Build A Vibrant Brand

This week on the podcast, listen in on a conversation I have with Liz Trujillo, of mytruedesign,  a graphic designer who loves to help people bring their vision to life.  We discuss the importance of authenticity and how values should be the driving force behind building a brand and a business you love. 

Here are 3 key takeaways:

• Let authenticity drive your brand: Liz shares her journey of shifting from a serious brand to one that embraces her love of pink and reflects her true self. Authenticity became her north star, giving her the confidence to put herself and her values out into the world—reminding us all that staying true to ourselves is where real confidence comes from.
• Your first version won’t be perfect—pivot often!  The reality is that your first attempt at branding or business might not fit perfectly. Don’t let that discourage you! It's essential to experiment, pay attention to what brings you joy, and let your values evolve. 
• Knowing yourself is the best tool for growth: Taking time to explore what you love—whether that’s colors, images, or ways of showing up online—will help guide your decisions. Liz encourages listeners to pause, make mood boards, and even use tools like Pinterest to get clarity. 

Most importantly, don’t hide: put your name and your face out there, because people connect with people, not just great branding.

Links 

• Join Kelly's Group Coaching Program
• Join Kelly’s Free community on Skool
• Follow Liz

 Let's connect.

I am cheering for you!

Transcript

0:00

what's the value that drives my true design? Yeah. What's the difference in the values? Basically the first brand was black and white to play this role of elegance. You need to be serious to charge for your service. And with my love of Pink, I was like, but I don't feel like that is me. I feel like i'm faking it. I was like, no, let me be authentic. Let me, be authentic and be true to myself. And I was like, yeah, pink and burgundy and yeah, that's me. I'm my true design. Welcome to the Live A Vibrant Life podcast. I'm life coach Kelly Kibbitz, and each week I'll be here to encourage and equip you with the tools you need to grow in self-awareness and invest your best energy in your dreams and your purpose. I believe self-awareness changes everything. Let's get started. This week we're gonna be talking about values. And I'm excited to have you here today tell us all the things Thank you, Katie. I'm Liz. I'm the owner of my true design, I am a graphic designer. I love to do brands and websites. We connected and I was able to help you bring everything together, your social media and your website For me, my favorite color is pink, so if you go through all my things, everything is pink. So using a color for you to put your presence out there, it's a great thing to do. We connected through the artist's way, and one of the things you noticed as we were talking about it is you found your way over to graphic design because your brain had a thought that just doing art isn't going to make any money. You need to find a way to make money from it. And as you became a graphic designer, did you find some connection with who you are and the ability to help people? Yeah. You know, use a brand and use color and use images. I had a thought like being an artist is not going to make me money. So the next thing was graphic design and yeah, I loved it. Of course it's not the same as being an artist, but for me, to help other people bring their vision to life and that creative side, I think it's the same creative venue that I like. So that's why I created my brand. What are the values that drive your company my true design? Authenticity. Yeah. So I love to be authentic. When I established that brand, Authenticity. was my north star. Before I was trying to be another person. My old brand was black and white- elegant and all of that, and I didn't embrace the colors that I really liked. And once I did, it changed everything. I love pink. It doesn't mean that i'm not professional. I embrace what I like and I got the confidence to put myself out there -and now have the brand that I have and meet amazing people across the world like you, Kelly. So, yeah. Oh, well thank you. It was great. I think one of the first things that most of us notice as we begin to do something we've never done before, it's uncomfortable and we have thoughts. The artist way says, a thought might be" you can't make money as an artist, so do something different." And you actually found a way to connect the two. I'm gonna make some money. I'm gonna stay in my art. And as you began to explore, your first version was black and white. And that wasn't exactly aligned to you, but you wouldn't have known if you didn't do version one. For people who are watching My Invest In Your Dreams Program, the first thing we want them to know is you're probably going to pivot. Like the chances of right out the gate landing on your exact right branding, your right marketing -pretty small. Like you're an artist and it still was not outta the gate. So giving people permission to keep pivoting. You started with black and white for a reason. What do you think the value was that was driving the black and white branding? And then Like my true design, the name is, it is because my true design, like my true self. So that's kind of the paper that I made. That's what you like helping people discover is who are they at their core. So if someone is listening right now, one of the first ways to finding out about yourself is maybe just taking out a piece of paper and taking a minute and saying