How do you know which thought leaders to listen to? How do you approach sharing your own thought leadership? Can one lead with thoughts if one doesn't have a thought with which to lead? What are thoughts?

In this "-etera" episode, we're tackling the deep thoughts around thought leadership. We trace the roots of thought leadership as a marketing strategy and how, with the rise of social media and particularly LinkedIn, the idea of personal branding and expertise have wrapped around each other like some sort of algorithmically driven ourobouros.

Thanks to the rise of inbound marketing as a top-of-funnel lead generation tactic and personal branding becoming more critical to career opportunities, many of us feel the pressure to be louder. We need to post our cutting-edge practices on LinkedIn and share perfect-sounding frameworks and maturity models at conferences. And let's face it; when we do that, we sound smart! But these same tactics get abused by marketers and consultants with something to sell you, who haven't actually worked in the field. This means they often end up sharing things that sound good and intuitive, but don't work in reality.

It's also difficult, if you're new to a field, to tell the difference between someone who is sharing earned insights and someone who knows the form of storytelling. So how can you tell the difference? In this episode, we share some of the signs of good and bad thought leadership, and also offer some suggestions to people who are looking to build their own careers.

And if that's you, we're not trying to gatekeep. We promise. We came up in our careers at a time where things were a bit different, but we've also faced the temptation to share slick-sounding revelations. But paradoxically, now that we are your CX uncle and auntie, we want to offer you some encouragement in a different way: the stuff you actually don't find that interesting or maybe even are a bit embarrassed about? That's the stuff we want to hear about. That's the stuff that makes you and your program unique. Those are the thoughts that lead, because they're based in real experiences and real things you've tried and learned.

When you're early in your career or new to a field, many of the frameworks, models, and even prepackaged concepts can seem like real revelations - because they help you make sense of a complicated landscape. But the best of those are based on nuanced experience. Focus on building that experience, and share what you're learning along the way.