Thought leadership is not a content strategy

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Yeah. You know, I've always been fascinated by entrepreneurship. And I actually right out out of university, I had my own sort of mini freelancing entrepreneurship venture when I was living in Dubai, where I was doing marketing, communication, and video production, things like that with other organizations. and then I decided to go into corporate life, but I always remembered That feeling of having your own business and also just being able to figure out what you like to do, what you don't like to do. And so during the pandemic, I started thinking about that again. And I wanted to go back to university to get my doctorate. And I knew that my corporate career was too busy to allow me to do a doctorate and work full time. So I kind of made this decision where I was like, you know, I would love to live what I call a modular life where I can accommodate all of my different different interests and have the flexibility of time to organize the day that I would like the way I would like to have it organized. And so the Ideas Collective had been something that was always in the back of my mind. And eventually I just thought, you know, if I don't do it now, I probably never will. And so I just took the risk and I was like, you know, let me try it. And hopefully this works out and it'll be something that I love. And, you know, all of these years later, it's still something that I enjoy and and something that I found has allowed me to evolve and challenge myself in terms of who I am as a business person. Versus previously I always saw myself as being a communications person, a marketing person. very much responsible for bringing other people up. But when I started my own business, all of a sudden I had to bring myself up. And if you've ever worked with other communication people, you know that we're always in the background. So, you know, when a CEO gives an amazing speech, it's the communication person behind them that actually wrote it and trained them and helped them give the speech. And so, you know, being on the other side of it, you have to think of yourself differently. You can't think of yourself as the person that you are good at in one thing. You almost have to think of yourself as I run a business, I need to have a budget, I need to manage finances, I need to manage vendors, I need to partner up, I need to do business development. So you have to all of a sudden wear multiple hats. And to me, that's been kind of the exciting. hard and why I've continued, even though there are times, you know, when it's hard where you're like, maybe I should just go back to corporate life. It was so much easier. but the reality is, you know, you could always go back and do the things that are familiar, but in order to truly grow, you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone. And you have to do things that are uncomfortable but also kind of unknown for you. And it allows you to learn something new. So So so that's really been my experience with the ideas collective. And you know, I I have all of these like big ambitions of what I would like to do. so you know, it's it's always about having big ambitions, not enough time to be able to do everything. But but that's the fun part.

