ALIGNED with Janna Meyrowitz Turner: Seeing connections, maximizing impact, and the power of personal brand
Julie and Casey sit down with personal brand expert, activist, and president of Synastry Capital Janna Meyrowitz Turnerto talk about making the impact you want to make and how to align your life and resources. Along the way, they discuss strategic language within movements, creating the world you want for your kid, and how the journey sometimes only reveals itself when you look back.
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TOP TAKEAWAYS:
For Janna, personal brand is about more than your public-facing persona — it’s about aligning your time, money, and relationships to create the life and the impact you want. And particularly with that “time” piece, you gotta get brave about figuring out how you want to spend your time, and how to ask for what you need.
Big complex movements for justice could really use a PR person — because sometimes we need to reexamine the language we need to use to be understood by the folks we need to call into the movement. We need language that helps people hear us.
It can be really uncomfortable to a lot of people to promote yourself, your ideas, your skills, etc. . . . but just as uncomfortable is the feeling of being under-actualized and unfulfilled. “Branding yourself isn't about self-promotion. Branding yourself is about maximizing your impact and maximizing your opportunities — because if you don't, if you're not out there being yourself and doing all the things that make you, you, then you're not creating space for others to do that.”
LESSON: Myth-busting the elevator pitch . . . and how to feel like a human instead of a walking, talking commercial.
Janna Meyrowitz Turner is an advisor, angel investor, and strategist focused on systems change, leadership development, and communication in all its forms, in every direction. She has been building values-aligned networks for over 20 years across the public, private, and social sectors. She started her first company, Style House, at the age of 23 in 2006. Style House became an award-winning public relations and brand strategy firm over the next 16 years, advising global brands from Estee Lauder to the WNBA, with a strong focus on the female consumer whose economic and political power is wielded both as primary household purchaser and as the largest voting bloc in the US. Today Janna’s cross-sector impact vehicle, Synastry Capital, houses her investing, advising, and advocacy work. Her signature Personal Brand Alignment offering, conducted 1:1 and through keynotes, workshops, and group facilitation, is a blend of leadership coaching, spiritual centering, and talent management, designed to build personal and professional narratives that maximize happiness, impact and earning potential. Janna is also the co-founder of VCs for Repro, a coalition of venture capital firms united in support of abortion access, and sits on the board of A Call To Men, a national violence prevention organization providing training and education on healthy manhood for communities of men and boys.