[HALB Leadership Podcast] Season 1, Episode 5 - Paula Edgar: How can law students build an authentic personal brand?

“Your personal brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room” — and Paula Edgar’s personal brand is so strong that her name kept popping up at a leadership conference that I attended... even though she wasn’t even there! So of course we had to ask #CoachPaula to speak on today’s episode on personal branding.

Paula Edgar is a speaker, executive coach, diversity consultant — and personal branding expert. She is the immediate past President of the Metropolitan Black Bar Association and her former roles include serving as the Chief Diversity Officer at New York Law School, the Associate Director of Career Services at Seton Hall University School of Law, and the Executive Director of Practicing Attorneys for Law Students Program, Inc. (PALS), a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing diversity in the legal profession.

Some takeaways from this episode include:

• Your brand is your professional reputation. It’s the intersection of your skill, energy, emotional intelligence, effort, resilience, and grit all packaged into your outfit that day. It’s what people say about you when you’re in front of them and, even more specifically, what they say about you when you’re not in the room.
• For Paula, the biggest challenge for black law students, law students of color in general and women law students is imposter syndrome. "It is like trying to climb a mountain and putting weights onto your own feet."