Hey, you! Yeah, I mean you! What’s your brand?

In other words, if you were to strip away all the outside pressures and influences from everyone else around you, what would be left? What thoughts and ways of living are 100-percent congruent with who you are inside?

Daydream a little, who would you be if nobody expected you to be a certain person and there was no right or wrong way to live? Can you even imagine?

Do you ever think about whether your convictions are really your own? Do you feel inwardly motivated and passionate about them, or are they a result of you still mindlessly moving through the motions you learned once upon a time?

How about this? Do you really mean what you say or is it something you’ve heard so often that it now rolls effortlessly off your tongue without a second thought?

I was only in fifth grade when I got the shock of my life.

I’d been talking on the phone with a friend of mine. I was folding laundry and mindlessly chattering away, when my friend burst out into laughter and informed me that I sounded just like my mother.

And at that age, it was the most dreadful thing ever to me to sound like my mother! But, there I was, just unconsciously regurgitating responses.

I’d heard my mom respond to situations similar to what I was hearing from my friend that day, and it just slipped out without me even being aware of it.

After thinking about it for a minute, I couldn’t help but admit I just didn’t know what else to say, so I just drew on my reserves of "mom-isms" to fill a silent gap in a telephone conversation.

The habit is hard to break. I say things I hear all the time and then realize it doesn’t quite fit what I really even mean. Canned responses and cliches can’t tell my story for me because they’re not my own words.

Anyway, back to this idea of brands and how it’s relating to authenticity.

If you consider a brand as something that is created to enable marketers to charge more for their product or have the product stand out from the others, then embellishing a marketing platform and masking the truth would seem more relevant to the concept of branding than would total authenticity.

But, stop for a minute, wouldn’t you say that the strongest brands out there are those that are based on authenticity? A strong brand is established from the inside out. A products must live up to the qualities that are being used to support its advertisement and promotion. The strength of a brand is built over a period of time, as it proves for itself that it’s a good brand.

If Mattel communicates that it has the "world’s premier toy brands of today and tomorrow," it had better be selling Harry Potter dolls, not vintage toys, like those dolly pops that were popular in the ’80s.

So, the same is true for personal branding. Your personal brand is based on what is real, true and genuine about you.

Unlike brands in the manufacturing industry, personal brand need not be anything really slick or flowery, though. It’s less about appearance and much more about experiences.

Being your authentic self is about really dialing into a visceral, cellular way of living in the world, without losing yourself in the process.

So, showing up and being actively involved in your own life _ knowing what you want and enjoying what is truly enjoyable _ that’s authenticity.

I’d say that my own personal brand, at this point in my life, is "simplicity."

Let me just clarify, though, that I do not equate simple with being naive or boring. That is actually quite opposite of what I’ve found it to really be about.

My life, in the past, was extraordinarily complex and pretty rigidly structured.

I learned a lot of what I knew from my family members, but I cannot blame them for the life I ended up living, even after leaving home.

I found that in every frustrating circumstance and every annoying scenario that was playing out the same way over and over and over again in my life, always had a single common factor. That common factor was me.

About a year and a half ago I really started digging into what was really going on inside of me and realizing that I wasn’t even sure who or what I was trying to be.

In an effort to remedy the situation, I started tuning into what other people were doing around me. I got inspired in certain cases, but in other cases, I was totally appalled.

I was noticing that the very things I was constantly doing really annoyed me to the core when other people did those same things. It was likely that when I did them, I was annoying a whole lot of people myself.

So, it’s only been about a year and a half since I’ve been really trimming myself back and seeking out who I authentically am beneath all the excesses in my life.

The good part, though, is the more I discover who I’ve been in my past, it pushes me to actively participate in my life, do what I really enjoy, try new things and ditch the synthetic life of rigid patterns, routines and canned responses.

Kate Pavlacka, a graduate of the State University College at Oneonta, has been totally blind for about 10 years.