Happiness fallacies: Ana’s personal branding experience
Ana Melikian (Website | LinkedIn) is a speaker who wants to spread the word about positive psychology and how we can really tap into our potential as humans. However, she has a deep and diverse background, with a PhD in psychology, and years of experience as a therapist and professor. In the last decade, she switched away from academia and therapy to life coaching and eventually to business coaching. She also hosts a podcast called The Mindset Zone. Ana believes that happy people lead to successful businesses, whether it’s a solo business or a big organization.
I met Ana through an online course of hers that I bought on how to build a business on LinkedIn. She looked at my website and decided she wanted to work with me. In this conversation, I asked her a few questions about her experience of the process. I’ve summarized the entire interview in this blog post, with a link to the full video at the end.
What got you interested in doing a photo shoot?
The photos that I’ve been using in my profiles and social media were almost 7 years ago. I haven’t changed a lot physically since then. I still have short hair. But I felt that they weren’t representing me in the way I want to be out there.
I also wanted more variety in my photos. When I did that photo shoot 7 years ago, I only got a limited selection of photos I liked, and using those was creating a certain monotone in my visual branding. Now, even when you look at my podcast, I put an episode out, along with social media posts to promote them. When you use the same photo every time, people start to zone out. So visual variety is important. Instead of always going to stock photos, it’s important to show photos of ourselves representing the different dimensions of the work that we do.
I’ve been thinking about photos for a while, though the pandemic was delaying my decision. I had researched some local photographers too. But when I saw your website, the work you’re doing around visual branding, and the variety of photos, I realized that was exactly what I was looking for even if I couldn’t quite articulate it before.
As part of Ana’s story, we captured how she might prepare for one of her keynote talks.
Thank you! During your planning process, you created a mood board, we had a planning session and we came up with a story for the session. What did that process feel like for you?
It was really important. The process you have is powerful because it helped me articulate what I was looking for. And you pushed me in a good way; or rather, you inspired me to think out of the box. The first mood board I created was very linear. I was simply looking for photos where I could replace myself in that and maybe a little bit more.
However, after you talked to me, I saw the purpose of the exercise; looking for a wider breadth of photos forced me to brainstorm and see different possibilities, and the end result reflects that.
As for the story, we landed on using the narrative arc of the keynote speech I’m working on at the moment. When you suggested that, I was like: Oh my gosh, why didn’t I think of that before? I use a lot of visuals and metaphors in my work already! It automatically led to tons of visual ideas and representations that made the process alive and fun.
This keynote is very important to my and my work right now. I’m not a model at all, but when we worked together in the studio, the story of the arc of the keynote made it very easy for me to embody a certain emotion rather than just, go do this pose.
The planning process made it really easy to have all of the big decisions taken care of beforehand. So when I arrived at the shoot, I was ready to get into it.
In her first attempt at a mood board, Ana mostly included photos of what she thought she should look like: famous speakers, women with short hair, stylish older women. However, I encouraged her to broaden her search to also include what she was truly drawn to. In particular, she’s a huge fan of Isabella Rossellini, a former Italian supermodel with (now) short hair.
When she let her mind loose and added even more photos, she was drawn to a lot of details, props and visual representations of the ideas in her talk. This is when we came up with the idea of photographing the narrative arc of her talk during her session. View Ana’s full board here on Pinterest.
Ana’s talk (and hence her shoot) includes many visual metaphors and props.
What was the experience of the shoot like?
Before the shoot, when you told me it would take up to 4 hours, I had an ambivalent feeling. Four hours felt like a lot of time. I also recognized that it would let us take a lot of photos.
The reality is that with the structure you provided (with little breaks and all) and the story we had decided on, the time just flew by! I felt energized and really enjoyed the day. You showed me a few snapshots in the back of your camera which left me really excited and ready to see the end result.
What was it like to see your photos?
I wanted the photos to represent me where I am in the moment, and they do! They’re gorgeous, and now I have to live up to that expectation (laughs). I don’t like how some photographers overdo a lot of photoshop on their images. And then when you meet that person in real life, you wonder if it’s the same person.
The way you worked presented the best side of me without the photoshop. You also had a really good makeup artist, which helps a lot. Makeup is like photoshop in real life.
My first reaction to the photos was: WHOA. Even my husband had the same reaction: I like what I’m seeing!
I’ve shared the photos with people who have known me for several years and their reaction is: Whoa, this really represents you! With new people, it’s great to see the reaction and how the photos are capturing their attention.
I’ve already updated my LinkedIn profile picture and my speaking page, and I’ll continue to use them for other things. You definitely captured the message that I want to transmit visually: around expanding possibilities of strength and positioning myself as an expert.
Another example of a visual metaphor that Ana uses in her talk.
Would you recommend this experience to a friend? What would you tell them?
I’d absolutely recommend that people out there work with you. If you’re a coach, consultant, speaker or trainer, you know that you're you are the service and the product and the face of your business. You know how important it is to have something that represents you visually out there. Working with Raj will allow you to level up your game in terms of your photos. I absolutely see immense possibilities. Now I'm going to be reusing and using the photos to to step up in my game online and I see business opportunities coming from that.
This card exercise is used as a visual tool in Ana’s keynote to make a vital point, so it was important to her to capture it.
