Style House became an award-winning public relations and brand strategy firm over the next 16 years, advising global brands from Estee Lauder to the WNBA, with a strong focus on the female consumer whose economic and political power is wielded both as primary household purchaser and as the largest voting bloc in the US. Today Janna’s cross-sector impact vehicle, Synastry Capital, houses her investing, advising, and advocacy work. Her signature Personal Brand Alignment offering, conducted 1:1 and through keynotes, workshops, and group facilitation, is a blend of leadership coaching, spiritual centering, and talent management, designed to build personal and professional narratives that maximize happiness, impact and earning potential. Janna is also the co-founder of VCs for Repro, a coalition of venture capital firms united in support of abortion access, and sits on the board of A Call To Men, a national violence prevention organization providing training and education on healthy manhood for communities of men and boys.
Janna suggests that the pathway to creating a strong personal brand is to:
So many people love us and want to help us but really just don't know what we want and need or they don't know how to explain to others what we do, or they think we're so busy, why would we want to talk to one of their friends or whatever.
It's our ego that makes this idea of personal brand really uncomfortable. I encourage you to work on your own personal definition of what ego means to you. And it's how you approach it, the voice in your head, so to speak, but it's the false sense of self that's based on mental concepts, when your mental image that you have in your head of yourself. And so this is why it's like, well, if you don't see yourself as someone who talks about themselves, then you're going to be like, well, I'm not going to do that. So what I want you to think about when it comes to the ego is this. That anytime you do or don't say something or do something because of how you think it's going to come across, that's your ego informing that decision. And it's not good or bad. It just is. So this idea of who you have in your head, and when people talk about limiting beliefs and the things that hold us back, impostor syndrome, it's rooted in this. And the best way to fight that is awareness of this.
So a lot of this, too, is embracing the impermanence of it all, but also being really grounded in who you are. And that is being intentional with tapping into your intrinsic power sources. You already have everything you need. We're not creating a personal brand. You're just aligning intentionally with who you are. And I simply say, the good news is that you already have a personal brand. But the bad news is that you're not leveraging it. And that's where this alignment comes in. Because it looks different for everyone.
These bifurcated things that we think are really unrelated but they're actually fantastically beautifully related, because they're part of the tapestry of who we are. And people will say, I'm really into this, and then I have this whole thing that I do, and I have that whole thing that I do, but what I really want to be doing is this whole other thing, right. And the nuance of that is what I do one on one with my clients and figuring out expansively what that can look like, but and then there's transition. We're all in some period of transition, right? So whether it's an on ramp, or an off ramp, or a ramp to we're not sure, we always need effective and sustained ways of talking about who we are in the present. And that is also uncomfortable, especially for some of us who are former, quote on quote, big deals, executives.
This idea that you're not really a former anything, you have to be in the present, this is who I am. Here's what I've done. And here's how I'm building and leveraging on that. I don't mind the term pivot, but I much prefer the term evolve. Because I didn't pivot from public relations. I evolved my company and the work that I do throughout the years. And then I think that the third bucket of things that I do with folks is this dreaming forward together of what's possible, because you have to think as expensively as possible about what's possible.
I want you to write down that the more that I do me, the more other people in the world can do them.
Time is your most valuable resource. And time alignment is one of the first exercises that I do with my clients. We really take an inventory of all of the ways that they're spending their time. One thing to remember and and to write this down, mantras for where you can keep them, time is your most valuable currency because it's non renewable.
Your time gets spent whether you decide how to spend it. We all have 24/7. And what happens is that our time, the biggest category of our time is reactive. People, projects, things that are going to take up as much time or resources as we give them. And then there are the things that absolutely will not happen unless we do them. And that's the proactive category. But I know that a lot of people in this room are really smart and competent and generous and really enjoy helping people. So you probably have what people call the curse of competence. This is fine. This is ultimately a good thing. But it's about being intentional with how you allocate these resources, because when you look at this, when you look at the personal economy, this is you in the center, the power source here, this lightning bolt, and you're the steward of these assets.
