The Aesteria Codex //002: Why I Kept Changing My Brand (And What Actually Makes a Personal Brand Magnetic)
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Lessons from 9 years of building and rebranding my personal brand, and the brand identity shift that finally made everything click.
ps. quick reminder: that this will be the only blog I send this week, in case you missed my news update from last week, check it out here.
I haven’t talked about this in a long time, but for the first several years of building my business, I kept changing my brand. Constantly.
Different aesthetics.
Different messaging.
Different offers.
Different positioning.
Every time I thought I had finally figured it out, something would start to feel slightly off again.
So I would change something to get things “back into alignment.”
Sometimes that would be a new visual, sometimes it would be updating my messaging and ICA. Others I would create a new shiny offer to get more momentum behind me.
And every time I made a change, I had the same thought: “Okay, this version feels more aligned, I’ve finally ‘got it!’”
But a few months later, that tugging in my gut would return.
Something still didn’t feel quite right.
Those of you who have followed my work for a long time might remember some of the different versions of my brand over the past 9 years in this industry.
Tina Mai. Tiana Mi. Christina Chabrier.
And most recently now, Irisel Aesteria.
Now, when I look back at those earlier phases now, it’s very obvious why I kept changing things.
But at the time, I genuinely believed I was just refining my marketing.
I thought I needed what all the other coaches told me I needed:
→ better positioning
→ better messaging
→ better offers
→ better branding
In reality, I was searching for something so much deeper than any mentor was willing to take me.
My issue was this: I didn’t understand what actually made my brand magnetic.
And because of that, every time something felt slightly “off,” my instinct was to change something on the surface to get my brand “aligned”
That’s why I was constantly creating:
X: A new offer
X: A new direction
X: A new visual identity.
But the real issue wasn’t any of those things.
The real issue was that I didn’t have a clearly defined brand identity guiding my decisions.
And as per usual if there’s something I struggle with within my own business, then I end up seeing this exact same pattern happening with my clients and the echo chamber of entrepreneurs all the time:
→ Starting new social media platforms.
→ Redesigning their brand visuals.
→ Repackaging the same offer with a new name.
→ Tweaking their messaging again and again and wondering why nothing ever quite feels stable.
Most of the time, the assumption is that something in their marketing just needs to be improved.
But in many cases, the real issue is much deeper.
And once I realized that, a lot of things from my earlier years in business suddenly started to make sense.
The Lessons I Learned About What Actually Makes a Personal Brand Magnetic
Lesson #1: I was unconsciously influenced by what I saw everyone else doing
When you’re building a personal brand online, you’re constantly surrounded by other creators.
You see their content. Their messaging. Their launches. Their offers.
And without realizing it, you start absorbing their strategies and perspectives.
Far too often I found myself creating content that felt similar to the people I was learning from. I was never intentionally copying them, but because what they were teaching me was front and center in my mind, of course it became what I unconsciously decided to talk about inside my content.
Which made it difficult to separate my brand from the mentors I was learning from at the time.
Lesson #2: I let my mood determine my strategy
This is something I see entrepreneurs doing constantly.
They build their business strategy around how they feel in the moment.
If they’re excited about something, they create an offer around it.
If they’re bored of a topic, they stop talking about it.
And on the surface, that makes sense. “Move toward what excites you. Move away from what drains you.”
In the personal development world, this is often framed as following your intuition.
But when your brand identity isn’t clearly defined, it’s incredibly easy to confuse intuition with unconscious influence.
This is also where I see a lot of people mistake “alignment” for constant change, when in reality, alignment without structure will always feel unstable. I broke this down more deeply in a previous article on why your marketing starts to feel draining → Why Your Marketing Feels Draining (And What That’s Telling You)
Your mood changes. Your energy changes. Your environment changes. The trends in your industry change.
And suddenly your “intuition” is pointing you in a completely different direction every few months.
The result is a brand that constantly shifts form a place of external influence, rather than aligned internal guidance.
Lesson #3: I let analytics make decisions for me
Analytics are useful, but when they become your primary compass, they can lead you in the wrong directions.
For example:
You create a piece of content that gets 200,000 views. Then you see another creator spend 10 minutes recording a casual video that gets 1 million views.
And suddenly you start wondering if you’re doing something wrong.
→ Should you simplify your content?
→ Should you change formats?
→ Should you pivot your entire strategy?
But what I didn’t understand back then is that views don’t always tell the full story of how a brand actually grows.
Sometimes the content that builds the deepest authority, the strongest audience loyalty, and the most profitable offers isn’t the content that gets the highest view count.
Without a clear brand identity, it becomes incredibly easy to misinterpret these signals.
This is exactly where a lot of brands start optimizing for attention instead of actual demand, which creates growth that looks good on the surface but doesn’t convert. I broke this down more in depth here → From the Codex //037: Attention vs Demand
Lesson #4: I didn’t understand what made me magnetic
This was the biggest realization for me.
I kept changing my brand because I didn’t actually know what people were coming to me for in the first place.
I didn’t understand the deeper role my brand was playing in my audience’s mind.
And when you don’t understand what makes you magnetic, you end up replicating what works for other people.
For example, you might see another creator building their audience by sharing vulnerable personal stories.
Their videos get millions of views, so you try to do the same thing.
But when you attempt it, something you just get the ick… but you do it anyways because you feel like you should “push yourself out of your comfort zone”
The content doesn’t perform the same way.
And instead of realizing that vulnerability might not be the core strength of your brand, you assume you’re doing something wrong.
In reality, different brands attract attention in different ways.
And this is where understanding your archetype becomes so important, because it explains why certain types of content feel natural for you and others don’t → How to Write Persuasive Content Using Your Brand Archetype
What feels magnetic for one person may feel completely unnatural for another.
And this is where understanding my brand archetype started to change everything for me.
Once I understood the deeper identity of my brand, my content, messaging, and positioning suddenly started to feel much more cohesive.
Why Brand Identity Is the Foundation of a Magnetic Personal Brand
Looking back, I don’t regret those earlier phases of my brand.
They were part of the process.
But if there’s one thing I wish I had understood much earlier in my career, it’s this:
I spent years trying to improve my marketing, when the real issue was that my brand identity was never clearly defined.
And I see entrepreneurs doing the exact same thing today.
They don’t fully understand what makes their brand magnetic in the first place.
And when that core identity isn’t clear, everything else starts to feel unstable.
You end up constantly adjusting the surface of your business without realizing that the real issue lives much deeper.
Over the next few weeks, I want to dive much deeper into this topic with you.
Because building a magnetic personal brand isn’t about posting more content or chasing the latest marketing strategy.
It starts with understanding the identity at the center of your brand.
In next week’s article, we’re going to explore one of the biggest misconceptions about personal branding, and why it’s the reason your brand still isn’t making you the type of money you’re dreaming of.
If you’re curious to start exploring the identity behind your own brand, you can begin by taking the [Brand Archetype Quiz here.]
It’s the fastest ways to start uncovering the deeper role your brand naturally plays in the minds of your audience.
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