I Ran a Personal-Brand Audit on Myself for Seven Days — Here’s What My Notes App Revealed

I have a Notes app graveyard. Ninety-four notes, most of them titled ‘ideas’ or, worse, ‘ideas!!!’. There are six half-written essays about my mother, a list of things to buy that I have clearly never bought, and one note that just says ‘the thing about February’ followed by nothing at all.

Last month I read a piece about founders doing a ‘brand audit’ on themselves before a big relaunch, and I felt that familiar itch of someone who is nosy about her own life. So I gave myself a week. No coach, no jargon, no personality quiz. Just seven days of treating myself like something worth describing accurately — and seeing how wrong my default description had been.

Day one: the evidence file

The first task was the least comfortable one. I messaged eight people — a sibling, two old friends, a colleague, a neighbour, an ex I’m still friendly with, and two people I’ve only met twice — and asked a single question: what do you think I’m about?

Not ‘what do I do for work’. Not ‘describe my personality’. What am I about. Two of them replied within a minute, which was flattering, and one replied eleven hours later with ‘sorry, this is a weird question’ and then a genuinely lovely paragraph, so.

The results were humbling in a specific way. I had assumed the headline was my job. Not one person led with my job. What came back instead: you always have a book on you. You’re the one who organises the thing. You send the long voice notes. You actually turn up.

I sat on the floor of my kitchen reading them and felt genuinely emotional about a spreadsheet, which is not a sentence I expected to write.

Day two: the audit of the digital self

Next I opened my Notes app and read it like a stranger would. Turns out the things I save and scribble say something quite different from the bio I’d been using for two years.

My saved posts were all: ceramics, window seats, second-hand bookshops, pieces about friendship breakups, and one recipe for lentils I have now saved four separate times. My notes were fragments of overheard dialogue and increasingly unhinged lists of ‘things to be’. My camera roll, by contrast, was 60% photos of my cat and 40% screenshots of train times.

So the gap was obvious. The person in my saved folder is curious, domestic-adjacent, mildly nostalgic and interested in people. The person in my bio was a vague set of professional nouns. I had been describing myself the way you’d describe a job title on a form, when the actual interesting contents were sitting right there in the mess.

Day four: the party question

By the middle of the week I’d started noticing something. When someone asked what I did, I’d give the tidy answer — and then feel a small, specific disappointment. Like I’d made eye contact with a stranger and then closed a door in their face.

So I tried an experiment at a birthday in south London. When asked, I said: I write for a living, but honestly the thing I’m most interested in right now is why everybody’s so obsessed with going to libraries again.

Reader, the conversation lasted forty minutes. Two people asked for the name of my local one. Someone gave me a recommendation for a lido in Kent. Nobody asked for my rates.

The lesson there is not don’t talk about your job. It’s that there’s a difference between a label and an opening. One of them starts a conversation; the other politely ends it.

Day five: the rewrite

I opened my professional bio on Friday and stared at it. Previously it was three sentences of nouns. I rewrote it as though I were describing a friend whose work I actually admire, and the rule I held myself to was this: no adjective I wouldn’t say out loud to my sister’s face. ‘Strategic storyteller’ — out. ‘Writes about the small things that turn out not to be small’ — in.

Then I did the small, satisfying bit. I deleted nineteen Notes app scraps that were two years old and made me feel like a failure. That was not part of any professional’s methodology. It was, however, the single most useful ten minutes of the entire week.

Day seven: the honest conclusion

The thing I’d been avoiding arrived pretty quickly once I stopped looking for a ‘brand’. It is this: I don’t want to be known for being impressive. I want to be known for being good company, for making things, and for noticing things other people walk past.

And once I knew that, the decisions got easy. What I say yes to. What I spend on. Where I turn up on a Tuesday. Which pitching ideas are worth the energy and which are just a slightly better-dressed version of trying to look busy.

The language of personal branding is deeply unsexy — ‘value proposition’, ‘positioning’, ‘audience’. But strip the words back and it’s asking one fairly human question: if I could choose, what do I want to be the kind of person who does?

You are allowed to answer that in a sentence that would be useless on a CV. Mine is three lines long, written in the Notes app I’ve finally cleared out, and it has nothing to do with how I earn a living. That’s not a brand. It’s closer to a direction, and I’ll take that over a strapline any day.