The Authenticity Triangle: Where Your Strengths, Passions, and Values Meet
Feb 23, 2026
One of the biggest challenges in personal branding is figuring out where to focus.
Should you build around your skills?
Your passions?
Your experience?
Your values?
The answer is all of them.
But not individually.
Together.
Over the years, I’ve worked with professionals, leaders, founders, graduates, and future leaders who often felt pulled in different directions.
They were good at one thing.
Passionate about another.
And deeply cared about something else entirely.
The result?
Confusion.
Mixed messaging.
A personal brand that felt fragmented rather than authentic.
That’s why I developed the Authenticity Triangle.
A simple framework designed to help people identify where their greatest personal brand strength exists.
The framework is built around three powerful questions:
What are you good at?
What do you genuinely enjoy?
What do you believe in?
Most people spend their careers focusing on just one.
Some build around competence.
Others around passion.
Others around purpose.
But the strongest personal brands are built where all three intersect.
Because that’s where authenticity lives.
It’s where your natural strengths align with your interests and values.
It’s where your energy becomes sustainable.
It’s where your message becomes credible.
And it’s where people experience the most consistent version of you.
The challenge isn’t discovering one of these elements.
It’s discovering how they connect.
When they do, everything becomes clearer.
Your content.
Your career direction.
Your positioning.
Your confidence.
Your personal brand.
In this week’s edition of The Brand Build, I explore the Authenticity Triangle framework and explain why understanding the overlap between strengths, passions, and values may be one of the most important steps in building an authentic personal brand.
Read the full LinkedIn newsletter edition of The Brand Build and discover how the Authenticity Triangle can help you build a personal brand that feels natural, sustainable, and uniquely yours.
About Marc Maley
Marc Maley is an international personal brand identity strategist, storytelling expert and founder of My Brand Academy. He works with global stars, sports personalities, creators, talent, founders, CEOs and senior leaders to help them understand who they are, discover what makes them distinctive and build influential personal brands.
For more than twenty years, Marc helped build and tell some of the world's biggest stories. From Harry Potter to Disney and Marvel.
Drawing on his experience working with international brands and individuals, Marc is the Founder of My Brand Academy, a world leading platform that specialises in Identity Intelligence, personal brand strategy, leadership positioning and storytelling, helping people turn their experiences, strengths and perspectives into meaningful opportunities.
His philosophy: Understand who you are. Build who you become.