The Story Unconsciously Shaping Your Brand: Going from Last to First

Photo of my TV taken moments after the championship ceremony. Congrats IU and all my fellow alums in Hoosier Nation!

On Monday night, my undergrad alma mater, Indiana, did something no one believed possible.

They went from being one of the most losing football teams in the country to winning the national college football championship.

Along the way, they claimed a series of firsts:

The first undefeated season, ever!

The first #1 ranking in school history.
The first on-the-road win against a top-five team since 1967.

And the first Heisman Trophy winner in school history, Fernando Mendoza.

Who, BTW, was only a two-star recruit out of high school, rejected by the University of Miami, and went on to defeat them Monday in the championship. 

He’s also a second-generation Cuban American who delivered part of his inspired, love-filled, teary, humble Heisman speech in Spanish in honor of his grandparents.

When I was at IU, I was the student director of football promotions (I also played, but that’s a different story).

One of my favorite memories was driving the golf cart across the field before it filled with 40,000 fans. During home games, I loved making human waves with my fellow Hoosiers and singing our fight songs—win or lose.

I can still sing them word for word. My favorite line was this: Never daunted. We cannot falter.”

Though in reality, we faltered a lot.

So when I found myself tearing up watching the game, I paused and asked myself, Why am I so emotional?

Yes, it was surreal.
Yes, it was a beautiful, improbable dream.

For decades, Indiana football was known as the team that always came in last.

But the players have taught me something important.

They were rewriting a legacy of being underestimated, overlooked, invisible, dismissed, and ridiculed for decades through vision, teamwork, and radical self-belief.

That shift began two years ago when a new coach arrived with a bold vision.

“You are going to be national champions,” Coach Cignetti told them in the locker room back in 2024.

The press mocked him.
You’ve got to be kidding.

Can you imagine what the players thought the first time they heard it?

But one by one, they made a decision to release the “loser” story and step into a truer one. 

They chose to claim and own a more powerful story of who they were and have it guide their work.

Despite decades of history whispering, You’ll always be last, they changed the outcome by changing their inner story.

They held a clear vision of who they were becoming before the evidence appeared.

As champions before the win.

Here’s the dot I want to connect: Your brand will only grow as far as the story you hold for yourself.

Just like that team, it’s the vision—and the personal story you believe—that creates the space to focus every action, decision, and expression toward what you’re here to build.

The story you live from shapes how you speak.
How you show up.
How others experience your leadership.

It's the tempo that beats underneath your messaging.

The world gives us plenty to feel heavy and heartbroken about. It needs your light, Rana. Your clarity, creativity, and courage to do what you love to heal and innovate into something better.

This game anchored me into that truth.

No matter what limits existed in the past, or what story has been handed to you by others—or by your own mind—you are far bigger than those limits.

But to change your life, you have to change the story you believe.

As we close out the Year of the Snake, I invite you to ask yourself:

What is the limiting story you’re ready to shed in 2026?
And what bigger, truer story is ready to take its place?

Because the truth is—you are a four-million-to-one miracle simply by being alive. You were born to beat the odds.

Odds that are even more impossible than Indiana winning the championship.

So shed the story that no longer fits. And put to paper the story you’re willing to hold instead.

Because what you say to yourself in private doesn’t stay private.

It gets woven energetically and unconsciously into your brand and your hard work.

It matters.

Playing small in 2026 doesn’t serve a broken world. But shining with the fullness of who you are does.

If you don't have your own Coach Cignetti yet, someone to champion your vision and show you the bigger story within you, I’m here. We all need and deserve one.