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Thought Leadership: Build Authority, Personal Brand
309 students
Thought Leadership: Build Authority, Personal Brand
thought leadership | personal branding | building authority | content strategy | public speaking | executive presence
Last updated 9/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Write a positioning statement that says what you are known for and to whom
- Audit how you are currently described, including by AI models
- Build a messaging matrix: one position turned into six repeatable messages
- Turn what you know but never wrote down into publishable material
- Produce content faster using AI trained on your own documents and tone
- Design the architecture of an expert's public profile, and its limits
- Handle a reputational problem in the first 24 hours instead of the first week
- Hold a room: group dynamics, resistance, and how to open and close a session
- Measure authority with reputation indicators rather than reach
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
Explore related topics
Course content
14 sections • 39 lectures • 19h 10m total length
Requirements
- Real expertise in something. This course amplifies, it does not invent
- No marketing, PR or design background required
- An AI assistant account. Free tiers work for most of the material
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- Willingness to publish something imperfect before it feels ready
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Ask ten people who respect you what you are known for. If you get ten different answers, you do not have an expert brand. You have a good reputation, which is not the same thing.
The gap this closes
You have fifteen years of hard-won judgement and no way for anyone outside your building to find out. The people getting invited to speak, quoted in articles and called about advisory work are not consistently better at the work than you are. They are legible. They have one sentence that says what they do and who it is for, and they have said it enough times that it stuck. Most experts skip that step entirely and start posting, which produces volume without recognition — a lot of effort that leaves no impression at all.
What this course covers
Thirty-seven lessons in the order the work actually goes. Positioning first: an audit of how you are described today, including by AI systems, then the positioning formula, fifty generated options stress-tested down to one, a messaging matrix, tone of voice and visual code, and metrics that are not reach. Then the raw material: getting the knowledge out of your head and into a form that can be published, structuring it, running retrospectives on your own mistakes, and checking whether any of it is used. Then production: generating and rewriting, adapting to a required style, images, structuring complexity, and building an assistant on your own documents so it writes in your voice rather than a generic one. Then authority proper: how trust is managed rather than announced, narrative and message framework, channels and opinion leaders, the architecture of an expert's public profile, public speaking and interviews, the boundaries of publicity, what to do in the first 24 hours of a reputational problem, and reputation measurement. Then the stage: Dale's cone, session design, group dynamics, resistance, metaphor as a teaching device, and webinars. Finally the conversion: development plan, profile, networking, getting onto a conference stage, negotiation, and mentors.
A note on the source material
Five of the six blocks were recorded as corporate role courses rather than personal branding courses. That is deliberate. You are getting the operating system a company applies to its own brand and reputation, pointed at one person instead. Brand and communications material transfers almost unchanged apart from budget scale; the knowledge block was written for a company wiki and is applied here to your own expertise; the training block is about live business training. The final block was recorded for a people-function audience, so its examples are drawn from that field even though the mechanics are general.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 37 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working material: the positioning canvas, the messaging matrix, the audit scorecard, tone of voice, the crisis playbook, the health dashboard, a 90-day plan
AI workflows for audit, positioning generation, content production and monitoring
Where to start
Write the sentence now, before lesson one. "I help [who] with [what]." Whatever comes out will be too vague, and that is exactly the point — you will rewrite it in section one. Enrol now and start today.
Who this course is for:
- Specialists who are respected internally and unknown outside the building
- Consultants and freelancers whose pipeline depends on being remembered
- Senior professionals moving into advisory, board or speaking work
- Founders who need a public profile but not a corporate marketing team
- Coaches, trainers and instructors building an audience for their work
- People who post regularly and cannot say what they are actually known for
- Experts asked to speak, write or comment and unsure how to convert it