We’re always told to separate our professional and personal lives from each other. We should just focus on business and not let our personal emotions get the best of us. It is what they say professionalism is. That is not the case for Erica Blair, founder of Blockchain Branding. She believes that our personal stories allow us to connect better with people. Business is all about connections. She teaches us to find our own story and to let it inspire our business and customers. It is through what we’ve been through that we create our own personal brand and foster authenticity. Erica has seen this shift in how people accept stories and she urges entrepreneurs to seek from their hearts.

---

Listen to the podcast here:

Finding Your Own Story with Erica Blair

I have someone who I am excited to interview. Her name is Erica Blair and she is a marketing strategist, a personal branding coach, and location independent entrepreneur. She’s in Thailand and she works with emerging entrepreneurs to generate influence and income by building an online presence. Her work centers on helping people uncover ways they can connect to an audience by sharing their own unconventional stories and the knowledge they have gained through lived experiences. Welcome to the show, Erica.

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Tell us a little about yourself, your background, and how you got into your work.

I am American, although I live in Thailand. I grew up in California. I love traveling my whole life. I always wanted to do it. I never quite got the chance as a child. I decided to make my way abroad when I reached adulthood and I've spent about seven years abroad altogether. I finally figured out a way that I could live the lifestyle that I loved and also have a career that worked for me. I came to this path that I'm on right now through getting my start as a social media marketer, which then evolved into doing some of the higher level strategy stuff. What I found through the work that I was doing was that I love working with people to develop their stories and figure out how they can get those online to the people that they wanted to reach.

What do you mean by to develop their stories?

We witnessed a lot of change in our world over the last decade or so and that's something that all of us who've been through it can recognize. Part of what has changed that a lot of people aren't necessarily noting is what it takes to connect with people through your business and your own personal branding has shifted. There used to be an expectation that there was this veneer of professionalism. There were things that you could do and things that you couldn't do. There was your personal life and your professional life. What we've seen over the last decade that it melded into something that's a lot more indistinguishable. People now are craving authenticity in a way that we weren't before because we have almost unlimited options in terms of who we can turn to for input, who we can turn to for advice.

For somebody to stand out from the crowd, it takes more than just taking the boxes of what it meant to be a good professional person in the past. Now, people are looking to work with people who they can connect with on a deeper level. We have access to so many people to work with that in order to stand out, it's important to get clear on who you are and who you like working with. Then to figure out how you can talk about that. What makes you unique, and what life experiences you've had, and that may extend far beyond what was typically considered the professional realm.

Let’s say somebody’s reading and they're like, “I've had these things happen in my life experience and my work experience.” How do they go about figuring out how to use that?