The ELI and Zuckerman Fellowships are part of CPL's fellowship offerings, which provide tuition support and robust, cohort-based co-curricular programming grounded in servant leadership and experiential learning.
By Nour Ahmed and Eman Muamar
It was a true pleasure to attend the You Are a Brand workshop. This joint session between the Emirates Leadership Initiative (ELI) Fellows and the Zuckerman Fellows was delivered by HKS, CPL, and ELI alumna Dr. Muhra AlMuhairi. Dr. AlMuhairi is a coach, an educator, and founder of both The Art of Being Academy—which facilitates leadership training, coaching, and lifelong learning—and Grow Research and Development, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing research and policy in youth and social development.
Dr. AlMuhairi invited us to reimagine self-awareness as a creative process, one that blends reflection, values, and storytelling into a personal “brand” that represents who we are and what we stand for. The session began with an icebreaker that quickly revealed how small differences make each of us unique. From sharing things we like that others don’t to discussing what people find “weird” about themselves, the exercise encouraged honest self-expression and laughter. It reminded us of how embracing individuality—not conformity—can be a source of confidence and strength.
"The workshop challenged us to look inward, to step into who we are, and to embrace that with more clarity and boldness. The session helped us build a deeper connection with ourselves, our purposes, and those around us."
Nour Ahmed MPP 2027 and Eman Muamar MPP 2027
Shortly after, Dr. AlMuhairi delineated how some classic brands that come to mind are memorable because of their associations with certain values like creativity and frugality. Similarly, she prompted us to reflect on how we can reframe our values in ways that make us unique. This was a particularly powerful exercise because, as she put it, it required us to put aside the criticisms that we occasionally feed ourselves to identify with the positive attributes we possess.
We built on those values to draw a logo that we believe represents ourselves. This exercise was both enjoyable and challenging as it prompted us to tap into our creativity. The process of figuring out how to encompass many of the values that we identified while also drawing something that we felt represented ourselves motivated us to think out of the box and create something metaphorical.
More importantly, the process of first identifying our personal unique values and then representing them visually was grounding and helped emphasize our purpose. The workshop challenged us to look inward, to step into who we are, and to embrace that with more clarity and boldness. The session helped us build a deeper connection with ourselves, our purposes, and those around us. We believe it came at the perfect time, as we kick off our experience at HKS with CPL and ELI. We have kept our logos as a memory of our purpose, and we are looking forward to seeing if and/or how our logos change over the course of our time here.
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