Yeah, you know, for me, the hardest part was to stop thinking big. And and I what I mean by that is like when you work in a large corporation, there's a process for everything. There are multiple people around you, there are specialized departments, and there's a very prescribed way of doing things, including marketing yourself, right? Like there's There are processes you follow. There's obviously things like what we talk about, what we don't talk about, the brand voice, the what we the words we use, the words we don't use. And particularly in financial services where I've spent most of my career, it's a very heavily regulated industry. So there's a lot that you cannot say. and, you know, so for me, one of the hardest parts was Reminding myself that I'm not a large corporation. Because when I started out, I think I probably wasted a lot of money acquiring marketing tools and other things to market myself in a way that a large corporation would. Because that was the only thing that I had ever known is how to do that. And so when I look back at the first couple of years, you know, I think like, my God, I spent like $2,000 on this tool, but really only ended up using 1% of what the tool's capabilities are. Because I didn't really know that there were tools out there for a small business, because I'd just never been exposed to it. So I think for me, one of the biggest adjustments was this mindset shift where I was like, I am one person. And I am a small business and I need to act like a small business. I need to scale myself gradually and I need to really think strategically about how I show up in the market. Because if I continue to to talk about myself as if I am like this large corporation, I probably am losing customers or losing out on markets that. you know, s don't necessarily maybe want to work with a large corporation or feel like I am too big for them. And so for me, that's what I found was the first couple of years was just this almost like doing things that I already knew how to do, but not realizing they were not the right things for me to do. And I have found like in this last like four, five years, I've gone through this journey where When I first started out, I was very much positioning myself as I do everything an in-house person does, but I do it outside your team. Which, you know, in my head sounded great. but the reality was, if why would you hire a consultant to do everything an in-house person does? Why wouldn't you just hire someone on your team as a full-time or part-time headcount? Right. And so I was positioning myself very much as this person who's been in-house and therefore can still do it all. Then I went through this iteration and this is kind of like that ties into your question because it just it does show that when you've worked in corporate as long as I have, it takes you time to find yourself as a consultant and as a as an entrepreneur. And so the next iteration that I thought about was what do I like to do? And I just want to do that. And for me, that was thought leadership. I in all of the roles I've ever held, thought leadership was one of my biggest areas of responsibility. So I just started saying, like, well, I only do thought leadership. And for a couple of years, you know, I all of my positioning when I spoke to prospective clients. It was around the fact that I can help them build a thought leadership strategy, a thought leadership program. But you know, many people don't really need that all the time. So when I found that when I was going too niche, I was again cutting myself off from this other piece of work that most people actually were coming to me for. Because majority of my work comes through referrals. And it's referrals from people who have worked with me, so they know what I can do. w really well and where I can add value. And so what I have come to realize is that in many ways I've gone back to my earlier positioning of being not so much a generalist marketing communication professional, but a strategic advisor in marketing and communication. Bringing all of those 20 years of corporate and agency experiences and knowledge and judgment to help clients solve problems. using communication and marketing as a solution lens. But I always start with figuring out what's the problem to solve. And so what I so, you know, so my transition from like corporate life to entrepreneurship was very much a journey of self-exploration, self-reflection, reminding myself that I'm not a t you know, $40 billion company and and reminding myself that at the end of the day, clients are hiring me for what I bring. And what I bring is based on this 20 years of experience. It's not based on necessarily things that where I'm like, I love to do this and I only want to do that. And I can still, you know, still absolutely have those conversations where I'm in a conversation with a client and I can say, Well, you know, as we're looking at this entire program and the solution that to solve this particular business problem, one potential solution. could still be thought leadership. But I I don't necessarily go in saying thought leadership is the solution to every problem you ever have because that's not necessarily what clients are hiring me for. So I, you know, so so for me I find like my advice to anyone who is making that switch from corporate to consulting to entrepreneurship is try not to like close yourself off or or Try not to continue to be the person you were in corporate life because you can take pieces of that, but ultimately you have to adapt yourself to the new reality of the world you're entering. And, you know, it's nice to look back on that corporate life and all of the amazing things that I did, but it's not who I am anymore completely. And I and I think for me, it took me a while and sometimes there's a bit of a grief. That comes with letting go of who you were. But you know, at the end of the day, you're you're better off for recognizing who you are now versus who you were then.

So I think the the biggest thing that people don't understand is that it's not about churning out content on a regular basis. Thought leadership is very much, if you break down the two words, it's about having a thought that is like a unique point of view that only you can have. And it can definitely riff off of what other people are saying and doing in your industry because you know, reality is. There's no idea that's truly unique. But each of us have our own perspective. Just like my perspective on thought leadership is very much, it's not a content strategy, it's a positioning strategy. And I know a lot of other thought leadership consultants who are very much about content, content, content as a way to send out that point of view. But mine has always been it's a point of view, it's how you think about an issue. And if you can get that message out there consistently and ensure that your point of view is reflective of who you are. It's backed up by your own experience, your knowledge. You know, I I, for example, don't have a point of view on cybersecurity because I don't really know anything about the ins and outs of cybersecurity. Right? Like I read the headlines like everybody else when there's a breach, but I don't really know the technical part of it. So I can't have a point of view on cyber. But if I was to have a point of view on what thought leadership is, I can do that. I can have a point of view on how communication effectiveness works and how communication functions bring value to the organization, because that is something that I have 20 years of experience doing. So so the point of view for me is Really, the heart of a thought leadership program. And the content piece itself is the expression of it. So the content piece can be coming up to podcasts like this one, speaking on stages at conferences. It could be writing an article or an op-ed, but there's multiple ways to get your point a point across. It's not necessarily that you're going to publish a blog every week, every month. on the topic and just talk about it. That to me is more content marketing, where it's like there's a volume game, you're trying to drive leads, you're trying to to show your thinking, but it's not necessarily, you know, here's what makes me unique in what I do. So hope that answers a question.