What colors, what pictures, what things do I like and what do I not like? So my first person who worked with me helped me discover so many things about myself. And it was a marketing conversation for me to figure out how to do my first website. And she helped me remember, I love the ocean, I love flowers, I love the color blue. Before that, I don't think I ever spent a second wondering, right? And we make our decisions with people around us. So the first thing is you have to start somewhere. You may or may not land on your correct future marketing on the first version. But you can't get to version 2, 3 4 without trying with version one. Without noticing your values, your value driving, your first brand was elegant. Is that still a value that's important to you? For me, it's just authentic. You know, authentic to yourself and, and encourage and embrace that because, you know, I wasn't embracing the things that I liked before. So I'm like, yeah, it's better if you like it and if you feel that kind of emotional connection with your brand that helps you stick with it. Otherwise, you are going to, you know, use everything. That you find like, oh, I like this. I will try this. But it's not bringing that consistency that you need to be able to be visible and establish yourself in the online world. That's what you helped me with. You helped me notice, I really liked the branding behind my KTLC logo. It had. Blue and purple hydrangeas, and the color scheme was pretty consistent. The colors were clear, and yet my website, my Instagram, none of those reflected it. So just having me pause and say, are these the colors I like? Are these the colors that express the values? My values are, I want to be collaborative, generous, and expeditious. None of those really bring a color to mind, but that picture. These flowers and a clear vase and everything about it. I love that. So would you suggest that people take 30 minutes and go on Canva and just look at pictures and begin to maybe make a Pinterest board or something as they start to understand what they like when it comes to colors and images? Yes. Actually, one of my techniques when I'm working with somebody, it's like, please go to Pinterest. Put a timer. Pin everything that you like for 30 minutes. It doesn't matter. Like it doesn't need to be kind of like a theme just pick the images that you like for 30 minutes. And then you'll know which colors which nighting, the type of topics. Maybe you were going to see like a bunch of seashells or that you like the ocean or. In my case it's like birds or, something like that. So yeah, like that. It's a great tool. It's going to help you know yourself and also if you're going to develop your brand and all of that, that it's a huge help for the brand designer. That was the other thing you were helping me see is once you start to narrow a little bit, helps your people who work with you to know, okay, these are the colors and the fonts and the lighting that I like. You helped me use my logo to then create the brand choice. And my logo was a little fluffy. There were too many words in it. There was, it was hard to read, and you had me get a little clearer and just have Kelly Tibbits be the big words. If somebody was starting out and they have a substack or a blog, or they're creating an Instagram community, is it important to begin to think about how you want to be known? So you're Liz at my true design. Is it worth taking the time to come up with a phrase or a way to describe yourself? Is it good for people to stay with their name or should we all be trying to find creative ways to brand ourselves? Personally, I would suggest to use your name. Because you know, you, we change so much. We have so many ideas and try every other method. So the only thing that is going to be consistent about your business is you. So I would suggest just keep with your name and if you have like a quote or a really cool word that you have thought about in the past, yes, you can use that. But I would say, let's say in my case, I use my true design. By, which is my name. So you can add your name always like your name. It's the one thing that should be consistent about it. That's what I did with my podcast. Live A Vibrant Life with Coach Kelly Tibbitts 'cause I had heard, putting your name into it is so important. And then the third thing I wanted talk to you about is you went through my website and all kinds of different things, and you said I needed to get more confident in putting pictures of myself out there. And I have to say, when you said that to me, one, I noticed right away that was true and there were seasons where I was doing a better job of it. And then there were things where I was like, oh, let's make a pretty Canva. Why do people need to see our faces? You need to connect. I don't know if you have thought about it, but when you purchase something, you purchase because of the person, not because of, great branding. With great branding you should be on there, your face should be there. It's funny because your picture was so beautiful. It was on the bottom and I was like, why this is not in the header? It was perfect, like great quality, great dimensions. And I just told you about, why don't you just put it up there,. Show it because you need to scroll down to actually get there. So yeah. Since you've said that, I've tried to be better. So even today I put out an email inviting people and I put my picture of my face on that email just so I can grow in my own comfort of doing it right? I have thoughts about, well, how old am I? And what does my picture look like? And