Happy Pride Month!

In this special Pride Month episode of the Lead With Your Brand Podcast, Jayzen celebrates and amplifies the voices of LGBTQ+ leaders, executives, creatives, advocates, and changemakers from the Pride On Brand collection.

But before diving into these powerful conversations, Jayzen opens with an important reminder: you have a brand, whether you realize it or not. The real question is whether you are consciously and strategically leading with the brand you want, or are you allowing others to define it for you?

Jayzen shares a personal story from early in his career, when he realized that others were assigning a brand to him based on only one part of who he was. At first, it felt light and fun. But over time, he began to understand that the perception being created was not necessarily the brand that would help him move into the next level of leadership. It became a powerful “aha” moment: when you do not put your own brand forward, people will create one for you.

This episode brings that lesson to life through a powerful Pride Month clip reel featuring LGBTQ+ leaders who have turned their identities, lived experiences, values, and visibility into sources of strength, impact, and career breakthrough.

Key Takeaways

• Your lived experience can become one of your greatest leadership superpowers
• Being authentic at work is not separate from professional excellence
• Your brand will not be everyone’s cup of tea, and that is exactly why finding the right brand fit matters
• Visibility, service, and giving back can all become powerful career accelerators

In this special episode, Jayzen revisits conversations with an incredible group of LGBTQ+ leaders and changemakers, including:

• Congressman Mark Takano, on becoming the first openly LGBTQ+ person of color elected to Congress.
• Jen Henderson, technology executive, on being known for your expertise and leadership and also proudly owning the identity and lived experience that shape who you are
• Erin Uritus, CEO of Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, on stepping into leadership with authenticity and not trying to be anyone but herself
• Chris Mossiah, Executive Director at JPMorgan Chase, on turning insecurities into superpowers and treating their name as a brand
• Sarah Kate Ellis, President and CEO of GLAAD, on visibility, media representation, and using your platform to make the world safer for LGBTQ+ families
• Beck Bailey, Chief Diversity Officer at Accenture, on combining business expertise with lived experience to create systemic change
• Christelle Miller, Senior Creative Executive at Fable Entertainment, on the importance of representation behind the scenes and on screen
• Wilson Cruz, actor and activist, on breaking barriers in the Star Trek universe and engaging in meaningful dialogue about representation
• Stephen Macias, Chief Inclusion Officer for Octagon, on building a career rooted in values, advocacy, entertainment, and culture
• Louis Vega, President of Dow North America, on giving back and helping make the path easier for the next generation
• Matt Brooks, Vice President and head of enterprise data tech and solutions at Nationwide, on how employee resource groups can build confidence, visibility, skills, and career momentum.
• Legendary Disney Imagineer Bob Gurr, on how far the LGBTQ+ community has come and why visibility across generations matters

This Pride Month, Jayzen challenges listeners to ask themselves: What are the unique lived experiences, perspectives, and strengths that can become your calling card as you lead with your brand to your next career breakthrough?

Links

To book Jayzen for a speaking engagement or workshop, visit Jayzenpatria.com

To hear the full conversations from the Pride On Brand collection, visit leadwithyourbrand.com/pride

This week on the Lead With Your Brand podcast, Jayzen Patria challenges listeners to think about their network not as a contact list, but as one of the most powerful amplifiers of their career brand.

It is not enough to deliver great work, build a strong reputation, and know what you stand for. If no one sees it, hears it, or can speak to your value when you are not in the room, your brand can only go so far.

Inspired by a recent trip to New York and a reconnection with this week’s guest, Andrew Turner, Jayzen breaks down how to keep your network alive with intention. Jayzen also explores how self-similarity bias and proximity bias can quietly shrink your professional world. It is easy to spend time with the people who look like you, think like you, work near you, or sit in the same functional lane. But the strongest career networks are built by intentionally reaching beyond the familiar.

To help listeners put this into action, Jayzen shares practical tools, including creating a personal network “treasure map,” asking for AIR (Advice, Insights, and Recommendations) as an easy way to reconnect, and treating LinkedIn as technology that powers your professional network, not just another social media platform.

The challenge is clear - do not just build your network. Keep the embers alive.

Key Takeaways:

• Your network is not just a list of people you know; it is a system of influencers who can amplify your brand
• Self-similarity bias and proximity bias can limit your network if you do not intentionally break out of them
• Use a network treasure map to diagnose where you already have strong connections and where you need to build new ones
• AIR (Advice, Insights, and Recommendations) is a simple, authentic model to reconnect without making it feel awkward
• LinkedIn only works if you are active. Like, comment, post, and show up consistently so your brand stays top of mind

Jayzen is joined by Andrew Turner, Employee Engagement Director for Diageo North America. Andrew’s career is a powerful example of how your passions and past experiences can become a differentiator in the work you do today.

