old you.
People who don’t know your family.
People who didn’t go to school with you.
People who don’t attend your church.
People who don’t know what you were doing five years ago.
People whose first encounter with you is simply:
“I came across Nicole’s work, and she is good at what she does.”
Those relationships are important.
But don’t despise the familiar relationships either.
Some of the people who knew you before the brand will eventually become your strongest advocates.
The goal is not to abandon familiarity.
The goal is not to allow familiarity to become the ceiling of your vision.
Change what you consume.
Expand your network.
Enter new conversations.
Put yourself around people doing what you aspire to do.
Build outside the rooms where everybody already knows your name.
And give the world enough consistent evidence to eventually separate:
“Nicole, the person I know”
from
“Nicole, the professional whose work has value.”
Because building a brand is not simply about becoming known.
It is about becoming known for something.