you are the brand

Christian Ray Flores here, feeling introspective,

This is a post inspired by a conversation I had yesterday with my father remembering our crazy adventures growing up.

if you missed it

The latest pod episode where I unpack the 7P Framework I use to help client develop a brand that is less of a marketing strategy and more of a life’s work.

If you haven’t watched it yet - I know it will be a few minutes well spent.

you are the brand

I was five, holding my mother’s hand outside a concentration camp in Chile.

My father was inside. She was talking to an armed guard, trying to pass him food. We were lucky — he came out alive. We spent time in a UN refugee facility before receiving asylum in Germany.

I was seven when I stepped off a plane in Mozambique. I still remember the smell of the hot tropical air that would become familiar as I spent my formative years there. It was my fourth country by age seven.

I coughed for a full year — recovering from months in and out of hospitals with chronic bronchitis and pneumonia. For that same year, I was shy and resistant to social settings. Whiplash from too many languages and cultures in too short a time.

I was nine when I started learning my fourth language — English. I had learned my third, Portuguese, the year before, after my parents enrolled me in a local school the same way you teach a kid to swim: by throwing him in the deep end. Russian and Spanish I had learned from birth, from my parents. I have a now-yellowed page with two columns — one for each language — where my mother wrote my first words.

I was eleven when I experienced my first bombing. A building across the street from where we lived. An echo of a civil war raging in the north of the country. Later that same year, my friends and I watched a spy plane get shot down over the bay after a deafening barrage of anti-aircraft fire.

I was fourteen when my parents divorced and my sister and I boarded a plane to the USSR. I was devastated — my family was broken, and I was leaving the only place I had ever truly loved. We arrived in a depressingly gray Moscow. Lines for food. A one-bedroom apartment. No one who looked or sounded like me. I slept in the kitchen.

I was twenty-one when I graduated from university with a Master’s degree in Economics — and the country everyone believed was an unshakable superpower collapsed like a house of cards. Tanks in the streets of Moscow. An attempted coup. Zero certainty about the future. And beneath all of it, an exhilarating sense of freedom and possibility as a fragile democracy was being forged in real time.

I was twenty-two when I decided to jump off a cliff — abandon a career in my field and pursue music.

I was twenty-three when I recorded my first demo in a studio.

I was twenty-four when I received my first record contract offer, saw my face on national television, and heard my voice on the radio.

I was twenty-five when I released my first album, shot my first music video, appeared on MTV, and played my first crowd of thousands.

I was twenty-six when I played Red Square, toured sports arenas across the country, and had Boris Yeltsin use my song in his presidential campaign against the resurgent Communist Party.

I was thirty when I jumped off a cliff again — after selling millions of albums and touring fifteen countries, I decided I’d had enough. I walked away and transitioned into entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and ministry.

But that’s a story for another time.

You are a collection of ups and downs, left turns and right turns, chapters that don’t seem to connect until suddenly they do. But only when you remember all of it, integrate all of it, and activate all of it in service to others — do you get to serve at the highest level.

You don’t really build a brand.

You are the brand.

Jump off more cliffs. Dare greatly.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​