A classically trained actor and self-described “reformed actor,” Andrew has built a career helping major organizations connect with employees through communications, culture, and engagement. From Universal Studios and NBCUniversal to Travelers and now Diageo, Andrew shares how he learned to meet audiences where they are, create community inside large companies, and bring creativity, storytelling, and performance into corporate life.

Guest Bio

Andrew Turner, Employee Engagement Director, Diageo North America

Andrew Turner is an experienced employee engagement and communications leader who’s spent his career helping large organizations connect more meaningfully with their people. As Employee Engagement Director for North America at Diageo, he leads strategies that bring the company’s culture, purpose, and performance ambitions to life—making sure employees feel informed, involved, and motivated to play their part. He’s particularly focused on strengthening a sense of ownership and pride across the business, while finding creative ways to tell the stories behind Diageo’s brands and people.

Andrew is known for turning complex ideas into clear, engaging communication that actually resonates. Before joining Diageo, he held senior roles at Travelers, where he helped modernize internal communications for a 30,000-person workforce, and at NBCUniversal, where he spent over a decade leading global engagement efforts, executive messaging, and large-scale change communications. He started his career at Universal Studios, working at the intersection of communications and digital during a time when companies were just beginning to rethink how they connect with employees online.

What sets Andrew apart is his belief that culture isn’t just something you talk about - it’s something you actively shape. He brings a mix of strategic thinking and storytelling to his work, helping organizations build environments where people feel connected, valued, and ready to contribute. He holds a degree from Boston College and completed postgraduate studies at the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art, which explains his natural instinct for a good story.

Links

To book Jayzen for a speaking engagement or workshop, visit Jayzenpatria.com

This week on the Lead With Your Brand podcast, Jayzen Patria challenges you to look beyond external obstacles and take a deeper look at what may really be standing in the way of your next career breakthrough. Before your brand, before your next move, before your next opportunity, there is your career strategy. And at the center of that strategy is your mindset.

So the question becomes,” What is actually getting in your way?”

For many of us, it’s not the market, the role, or the timing. It’s the self-limiting beliefs we’ve built over time the ones that helped us succeed early on, but may now be holding us back.

Jayzen shares a personal story about how his belief that he needed to “be the best” helped him stand out and accelerate early in his career. But as he moved into leadership, that same belief created friction, driving competition over collaboration and limiting his ability to lead effectively.

The breakthrough came from shifting that belief, from needing to be the best to focusing on being excellent and helping others be excellent too. Because the mindset that helps you survive one stage of your career is not always the one that will help you thrive in the next.

Key Takeaways from Jayzen’s Teach:

• Your mindset drives your career strategy, not the other way around
• The beliefs that helped you succeed early in your career can become barriers later
• Self-limiting beliefs often show up as habits or patterns you don’t question
• Growth requires identifying those beliefs and intentionally rewriting them

In this episode, Jayzen sits down with Anya Cheng, Founder and CEO of Taelor, an AI-powered styling platform helping professionals show up with confidence without the time, effort, or stress of managing their wardrobe.

Anya’s journey is a powerful example of building a career by creating opportunities instead of waiting for them. After moving to the United States from Taiwan and graduating during the 2008 recession, she had no network and no clear path forward. Instead, she built one, reaching out to hundreds of people, finding ways into rooms she wasn’t invited to, and consistently asking for opportunities.

That persistence led her to leadership roles across major brands, including Target, eBay, McDonald’s, and Meta, where she helped launch Facebook and Instagram Shopping. Today, she is a venture-backed founder building at the intersection of AI, personal branding, and how people show up in their daily lives.

This episode is a reminder that your next breakthrough doesn’t come from trying to be everything to everyone. It comes from understanding what makes you distinct and building from there.

Guest Bio

Anya Cheng, Founder and CEO of Taelor

Anya Cheng is the Founder & CEO of Taelor, an AI-powered men's clothing subscription service promoting sustainable fashion. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur, she has been recognized among "Girls in Tech 40 Under 40" for her expertise in tech product management and marketing.

Anya played a pivotal role in launching Facebook and Instagram Shopping at Meta, led new business expansion at eBay, and helped grow McDonald’s global food delivery. She also shaped Target’s mobile commerce and has led teams in AI, eCommerce product management, and marketing across Fortune 500 companies.

Anya’s award-winning venture, Taelor AI, was named one of the Bay Area’s Most Innovative Startups to Watch by Business Journal and is backed by early investors in NVIDIA, TikTok, Facebook, Lyft, and Spotify.

Anya’s work has earned her 30+ prestigious tech and marketing awards. A best-selling author and two-time TEDx speaker, she teaches at Northwestern University and is a popular keynote speaker worldwide. She holds a Master’s in Integrated Marketing Communications from Northwestern University and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Links

To book Jayzen for a speaking engagement or workshop, visit Jayzenpatria.com

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