Every professional lives with a distance in their mind. It separates the person we believe we are from the person we would like to be, or feel we ought to be. Most of the time we just live with it with consequences that we might not even notice: it influences our decisions, affects our confidence and also shapes the way we present ourselves.
And there is also a second distance, one that abides in someone else's mind. Your boss, your board or your client perceives you in a certain way, and also holds a picture of what you should be in order to receive what you are asking of them: a promotion, a mandate, a contract, their trust. When that distance seems acceptable to them, things move forward. When it seems too wide, they stall, and very often nobody tells you why. (That distance happens also in the mind of your colleagues or collaborators, affecting the effectiveness of your personal ecosystem of value creation, but let's leave this aside for the sake of conciseness).
In this article, I look at the image that we and others have of ourselves and at the way it becomes reputation. Leaders tend to call me when one of these two distances has become impossible to ignore. My conviction is that they need to work on both at the same time.
Three versions of the self
The most useful framework I know for this experience comes from psychology. In 1987 Edward Tory Higgins, then at New York University, proposed that each of us holds three representations of the self. The actual self is the set of attributes we believe we possess today. The ideal self gathers the attributes we hope to possess. The ought self gathers those we believe we should possess, out of duty, obligation or responsibility. Each of them can be viewed from our own standpoint or from the standpoint of the people who matter to us. What it takes to be a good leader may spark different answers in our mind and in the mind of those who decide on our next promotion, for instance.
Higgins called the ideal and the ought self "self-guides", the standards against which we measure who we are. What makes his theory valuable is the link he established between each gap and a particular kind of discomfort. Falling short of our ideals feels like the absence of something we hoped for, and it brings dejection: disappointment, dissatisfaction, sadness, at times shame. Falling short of what we ought to be feels like we are doing something wrong and a sanction might be on its way. It brings agitation: anxiety, guilt, a sense of threat, an inability to rest.
Higgins studied the individual mind: the perspective of the self. My proposition is that the same three categories operate in the minds of the people who judge our work. The market holds an actual version of us, made of the attributes it perceives, and an ought version, made of what it believes we must be to deserve what we seek. Personal reputation, as I understand it, takes shape in the relationship between these two sets of representations, ours and theirs.
The discrepancy in our mind
António Horta-Osório became chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group on 1 March 2011. Eight months later, with the eurozone crisis at its height, he took medical leave for exhaustion after five days without sleep. He later explained that he could see the bank might fail, and that he had taken it upon himself, personally, to save it. He traced that sense of duty to his education at a Jesuit school in Lisbon, where he learned that his role was to serve others.
Few cases illustrate Higgins's theory so clearly. The discrepancy lay between his actual self, a capable executive facing a situation larger than any individual, and an ought self formed long before he joined the bank. The symptoms belong to the family of agitation: vigilance, threat, sleeplessness. His capabilities were not the real point: the distress came from the standard against which he was measuring them.
I see two reasons why this matters for personal branding, and I consider them inseparable. The first is wellbeing. A discrepancy that is not addressed works in the background, and its cost accumulates. The second is coherence. A professional who acts under the pressure of an unexamined ought self tends to send inconsistent signals: overcommitment in one setting, defensiveness in another, a public image managed with visible effort. Audiences read people as patterns, a principle that is at the centre of how I approach personal branding. When the signals do not fit together, the pattern they perceive is incoherence, and the perception of authenticity is the first to suffer.
The first task, then, is awareness. It begins by identifying which of our standards we have chosen and which we have inherited, from a parent, a mentor, an early employer or a professional culture. It continues by separating what we want to become from what we feel obliged to become, because the two produce different emotions and call for different responses. An ideal that is genuinely ours can orient our positioning and give energy to our expression. An ought we have never examined tends to govern our behaviour without our deliberate consent.
The discrepancy in their mind
The second distance is harder to see, because it lives in someone else's mind. Every boss, board and client holds a perception of our attributes, built from what we do, what we say and what others say about us. They also hold an idea of what someone in our position ought to be in order to receive what we are asking for. When a board is weighing a successor, a client is choosing an adviser, or a chief executive is deciding on a promotion, each is measuring a perceived actual self of the candidate against an expected one.
