BIO: Amelia Sordell is a speaker, content creator, and Founder of Klowt, the first-of-its-kind personal brand marketing agency.

STORY: Amelia lived all her life seeking external validation, and instead of making her happy, it left her very empty. She eventually decided to invest in herself and now is thriving.

LEARNING: Selfishly invest in yourself before everyone. Always ask yourself if what you’re spending time on has any ROI.

“You can’t serve people in the way that you’re meant to if you’re not first looking after yourself.”

Amelia Sordell

Guest profile

Amelia Sordell is a speaker, content creator, and Founder of Klowt, the first-of-its-kind personal brand marketing agency.

Her desire to oversee her career and live by her own rules led to launching her first business, a clothing brand, at the age of just 21. After the business failed, Amelia’s resilient attitude meant she pivoted her career to become a Tech Headhunter, where she quickly discovered the reach and positive power that an individual personal brand can have on the overall company.

It wasn’t long before people outside the organization began to contact Amelia for her help in building their brands online. Now 31, Amelia has built a 6-figure personal branding agency - Klowt with a team of 7 during the middle of a pandemic, all off the back of her own personal brand.

With a strong following on LinkedIn and with views of 40 million, Amelia and the agency have worked with Tech Startup Founders to FTSE Leadership teams, such as The National Lottery, on building personal brands that deliver actual results so they can scale their lead pipeline, generate more referrals to position themselves as an authority and accelerate their businesses growth.

A strong leader and public speaker, Amelia also often comments on discussions around fairness, equal opportunities and pay, hiring and retaining great talent, the realities of running a startup, and women’s issues online.

Worst investment ever

As a 13-year-old girl, an incident happened, and Amelia suffered tremendous trauma. As a result, she constantly sought external validation from others, particularly men, in relationships, friendships, and online. Amelia was obsessed with how people perceived her looks to the point of losing a lot of weight and ended up with a bad case of bulimia. Amelia believed that if she could control the external narrative she was telling people, she wouldn’t have to deal with her internal feelings about how she felt herself. She just wanted people to like her.

Amelia lived like this through to her 30s, and it affected her actions, behaviors, friendships, relationships, the jobs she took, etc. She finally got to a point where she realized she wasn’t happy. Not in her marriage, her home, her job, everything. She found herself constantly wondering what she was doing with her life.

Amelia checked all the things she was spending her time on and realized she didn’t enjoy any of them. She loved her kids and loved spending time with them. But that was about it. There was nothing else in her life that was making her feel happy. She was at a harrowing point in her life. Amelia decided to look inward and invest in herself. She filed for divorce, quit her job, and started a business.

Lessons learned

Selfishly invest in yourself before everyone.
Always ask yourself if what you’re spending time on has any ROI. ROI doesn’t need to be cash. It could be happiness, fitness, good health, the overall sense of well-being, etc.
You can’t serve people how you’re meant to serve them if you’re not first looking after yourself.

Andrew’s takeaways

You have a right and the ability to have everything in this life. But you’ve got to make a choice.

Actionable advice

Write down a list of the things that trigger you to feel unhappy, depressed, or trapped. Underneath that, you write down what makes you feel calm and happy. And then underneath that, write down a routine explicitly built around the things that make you feel good and completely ignore the things that trigger you.

No.1 goal for the next 12 months

Amelia’s goal for the next 12 months is, first of all, to be the best mom she can be. The second goal is to grow her business to be known synonymously with personal branding. She wants Klowt to be known as THE (not a) personal branding agency in the world.

Parting words

“You’re the only person in your life that will be there for you unconditionally. So protect yourself at all costs.”

Amelia Sordell

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