Michelle B. Griffin: Welcome everybody to this week's episode. I'm your host, Michelle B. Griffin, and this is another standout women's spotlight series. Today, I'm really thrilled to introduce you all to a former client who is here to tell us all about her journey on how to find the brand inside of you, how to dig deep, connect all the dots with all that makes you, you and get out there with your gifts and your genius.
So I'm thrilled to welcome to the show today, Leigh Maneri. Welcome, Leigh.
Leigh Maneri: Hi, Michelle. Thanks so much for having me.
Michelle B. Griffin: Absolutely. Leigh, for those who have not met you yet, can you share who you are, who you help, and how you help them?
Leigh Maneri: Yeah. So as the holistic brand strategist, I work with impact-driven entrepreneurs and teams to build flourishing businesses from the inside out. And what that means from the inside out is their brand positioning, their mindset, what's happening inside of them and their teams, and also their operations.
And I come from the world of branding and marketing. I served in the roles of director of brand strategy, director of operations, chief of staff, and then simultaneous to my creative agency career. I also followed my curiosities to the wellness space and earned certifications in breath work, hypnotherapy, internal family systems, coaching.
I really went all out to discover all of the ways that you can lead from a place of wholeness. So that is what I'm all about and what my business is all about.
Michelle B. Griffin: I cannot wait to dissect all the beautiful things that you're doing with brand operation systems and all this wellbeing, how that ties in. Today we're going to share all about when you feel trapped inside with who you are, your brand, your identity, and you know it's inside. How do you find that? Your brand is how you communicate with your audience. However, I really believe that the way to a brand is to go inward and to figure out what is the substance behind that brand? What is the purpose? And much like you, that is something that I work with my clients on, and it's so much fun.
Leigh Maneri: And I love that we have this in common and working with you, like it was such a dream to do this process with someone who gets it and who really understands the fun behind what it means to get to the soul of a brand.
Michelle B. Griffin: Absolutely feel the same way because I think I've worked in the previous past, not in this particular service with a brand strategist, but you and I went really deep. So for those who are just getting to know Leigh, she came to me knowing that she wanted to pursue her own business and really own her lane with her strengths. And what she had been doing for 10 years is working in creative agencies in LA and San Diego.
Global brands doing brand strategy, chief of operations, but tell them on the side, you also have this other beautiful part about you. So for those who don't know yet, share that part.
Leigh Maneri: So when I was around 24, I kind of got catapulted into this director of operations role. And I started to learn what burnout felt like and what it felt like to kind of just have all of this pressure and to get to the end of my rope and then to keep going.
And I was just feeling terrible every day at the end of the day, you know, feeling used up. Like I was using my gifts, but also just really burned out. I didn't know how to regulate myself emotionally. So I started down this path of learning all of the tools that one could use to access a place of calm and to lead from a place of wholeness.
And I got certified in breath work. I started meditating quite a bit. I explored hypnotherapy because I had such a profound experience myself in hypnotherapy. I wanted to understand the subconscious and how that plays into our working lives. I also took a course for internal family systems, which if you're not familiar is kind of this methodology of understanding that we are multiplicitous, like our psyches. We have a core self, but we also have these parts of ourselves that have come about at various parts of our lives. So I just explored anything I possibly could when it came to mental wellbeing and mindset and growth mindset and all of the things.
And that is something that I have woven now into helping these entrepreneurs. And I figured that one day I would probably just leave the business world behind and probably go be a hypnotherapist or some sort of wellness practitioner. And what I ultimately discovered is that the business part of me is just as big a part of me and just as big a passion as the wellbeing components.
And so I decided to combine it all together and create something fresh and new that was based on creating this whole business health from all angles, both internal in our teams and our leaders, and then also the external, how do we communicate with our audience.
Michelle B. Griffin: That is beautiful. And that's pretty much when you came to me and much like a lot of my clients and even friends and connections I have, there's a lot of different parts of them. So how do you leverage all that? That's actually what makes you very different, unique, and a breath of fresh air, no pun intended on how you approach things. We need that uniqueness, those standout points of view. But much like the women like you, Leigh, who I work with, they have all these things going on.
And because you're so close to it, and especially because you've been in brand strategy where you were writing brands for other big companies, it got overwhelming for you, too many ideas. So when you came to me, we did our assessments, but then you shared all these beautiful things that you had worked on. So share a little bit about, because we're talking about today, how to get the brand you have inside out. So tell us how that process you did before you came to me to really kind of flesh those out because that's so important to start from.
Leigh Maneri: Well, the process before I came to you looked a lot like getting all of my ideas down in a Google doc and then saying no, that's not it. And then coming back months later and writing something totally new and then looking back and saying, wait a second. This looks a lot like what I wrote the last time. And so I started to recognize, okay, there's some patterns here, but I wholeheartedly believe that it is really difficult to do this process for yourself and for your own business.
That's something that I even found growing up in terms of like my own identity. I found it so helpful to go out into the world and to work with a coach or even just a boss or a mentor or manager at work to reflect back to me and say, hey, this is what you're really strong at. It seems like you really value this and to have someone reflect that back is so, so helpful.
And in a business sense, I think it's the exact same thing. We really need someone outside of ourselves to reflect back and say, okay, here's what you just said. Does that sound like that golden thread? And you're like, oh yeah, wow. Did I say that? You know, like it is inside of you. And if you're starting a business, you already have that substance of your brand.
It's already there inside of you. And it's so helpful to have someone beyond you to reflect back and say, this all fits together like a puzzle and here's how it fits. And here's how to put words to that. So that is essentially what you do. It's essentially what I do. It's the most fun thing in the world to do for someone because they're like, whoa, did I say that?
Michelle B. Griffin: I wish I would have found someone like me back in the day when I was struggling much like you to leave my job at this burning desire that bubbled up because when I was in my twenties, you know, I've said this before, I want to have my own PR agency. It didn't look like that so much later, but I still had a burning desire. I had too much going on, too many ideas, too many things. So instead of finding that someone, I started consuming courses, credential certifications that just spun me around in professional confusion more and more and more. Wasted time, money, sanity, and just started feeling kind of hopeless.
Like, oh my goodness, is today Groundhog Day? Like that movie every single day. And so that's why I truly, I always remember this intuition would say your struggles, your story, and here I am all these years later telling you this, telling everyone on the podcast, because that's why I call myself the brand therapist and really hold that eyes, ears, and mirrors.
And I'm not making this up. I'm just pulling it from you and connecting the dots. And just like you said, nine times out of 10, I'll find something and they're like, oh, wow, that's great. I'm like, well, you wrote that. That's you. You know, I'm just like you said, I always say the golden thread. To me, it's the most impactful, most beautiful work when you can, like I know you're doing for your clients now.
But to see the light and then just the aha, the clarity, just, you know, it's like the clouds part, the sun is shining, you found your way now. And it's, it's really beautiful, but I know a lot of people struggle with that. So I want to use your story today. Talk about the important work you're doing, how you found your brand and some just really helpful ways that other people who are struggling can get out of that funk and you know, find
