Your Brand Can Match Your Vibe and Still Not Be Built to Carry You Forward

(She still cute tho)

Look what crawled out of the abyss and landed on my desk today.

My anciently sleek Motorola Razr flip phone. This thing used to feel like the future to me. I grabbed it expecting a laugh about how outdated it looked but what I noticed first was the color, the exact same shade as my journal.

When I set it down on top of my journal, I actually laughed and thought, wow, I'm still that same girl.

Then I picked it up to look at it closer, and that thought turned out to be the farthest thing from the truth.

It pulled me straight back to the woman who carried that phone every single day. The season she was in. What she was building, what scared her, what she thought success was going to look like. I remember the version of me who flipped that thing open like it was a power move, and tbh still feels smooothe to flip that thing open!

I remember the size of the dreams I was holding at the time, and how big they felt in that season…and how small they look from where I'm standing now.

And I sat with it for a moment. The phone is just a relic of the past, an old object. The real story is the distance between the woman who used to carry it and the woman holding it today, laughing at how outdated it looks next to a journal she's filling with completely different dreams than the ones she had back then.

“What got you here is not going to take you where you are going.”

I say that all the time when I’m talking about building a personal brand that closes the identity gap between who you are in the room and how you show up online. And it’s true!

But I used to hear that line as a warning. And holding this phone, it landed as proof of motion instead. Walking all the way through a season is how you end up somewhere your old self couldn't have pictured for herself.

You've had a version of this moment. Maybe yours was an old planner, a business card from a launch that felt like everything at the time, a screenshot of a website you used to be proud of. Finding it usually feels like proof of how far you've come. You walked through a season, and then another one, and you're standing somewhere now that the woman holding that old thing couldn't have imagined for herself.

So as I kept thinking about how far I've really come since then (literally, figuratively, emotionally, spiritually, mentally etc) I thought, if I plugged that phone in today, it would work. I could connect the service and it would ring. Nothing about it is broken. But I couldn't run my business from it today. And so while it would work, it wouldn't work the way I need it to now because my dreams are bigger than that phone was ever built to hold.

The journal sitting right next to it is the real story here. I'm filling it with dreams and plans I never could have written down back then, bigger ones, wilder ones, dreams that needed way more room than that phone, or that season, or that version of me, had to offer.

Your brand works the same way.

The one you built in your last season still works. It still answers. It still says your name and lists what you do. But a brand that was built for who you were cannot carry you into who you are becoming. Just because it matches the vibe doesn't mean it's built to run the business you're building now.

You are being called into a new season of dreaming bigger, the same way you've been called into every season before this one. Evolution is what happens when your dreams expand past the room you used to keep them in. The only question is whether your brand is built for where you are going, or still living in the season you already walked out of.

As entrepreneurs we're always chasing the next thing, certain we should already be somewhere else by now. Most days it feels like we're behind.

Holding this old phone reminds me of something different. Every version of you was exactly where she needed to be in her season. She deserves to be celebrated, and so does the brand she built back then. It did its job. It carried you here.

Now look at where here actually is. Look at the dreams you're carrying now compared to the ones you used to. Look at the room you're standing in versus the one you started in. If your brand feels kinda like your old phone, there is no need to feel behind. It’s just data. Data that points to your next-best move.