Stop Handing Away Your Power: Rethinking Authority in Creative Branding

In this solo episode, Jazzmyn breaks down the cultural moment surrounding Mel Robbins’ recent op-ed and Pantone’s Color of the Year announcement—and uses both as a powerful entry point into a larger conversation about authority, creative autonomy, and visibility.

If you’ve ever wondered why certain voices dominate the conversation (even when their takes fall flat), or why trend-driven branding feels increasingly hollow, this episode invites you back into your own power.

Jazzmyn explores:

• Why creators keep centering people and institutions that uphold the status quo
• How to decenter authority without slipping into cynicism
• What the Pantone “Cloud Dancer” discourse reveals about conformity vs. creative courage
• The real reason Mel Robbins’ takes feel grating—and what it teaches us about visibility
• How to build a brand that leads with nuance, vibrancy, and originality
• Why your creative orbit expands the moment you stop waiting for industry validation

This episode is a call to reclaim your voice, challenge who you grant influence to, and create from a place of bold self-trust—not passive consumption.

If you’re ready to show up louder, brighter, and more unapologetically aligned in 2026, this conversation is your permission slip.

Follow Jazzmyn on Instagram @healingwithjazzmyn for updates, behind-the-scenes insights, and upcoming announcements.

Visibility is a long game—let’s play it on our own terms.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