no, I I will say I I use AI a lot. but I use it in in different ways. So I have found that when you're using AI, you need to go in with your own perspective first and use AI to challenge your thinking. use AI to bounce off ideas, and also many times, particularly when English is your second language, use it for editing. You know, I've I've studied English since I was a child. So I consider it my first language and I'm very good at grammar. But when I run my writing sometimes through AI, it allows me to see where my grammar can be very much improved and where sometimes I'm using words that are correct but maybe not the right ones in that context. You know, so like w because when I've when I learned English, like I learned it a long through TV, reading, etc. And so sometimes I picked up all of these big words which sound amazing. And you know, you think you're so clever when you're using them. but then AI will come to me and be like, you could say that, but it sounds a bit pedantic or it's a bit too formal for this situation. So I use A AI a lot to help me improve the way that I articulate certain things. But Sometimes I just don't like what it tells me because I'm like, you know what? I know you're trying to like tell me that this will sound better, but it doesn't sound like me because I would never use that word. So for me, AI is very much like this, almost like a team member that I can brainstorm with, I can bounce ideas, I can have it review my work to make sure that I don't may have any spelling mistakes or grammar mistakes, little bit of mistakes. They're all good. And I don't really need it for everything. But certain things I absolutely needed to do that. And you know, sometimes I for me it's also about outlining. I have like often a million thoughts in my head. And I just need to get them organized. And so what I do is I just do a brain dump where I'm like, here's everything I'm thinking. Help me just organize these into something that makes sense. And so it's less about the writing. You know, it's it's more about organization of my thought process because the thoughts are still my own. It's just that they're too many and they're often competing against each other. And I don't always know which one to pill to pull on. So, you know, it's almost like you put everything in there, you're sifting it w to see what's the right thing that falls down. So for me, I use AI a lot for that. my actual content. Like when I post on LinkedIn, I often will will do like a quick write whether I'm when I'm on my phone, I'll just open the notes app and I'll just start writing what I'm thinking. And then I'll run that through the the the grammar and editing check and things like that, 'cause I tend to repeat a lot of words and when I'm writing, I do a lot of ands. So you might have like a a sentence that's thirty words long. Because I'm like, it's just like my entire thought process just in there. And so so AI will help me kind of be like, okay, let's break this sentence down. But like you, when I go to LinkedIn, I see a lot of posts that I would say are sometimes obviously AI, but I think sometimes they don't necessarily show a unique point of view. And there was a while when I stopped going to LinkedIn because I felt like every was just somebody bragging and talking about how how they did something or trying to show that they had this provocative point of view. But when you like click the read more, you just kind of felt like whatever, like doesn't really sound all that interesting to me. So I I think you have you have the opportunity to use AI creatively and strategically. I just think if you offload your thinking to AI and allow AI to tell you exactly what to say, that's when it's an issue. Because then it's not your thought leadership. It's an amalgamation of all of the training models learning given to you in a way that you feel confident you can post. And you know, you've seen it as well. Like AI writes very confidently. Sometimes I I actually will tell my ill my at the LLM that I use, I'm like, you know, I don't think you're quite getting this. You know, here's my experience. So I think what you've given me doesn't necessarily meet the bar of what would be accepted practice in my profession. Because I'm like, it's like giving feedback to a junior team member. Sometimes you just have to do that.

Yeah, I've definitely LinkedIn. Like professionally, that's where I share a lot of what I'm thinking, things that I'm working on. I also have a substack which I need to get better at updating. It's called Curious Systems Thinker. And it's a place for me to just indulge this other interest that I have in how systems work. Some of it is informed by my professional work, some of it from my doctorate. So it's just one of those things where whenever I have this thought where I'm like, why do we do it like this? And why is it like that? That's when I'll go onto my Substack and just put put the thought out into the world. and by doing that, I get it out of my head and into the world so I can focus on the next thing that pops up in my head. But I would say LinkedIn absolutely is the best place to stay connected with me and to see what I'm working on.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you again so much for having me. This was amazing.