goldie chan teaches personal branding for introverts

Meet Goldie Chan – a proud introvert who has, among many other things, launched a branding agency, written a book all about personal branding for introverted folks, and survived cancer. She's a total inspiration, so we decided to have a little catch-up with her during our trip to Miami this month for Adobe MAX 2024. 

First off, can you please tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do? Hi! I'm Goldie Chan. I am a creative, a writer and an Adobe ambassador.

How did you get the gig as an ambassador for Adobe? Oh gosh, so I actually started doing work with Adobe on the B2B (business to business) side of things – the serious business enterprise side. A lovely woman, Rani Mani (Adobe’s Digital Media Customer Communications Lead), found me originally. I had been making videos on LinkedIn, and at one point I was actually the number one video creator on the platform. She discovered me because she had found a bunch of my videos.

I've never really heard of people using LinkedIn for video before. What made you decide to use that platform over others? Sheer stubbornness. I got into the video beta, and I thought, “This is a really interesting platform to experiment on.” And I also thought, “Nobody's going to watch these,” because it's so uncool to be making videos on LinkedIn. And the great irony was because I was in so early, and made over two years’ worth of daily consecutive videos, I essentially blew up my own personal brand.

You run an agency, Warm Robots. What do you do there? We're a branding marketing agency. We're a great team and very small. We're based out of Los Angeles and it's been really fun to run an agency that really works on, for example, C-level personal brands. So corporate executive personal brands, but also branding and marketing strategy behind the scenes, and community ambassador program-building behind the scenes. I love working behind the scenes.

Why is that? I do a lot of in-front-of-camera work, and so with my agency work, I love behind-the-camera strategy work. I think it gets two sides of your brain going.

You've got a book coming out – Personal Branding for Introverts. Why are you drawn to this topic? So, I know that no one believes this, but I myself am an introvert, and I love the idea of a personal brand book specifically for introverts. I think what's so cool about that is it has not really been addressed in other books. I think there are a lot of other books about how you can work better as an introvert, but very few that talk about promotion of yourself as an introvert, and also how introversion is a superpower. It is really powerful to be an introvert, and it's not a negative – it's a positive. 

Do you think there's a misconception that introverted people aren't confident or strong? Yes – I have one section in the book I'm really proud of, called “Loud Introverts”. And I think that there's such a misconception that introverts can't be confident or loud just because they are introverted, which can be an array of things – there's a variety of segments of introverts. There are so many ways in which introverts can surprise you and have what we consider to be extroverted qualities, but are still truly introverts. And a lot of it has to do with our little internal batteries and how they run down over time. I actually wrote a couple of Forbes articles about this. It was really interesting – so, one of the things that I actually have used Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant for was the initial concepting of this book. I used AI Assistant to look through some of the research documents that myself and my team put together. What is so neat is it was able to look within only those documents, so it's an enclosed environment that uses machine learning to comb through, and I was able to pull out these very cool stats about introverts and fun facts about introverts from a very lengthy scientific document. It was probably hundreds of pages, but I was able to really distil it down into a few bullet points. That was so helpful when I wrote the initial article that really inspired this book.

So even though you'd put that research together, did anything come back from the AI that really surprised you? Things that stood out that you didn't realise the first time? Yeah. I think there are a couple of interesting neuro-related facts. Like how extroverts get that dopamine rush around people – which does make sense in the long run – and how introverts don't get that. So the way the brain functions for a lot of introverts, is they just simply do not get that physical rush of excitement from being around so many people. And that's part of why introverts also feel a certain way versus extroverts.

You mentioned that there are a few different types of introverts. Which type are you and how does that impact the way that you work? I am an anxious introvert. So once again, people don't believe this, but I am a socially anxious introvert. If you put me in a social situation, like a social party, it makes me incredibly anxious because I don't know what my role is at the party. However, in a situation like this, at Adobe MAX, I know what my role is. I'm an Adobe ambassador, and so I know what I'm talking about. I know what my role is with you here, but at a social party, I'm like, “What do we talk about?” And I default, usually, to amazing shoes. “Best shoes I've seen in my entire life!” Because I'm just like, “Oh, the small talk.” Part of what I wrote in my little book is easy small-talk starters, so people can have more things to talk about, because I totally get that, as an introvert myself, who sometimes struggles with small talk – how do you do it?

Do you have a piece of advice for creative people who are introverted but want to get their work out there? Yeah, I think something that is incredibly powerful that we didn't have 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, is the internet. So what's so beautiful about that is we have all these wonderful social platforms that we can now use to get ourselves out there. So one of the cool things about Adobe Express, which I also work pretty heavily in, is it allows you to schedule posts so you can create social posts about the work that you do and get it out there. I've done a couple of seminars with writers about: how do you make your work visual? Because if you think about it, I mean, writing is literally text, right? So it's so hard to think: how do writers who are also creative individuals get their pieces of work out there? And it's all about formatting it into a visual thing. And for so many people, they're like, “Oh, gosh, I have to upload it onto a social platform.” If you can use a scheduling tool like the one in Adobe Express, you can then schedule it out, and then you can be promoting your work and – this is the selling point – you don't have to talk to a single person. It just gets out there.

Follow Goldie at @goldiecylon and nab her book, Personal Branding for Introverts, from Public Affairs Books in 2025.