Are you sitting with thousands of hours of B-roll content and telling yourself, I'll start posting tomorrow? Are you in your head worried about your friends and family thinking your cringe for choosing to be visible? Are you chasing trends instead of building influence? Welcome to the Visibility Standard where the visionaries of today are changing the roles of their industries and letting their voice be heard. I'm your host, Jasmine, and we are setting the standard. Mel Robbins and Pantone really took to the scene this week in the creator space. I'm gonna talk about it here. Hi, I'm Jasmine, your host of the Visibility Standard, where visibility is the standard. This is the space for creatives, wellness entrepreneurs, founders to find their voice, to build authentic brands, and build strategic toolkits that allow them to show up boldly and proudly. Like I said, we're gonna talk about what's been going on in the creator space. I've been loving using my solo episodes to respond to what is going on out there and linking it back to visibility, strategy, authentic branding, all of those things that we need to be visible. To start the week, we had Mel Robbins op-ed piece. She co-authored Life's Too Short to Argue with Your Family, and Pantone dropped its color of the year for 2026 Cloud Dancer. My opinion on both are neutral. As a creator, and I think the overarching message of this episode today is I am becoming very specific about who I give authority to. So I'm not gonna sit here and comment on it. What I am going to comment on though is how willing we are to give our authority to experts that have already proven they uphold the status quo. When we think about building authentic brands, when we think about building legacies beyond what is already in front of us, our leaders need to look very different. Our leaders need to be embodying that they are really forging a different path forward. Mel Robbins said exactly what we thought she would say. What we thought she would say. Her content unanimously has been fairly surface-level psych pop insights. She has really good marketing, she's willing to be visible, she's willing to be loud about the things that she believes have benefited her healing. Again, benefited her healing. But we are looking for her to speak on nuances, on experiences, on education that she doesn't have. So when I don't understand why we're shocked that she's offering insight when she's never really, she has never really reflected, embodied, professed that she understands more nuanced, complicated dynamics or experiences, and she doesn't really talk about them. She talks about what has worked for her, and then she tries to say, Well, if this worked for me, it should definitely work for you too. I fucking hope. Like fingers crossed, that it works for you. The only difference from her and a licensed professional is that she is visible. She chooses to be as audacious and loud about what she believes will benefit your mental health regardless of the consequences, because she is not someone that sits across from people where what she says has real life consequences. So I don't understand why we're holding her to that standard. Let her be, let her be a psych pop speaker, orator, podcast host. Let her continue to market, and then what you can do is use your voice. What you can do is to build a brand, build a platform that also contributes to the conversation. What you can do is leverage the credibility that you already have, leverage the skill set that you already have, and show the fuck up. Like, well, why is everyone giving so much weight to what Mel Robbins is saying? Why, like, why is she speaking on these things? She's speaking on these things, and people are listening because she's willing to share them. She's got the balls enough to share it publicly, and it's up to us to filter in that conversation, to make a dent in what she's spewing, and to be bold about offering nuanced, complicated takes. My tagline, if you've seen in my social media bios, is making nuance hot again because we've lost it. We have so deeply lost the plot, and it's reflected in our responses to people on social media. It is reflected in how we engage with content that we don't like on social media. We are very quick to react, to leave a comment that might feel good in the moment, but may not reflect a more nuanced, balanced response. Mel Robbins has this ability to share a take and to irritate the fuck out of people. That is something I'm curious about. What is it about what she is saying that is so frustrating that it dysregulates every part of who you are? Where you can't just say, okay, this doesn't apply to me. I'm not going to feed it more. I'm not going to give it more energy. I am going to consume, I'm going to uplift creators and people who are sharing the message, who have the experience and who are willing to do the work to offer nuanced, complicated takes on all things life and relationships. In my mind, there is a simple solution to decentering her. It may be a 10-step process, but if you do not want her front and center, stop making her front and center in the dialogue. And that doesn't go for just her. That goes for any creator that you don't agree with. That goes for any content that you find really misses the mark for what you're interested in consuming. You can decenter it. Part of what has allowed me to maintain the creative orbit that I have that has allowed me to expand my way of thinking, creating, how I choose to share online, that is largely contributed to the creators I choose to follow. The creators that I choose to engage with. And even as it relates to my friendships, being able to have the conversations that both encourage me and challenge me, we can decenter her at any time, or any creator at any given time that we find is not progressing commentary or does not align with our values or the messaging that we want to propel forward. But saying her name a thousand times online, click-through rate just went up 5,000. Her views just went up a million. Pantone, similar vibe. Cloud Dancer has been named the color of the year for 2026. It's a shade of white for folks who have stayed away from the discourse or have no clue what I'm talking about. I genuinely thought people were misspelling pantine. And I was so confused. And I went to threads and I was like, okay, what the fuck is Pantone? And I had people graciously tell me what it was, and so I looked into it. I read it. We had the Sydney Sweeney, good jeans, and now we've got Pantone saying white or cloud dancer. Sorry, cloud dancer is the color of 2026. Now I've seen so much different discourse from perspectives from artists, perspectives from social justice commentators, uh ranging from great, we are again centering whiteness, to cloud dancer embodies a blank canvas to dream bigger, to dream beyond what is in front of you. Okay. When I looked at that color, the first word that came up for me was conformity. It elicited this feeling that if we all just stay pretty neutral, stay calm, stay collected, that we will elicit this feeling of starting over, starting anew. This conforming color scheme has been in the limelight for the last five, ten years. We've moved into the beige to the neutral color schemes. You see it on your static posts, you see it in people's house designing, minimalist color, minimalist expression. We've already leaned in to that. I understand both perspectives, but Pantone isn't offering a new perspective at all. They are simply reinforcing the very boring layout that already exists. Okay, it's a blank canvas. Unfortunately, people believe that being a blank canvas is how they are palatable. People believe that having this blank space or having this neutrality is how they are meant to survive in the world. When is something going to remind us that vibrancy, that color, that brightness is okay? That is one of the things that I really love about Suzanne Lambert's marketing. She has stayed true to the political Barbie, offering hot takes, offering bold, authentic conversations in the political space, and she always rocks the hot pink. She hasn't conformed into the tan suit. She hasn't gotten the black and navy blue look with the loafers. I saw her Spotify rapped post. It was like a lot of hip-hop, rap music, and she was like, sorry, I don't have the greasy Abrams, the sad girl era reeking my Spotify Rop. And honestly, that was so real of her. Honestly, more of us can take a page from her playbook. When we allow ourselves to engage fully in our creative process to step away from what feels safe, what feels comfortable? That's where the magic happens. And I want to challenge where you are giving authority to. Okay. Seeing that has actually only embraced my desire to really revamp the static post. I've been talking about it a little bit on a lot of different episodes of how kind of blank slate my static posts feel. Seeing that has only encouraged me to use as much color and as much vibrancy and as much joy as I can communicate through my static posts. Because why not? Right? Why not? Because when we dare to be ourselves, when we dare to allow ourselves to go against the industry's standards or what it dictates to believe, dictates to be in trend in style, that's where we find our authenticity. That's where we find our voice. That's where our aligned clients, our aligned audience, aligned opportunities. That's when those things will find us. When we allow ourselves to step away from what other people are doing, when we allow ourselves to imagine ourselves as something braver, bolder, more forward-thinking. That's where the good stuff comes in. I'm telling you. But we have to stop centering these platforms and people that have already shown us they are a part of the status quo. They've already shown it to us. Being shocked that the color red is red is wild to me. And something to consider. Why are we expecting red to be purple? Why are we expecting red to be white? It already showed it's red. I think rather than looking for people to change with the times, we start centering businesses and people and missions that are already doing the work, that are already saying, you know what, fuck this. I'm building something different, and my people are gonna find me, and that's enough. They're not folding, they're not caving, they're waiting their time. They're doing it right the first time, and that's a long game. That's a long game in visibility. I made a post over on LinkedIn about visibility being a test of grit, of being misunderstood, of being of allowing other people to perceive you and make choices based on what you share to create an opinion of you, and I'm still flexing that muscle, and I think Threads has allowed me to do that best in podcasting, and I only hope to continue translating that on my more short form platforms. We have to be willing to practice what it is we're trying to reject. That's my two cents on everything. I would love to hear your thoughts. I have some really exciting things in the works that I'm excited to announce and share as they continue to evolve. You definitely want to follow me over on Instagram at Healing with Jasmine. That's where most of the updates will always live. I hope you are using the end of this year to reflect on your own legacy. I hope you're using the end of this year to think about all the ways the universe has shown up and really shown out for you this year, processing those levels of gratitude, and also thinking about how you want to crush it in 2026. I do have a New Year's Aspirations episode coming at the end of this year. It is heartfelt, it is real, it is only the second time I've cried on my own show as the host, so I'm excited for you all to hear it, but you know where to find me, and I'll see you on Friday.