Your ideas are assets. Treat them like it.

We are creating more content than ever. LinkedIn posts, newsletters, videos, podcasts, Instagram, TikTok - and every platform would happily have us creating for it full-time. But creating more content isn’t the advantage anymore. Honestly, who has time for that?

(Psst! If you’d rather look at a video about this topic you will find it here on my Youtube channel)

I learned this the hard way. For a long time, I thought the answer was to create more, be more consistent and show up everywhere. At one point I was producing so much content that I was basically burning myself out, without getting results that matched the amount of work I was putting in. I see my clients falling into that trap all the time.

The other day I sat down and mapped all the channels I have between myself and my companies. There were probably 20 different places that, theoretically, I could be filling with content. And even if you only have LinkedIn, Instagram and a newsletter, you can easily end up on the same hamster wheel.

I think we need to flip the way we think about this.

The goal shouldn’t be to create as much content as possible. The goal should be to develop ideas, perspectives and ways of thinking that people start to recognise as yours, and then use content to help those ideas travel.

A piece of content might be relevant for a few days, but a really good idea can keep working for you for years.

That’s why I started building what I call my IP Bank.

What is an IP Bank?

Quick disclaimer (!!) before an intellectual property lawyer comes after me: I’m not using IP in the strict legal sense here. I’m using it to describe the intellectual assets you build around your personal brand - your ideas, ways of thinking, frameworks, methods, stories, language, research and proof.

What goes into your IP Bank will be different depending on what you do and what you want to be known for. It could be an idea you keep coming back to, a framework you use with clients, a method you’ve developed through your work, a story that helps explain something you believe, or research and proof that support your point of view.

But one of the most important parts is language.

The words you use to package your thinking are what help people remember an idea and connect it to you.

If I have an idea that I really believe in and want to become known for, I need to formulate it, name it, talk about it and start tying it to my personal brand.

That is how an idea starts becoming an asset.

Your ideas don’t have to be groundbreaking

This is where I think a lot of people get stuck. They assume that to have original ideas, they need to come up with something nobody in the history of humanity has ever thought before.

You don’t.

An idea can simply be your way of looking at something, shaped by your experience and expressed in your words. I get ideas from everywhere. Sometimes they come from something a client says. Sometimes they come from something I’m experiencing in my own business. I can listen to a podcast and hear someone explain something one way and immediately think, Yes, but what if we looked at it like this instead?

That doesn’t mean stealing someone else’s idea. It means letting what you see, hear and experience trigger your own thinking.

You probably already do this all the time without noticing. You have things you say repeatedly to clients or colleagues. You have ways of doing things that make complete sense to you but that other people don’t seem to do. You see advice in your industry and think, I really disagree with that. You explain something in a certain way and suddenly someone understands it.

There is IP hiding in all of that.

The goal isn’t to collect hundreds of random thoughts. It’s to uncover the few ideas that make sense for you to become known for, that you genuinely use in your work and that could make a difference for other people if they understood them.

Naming an idea helps it travel

I believe naming an idea is what helps that idea travel. And we want our ideas to travel. The further they travel, the more people are exposed to our thinking. The more people recognise our thinking, the stronger the connection between those ideas and our personal brand becomes.

I’ve experienced this myself when I’ve started using certain language or framing something in a particular way. After a while, I’ll see more people talking about it too. In the beginning, that used to annoy me a little. Now I mostly take it as a compliment.

I don’t think we should sit on good ideas. Good ideas are meant to be used. But you can create proof around an idea and consistently connect it to yourself so that you also benefit from being the person who developed or introduced that way of thinking.

Language is a huge part of that.

How one idea became part of my brand

One example from my own IP Bank is an idea I call the Conversation Leader.

When you work in personal branding, you inevitably come across the term "thought leader". But I’ve noticed that a lot of people don’t identify with it. It can sound big, intimidating and slightly unreachable. They don’t necessarily want to position themselves as the person with all the answers.

So I started thinking about it differently. What if you didn’t need to be a thought leader? What if you could become a Conversation Leader instead?

Last year, I spoke at a large conference for one of my clients and introduced the idea during my talk. Afterwards, their marketing director told me how much feedback they had received about that particular concept. It was almost as if the room had collectively sighed with relief. People felt like they had permission to start somewhere smaller and more comfortable. They didn’t have to become this enormous "thought leader". They could simply become someone who starts and contributes to important conversations.

That was interesting to me because I had taken an idea, given it language and then tested it on real people. The response told me there was something there.

So I kept it. I started developing it, using it in my work and talking about it across my channels. Something that had initially just been a thought became part of my IP Bank and, over time, something I could deliberately connect to my personal brand.

Your IP Bank makes content easier

This is where we come back to the content problem.

When you have two, three or four ideas that you know you want to become associated with, creating content gets much easier. You’re no longer staring at a blank screen thinking, What on earth am I supposed to post today? You already know what you want to talk about.

One idea can become an article, a LinkedIn post, a newsletter, a YouTube video, part of a keynote, a client exercise or a conversation on a podcast. You’re not inventing something completely new every time. You’re finding different ways to explore, test, explain and prove the thinking you actually want people to associate with you.

That also means you can spend less time creating random content without knowing whether it’s actually building anything. And personally, I find it much easier to talk about an idea that I genuinely believe can help someone than to constantly talk about myself. I think a lot of people who find personal branding uncomfortable probably feel the same way.

You don’t have to make yourself the subject of everything. Let your thinking do some of the work.

Start building your IP Bank

Maybe you’re reading this thinking, Great, Mira. Easy for you. You’ve been doing this for years. I don’t even know if I have any ideas.

That’s fine. But you probably do. You’re just not used to looking for them.

Start paying attention to the things you say all the time. Notice where you disagree with the conventional advice in your industry. Think about the methods you use repeatedly in your work. Look for the things you explain differently from other people, or the moments when someone says, "I’ve never thought about it like that before."

Then write them down.

Don’t force yourself to immediately turn every thought into a polished framework with a clever name. The point at first is simply to trigger your brain to start thinking this way. Put the seed there, leave it for a day or two and come back to it. You’ll probably start noticing ideas everywhere once you know what you’re looking for.

When you find the first few that feel really you, put them in your IP Bank and start investing in them. Develop them. Test them on real people. Find the language. Collect the stories and proof. Repeat them enough that people begin connecting those ideas with you.

Think of your IP Bank as a living thing. New ideas will be added and old ones will evolve. But if you keep investing in it throughout your career, the bank itself becomes more valuable.

That’s also how I think about building a personal brand. It’s an investment of time into something that belongs to you and that nobody can take away from you.

To help, I created a simple IP Bank guide with very SPECIFIC questions to help you uncover the ideas that are probably already sitting in your head. Give yourself 15 minutes, get your first thoughts onto paper and start building the bank.

Your ideas are assets. Start treating them like it.

Get the IP Bank guide now.
I hope it helps! :)

/M.