the truth is, when I look at other people's pictures on Instagram or anywhere else, I'm not judging them. I'm not saying their hair looks like their, so their face looks like this, but I do feel connected when I see their face. Those were the three things we were gonna talk about today. First was values drive the decisions you make. When you don't pay attention, there may be values that you're not even connected with. The value you were trying to connect to was authenticity, but you, before you noticed it, your brand was going in a different direction. The second thing was, once you've taken the 30 minutes to go on Pinterest. Send that image over to Chat GPT, see what it comes up with. Ask some friends, find something that feels true to you. And then third, use your own face. Get your name out there. Get your face out there. If you were working with somebody who is just beginning and they don't even have a website yet, what would the first thing you would say be? Create a website Stay on Instagram? When you work with people and they're just beginning, they don't really know their values yet. They don't really know a hundred percent what they want to name their program or their podcast. Should they start with version one or should they wait till they're clearer? What do you tell people who work with you? It's really simple. I would ask, tell me what brings you joy? What makes you light up? What do you like Do you see yourself doing this three, five years alone? And talk with people. Go deep a little bit. What do you really like, what do you really enjoy? And therefore we can go from there. It really depends, like, for example, if you are going to be a service. I would suggest to have a website where you list your services and then direct the p the person. But if you're selling products that you like or recommend it would be, okay, you don't need a website right now. You need to kind of find your thing and go with that. It depends but the one thing in common that I would ask is, what brings you joy? What is the thing that you really like? Like the purpose of this? So yeah, I would start with that. And I love that because I think if our values are driven by "what brings me joy?" We can't help but create something that we love doing. When I first began my company, I realized that I had worked in many organizations and not every value was a value I was aligned to. And so I didn't want to create something that I no longer wanted to do. Having been a speaker and a leader, I know that when I speak quickly, some people love it. I personally listen to podcasts at 2.0 Sure. But there are also people who are like, I don't like how fast you move, and I wanted to be clear. I do move fast. I want to create expeditious results. So I put that right into my values. And I wanted to be collaborative. I want to work with other people. I don't want to do anything in a silo alone. I want community. And then I want to be generous with my thoughts and my words and my actions. And so taking the time to think about your values, to write them down, to grow them, and then as you look at those values to say, does that bring me joy? Then I should do more of it. But if it's not bringing me joy, why am I doing it? And it's so often a thought. When you began your company, what thought do you think was driving you to create this very structured, serious version? Do you even know what thought was driving that? Yeah, yeah, definitely. It was like, nobody's going to take me seriously. No one is going to even like, I don't know, I kind of look younger than my age, so I'm like, no, I need to be serious. You know? So that's why black and white. And then I was like, no, that is not who I am. If you had created a big company where you always had to be serious, that was the opposite of what brings you joy. Yeah, I would be faking it. I don't know, I, I, I wouldn't be able to, you know, be myself and show up, you know, show my face. I always struggle with that. Like making videos on social media and all of that. It wouldn't, I wouldn't been there. Yep. Deciding for you, authenticity was going to drive everything. And I do love, we met through Cathy Heller's world, and I love that she always says authenticity is the highest, vibrations even higher than love. And it's hard for a lot of us to get there because we spent so much of our life trying to be the people that everyone around us wanted us to be. If somebody's hearing this and they're thinking, boy, I want to work with Liz. Have a conversation with you. Find the values that drive what you're doing. Connect on, I want to learn how one of your -Your logo is not your brand. You did a great overlook of my website and within 10 minutes we're really clear. Move A, B, and C and it's so much cleaner and clearer. If someone wanted to connect with you, is Instagram the best way? Yeah, in Instagram, my true design or my website, my true design.com. You can see my work, you can see the packages and email. It's liz@mytruedesign.com. I always am there. So Yeah. I love that your name on Zoom says, Liz at my true design. I need to do that as well. Thank you so much- i'm so glad you were here, Liz. Thank you for joining the Live A Vibrant Life podcast. I hope our time together encourage you and will equip you with the tools you need to move into the vibrant life you desire. I'm here to help you live a brave, creative, purpose-filled life. And if you'd like to learn more. You can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, Kelly tibbits life coach, or visit my website kelly tibbits.com. I look forward to connecting again soon.