How to build a personal brand that actually opens doors with Grace Andrews | Future Self Series Ep. 6

So I'm going to share with you how you can reverse engineer your goals through personal branding to make yourself a magnet for the opportunity that feels so out of reach right now.

But look, context is everything.

And I wanna start by providing a little insight into why I believe a personal brand is no longer a nice to have, but a critical building block for anyone looking to gain attention and ultimately trust.

So I wanna kick things off with where we actually are right now, which unfortunately is in the middle of a bit of a trust crisis.

The Edelman Trust Barometer, the world's largest annual trust study,

just published its 2026 findings.

And the headline is that society isn't just losing trust in institutions anymore, it's actually sliding into something they're calling insularity.

Which means 7 in 10 people now say they're unwilling or seriously hesitant to trust anyone who doesn't share their values, their background, or where they get their information.

So trust isn't eroding evenly, it's collapsing inward, into smaller and smaller circles of people we already agree with.

And it's not just the public that's feeling this.

The people running brands are misreading it too.

PWC asked business executives how much they think their customers trust them.

Then they asked the customers themselves.

90% of executives believe they're highly trusted.

Only 30% of customers actually agree.

That is a 60 point gap.

And it's been growing by the way, not shrinking.

Now layer on the attention problem because trust and attention are obviously entangled together.

We're not just distrustful, we're overloaded.

When people are given too much to process, too much content to consume, they don't slow down and evaluate more carefully what they want to watch.

They reach for a shortcut.

We all do that.

We all reach for shortcuts.

And the shortcut people reach for when they genuinely can't evaluate everything in front of them is trust.

And it's trusting in someone specific.