Writing About Ben… Here We Go

One of the most difficult pieces of content I have tried to produce on my web site is my personal bio. My wife is a writer, has worked for years in journalism and has spent years shaping her creative writing craft, and even she has a hard time writing about herself.

The Art of Curating

Several months ago, when I began putting together the content for “In the Boat With Ben”, I was struggling with how to present myself and my personal brand. There are many things that make up who I am and what I love to do, but a lot of the advice I had read or heard told me to curate what I shared and to limit how I presented myself. I was learning the importance of carefully considering how each thing I shared on social media, each word I wrote about who I am and what I do, supported my brand.

So I scaled back a lot of what I was sharing and really tried to focus my brand expression. This turned out to be a smart move. I found out quickly that when people enjoy your work and know what they can expect from you consistently, they are more willing to become a part of your audience.

Here are some of the things that I consider to be a major part of my life that I haven’t made a part of my brand:

1. My faith – There are a myriad of reasons for or against sharing your beliefs as a part of your brand, ranging from very personal to strictly strategic. Though I don’t take great care in censoring a natural expression of faith in my work, I am purposefully not purposeful about sharing it explicitly. I feel that the lack of nuance in the perception of faith as a part of one’s brand leads to unintended and unnecessary exclusivity. If I wanted to work within a niche faith market I might use this to my advantage, but because my audience is made up of people from many different faith backgrounds, I choose to remove this potential barrier.

2. My family – Though this blog is focused on creative pursuits in the context of family, I don’t really bring them into most of what I share. I do have other outlets where I share more detail about my family life and experience. My family is a major source of inspiration and joy in my life. Some of the most wonderful, hilarious and beautiful things happen inside the walls of our home, but where it’s not applicable to my brand here at “In the Boat With Ben”, I tend not to share it.

3. Music – Music is hands down my first passion. To be completely honest, I am going through a season of mourning right now because my current circumstances do not allow me to pursue music the way I used to and it’s tearing me up a little bit. I have been a singer/songwriter for more than 15 years and have been in 4 different bands. With my bands I have recorded 4 full length studio albums and a handful of singles, I have performed live shows all over Texas and even got to go on a little 2 week tour up to Colorado and back. I could sit and play my guitar, piano, computer midi program all day and never get bored with it. Some of my “In the Boat With Ben” audience might appreciate my music, but that’s not the primary reason they are here. So while I do share about music as a creative pursuit, I do not share specific projects or songs here.

4. Lots of other stuff – I have a list of creative hobbies as long as your arm and would enjoy sharing at length about any given topic if I had the platform.

The Magnifying Glass

The reason I don’t share at length about those things here is that I want people to associate “In the Boat With Ben” with creative pursuits in the context of raising a family. The more it is felt that I am committed to providing content specifically around this topic, the more targeted my audience will be, and the more readily they will be willing to listen to and share what I have to say. It’s like what a magnifying glass does to the sun’s rays. If you are the sun (track with me here) your brand should be a magnifying glass, focusing a part of who you are into a concentrated beam of light, hot enough to start a fire!

Don’t Lose Yourself

As good as this approach is, one of the dangers is that you may begin to creep into the more targeted expression of your brand identity. When what you share publicly is only a part of who you are, it can be easy to slip into seeing yourself as that one part instead of the whole.

Super Ben

For this reason, I try to imagine that “In the Boat With Ben” is one of my super-hero identities and that Ben Toalson, the person, is my secret identity. That’s not to say that I see myself as an actual super-hero, but that, in the same way a super-hero is more than the sum of their super-powers and crime fighting skills, Ben Toalson is more than what I present through “In the Boat With Ben.” A super-hero wouldn’t talk to News 1 about the kind of food they feed their cat after saving their city from peril.

When I look at it this way, I can also feel more freedom to pull in other aspects of who I am as a part of my branding strategy. Who knows, maybe if people knew that I make homemade pizza for my family every week from scratch, my audience would grow exponentially. Maybe not.

The points are:

1. Don’t let yourself creep into a mindset of seeing yourself only as the narrow expression of who you are as your brand.

2. Don’t feel guilty about not sharing all of who you in your brand. Instead, feel the freedom to bring in or leave out any part of who you are as a way of supporting your brand.

Allow it to Evolve

Finally, your brand, by virtue of the fact that it is a part of you, will continue to grow and evolve with you. Don’t fight this natural process, but allow your brand expression to be an iterative process.

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