The decisive variable is whether the distance is acceptable. Nobody meets every expectation, and decision makers know it. They tolerate a gap within a certain range. Inside that range, the professional is credible and the relationship moves forward. Outside it, the request is declined, the mandate goes elsewhere, the promotion is postponed. The explanation offered often has little to do with the real reason, which is that, in the other party's mind, the distance was too wide.
Ana Botín's story shows this mechanism at work with great clarity. When she joined Banco Santander in 1988, she has said in interviews, she had to prove her worth like anyone else, regardless of the fact that she was the daughter of the boss. In 1999, during the merger with Banco Central Hispano, an interview she gave to El País Semanal irritated the other side's leadership, and her father removed her from the bank. She has said that she decided that same day she would return, and that the decision became an enormous motivation to prove she could achieve anything. She came back to lead Banesto in 2002, later ran Santander UK, and became chair of the group in 2014.
Her trajectory shows that the discrepancy in the market's mind (any stakeholder's mind) has two components. One is the perceived actual self, which changes through evidence: results, decisions, visible competence. The other is the ought self the market applies, which also changes, more slowly, as we accumulate the forms of recognition our market values. Botín spent years closing that distance in the minds of those who would decide her future, until the question of whether she was the right person had an answer they could accept.
The second task is therefore analytical and continuous. It means identifying who holds the decisions we depend on, understanding what they perceive in us and what they expect, and monitoring the distance over time. Expectations move with circumstances. A board in crisis looks for different attributes from a board in expansion, and a distance that was acceptable last year may be unacceptable today.
Where the two minds meet
The two discrepancies are connected, and Higgins describes the link quite clearly. Among our self-guides is the ought self as we believe others hold it: our reading of what the market expects. Like any reading, it can be wrong. Some professionals suffer trying to meet a demand the market is not making. Others feel at ease while the distance in the market's mind keeps growing.
This is why, in my view, the two tasks form a single discipline. Awareness of our own discrepancies remains incomplete until we test our assumptions against what our bosses and clients actually perceive and expect. The analysis of the market's discrepancy, in turn, becomes more reliable when we know which of our own standards might be distorting our reading of it.
Once the distance in the market's mind is visible, we have two ways to reduce it. The first way acts on the perceived attributes. It works through expression and through the accumulation of what Pierre Bourdieu called symbolic capital: the capabilities we demonstrate, the credentials we earn, the relationships we build and the power we come to exercise. Each of these changes what the other party sees.
The second way acts on the expectation itself. Eleanor Rosch showed that we judge members of a category by their distance from a prototype. The category in which a professional is evaluated determines which prototype applies, and therefore which expectations the market uses to measure us. Choosing that category is a strategic decision, because it selects the standard against which our attributes will be read.
George Lakoff showed that the frame through which an audience interprets a person decides what it considers relevant and legitimate. The same behaviour can meet or breach an expectation depending on the frame in which it is read. Horta-Osório's leave, read within the frame of the infallible banker, was a serious failure against the ought of his role. He returned to Lloyds in early 2012, spoke openly about what had happened and went on to advocate for mental health at work. In doing so he placed the episode within a different frame, one in which recognising one's limits is part of responsible leadership. The market's expectations of him remained demanding, and they now included the possibility of a leader who reaches his limit and says so.
Three movements
I propose three movements to work on this tension.
The first is to understand your own mind. Identify your actual, ideal and ought selves, notice which emotions accompany each gap, and ask where your standards come from. Dejection points to an ideal that feels out of reach. Agitation points to an ought that may never have been examined.
The second is to investigate the expectations of your stakeholders. Find out who holds the decisions that matter to you, what they perceive in you and what they expect, and test these findings against the assumptions you carry. Repeat the exercise as circumstances change, because expectations move with them.
The third is to deliberate on how to manage your ideal and your ought self, finding the right balance between who you think you should be and what the market expects you to be. Some expectations deserve to be accepted as the condition of credibility. Others can be redefined through the category in which you choose to be read and the frame through which you are interpreted. A few may need to be declined, with a clear view of the cost.
This deliberation calls for two attitudes held together. The first is self-love: treating our own ideals and limits with the respect we would offer a person we care about. The second is a sense of service towards the people who make up our market. Bosses, boards and clients are persons with their own needs and their own reasons for expecting what they expect. When we treat them as ends in themselves, and never merely as means to our goals, closing the distance in their minds becomes a form of service, and our reputation grows from the value we create for them.
