About Rúna Magnúsdóttir

I have spent most of my life exploring one question:

What shapes the way we see ourselves — and what becomes possible when we begin to see beyond it?

I was born, raised and still live in Iceland.

My entrepreneurial journey began in 1988, when I joined my mother — my greatest role model — in building our wholesale company, Bergís. I was 27 years old, learning business the wonderfully traditional way: by doing it, making mistakes and occasionally pretending I knew exactly what I was doing.

I sold the company in 2006.

By then, I had become less interested in what made a business successful and increasingly curious about what made people believe they could — or could not — succeed in the first place.

That curiosity changed the direction of my life.

From personal branding to the boxes we live and lead from

My work in personal branding began with helping entrepreneurs, leaders and politicians recognise what made them distinctive.

Not what the market said they should become.

Not the polished version they thought other people wanted.

Who they already were — when they stopped trying quite so hard to fit into someone else’s idea of success.

I created personal-branding programmes, co-created the EU-WIIN BRANDit programme and wrote Branding Your X-Factor. I also founded Connected Women, one of the early international online communities for women entrepreneurs.

But the deeper I went into identity, the more I noticed something else.

People were not only struggling to see their strengths. They were living and leading inside invisible expectations about success, gender, power and belonging.

We were putting ourselves and one another into boxes — and then behaving as though the boxes were reality.

That insight became The Story of Boxes and Exploring Boxes: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly™, which I co-created with Nicholas Haines. It later led to my third book, Beyond Gender: The New Rules of Leadership.

Different projects. The same question:

What has been shaping us without our awareness?

The room that shaped my thinking

Following Iceland’s financial collapse, I became involved in the National Assembly — a gathering created to bring citizens together to explore the values they wanted at the heart of rebuilding the country.

I saw what can happen when people are invited to pause, speak honestly and listen beyond the familiar divisions.

Not everyone agreed. That was never the point.

The point was to make room for something other than automatic reactions and the loudest voices in the room.

That experience strengthened a belief that still sits at the centre of my work today:

We do not see reality exactly as it is. We interpret it through our experiences, habits, assumptions and boxes.

And when we become aware of what we are looking through, we create more room for choice.

When my own work had to work on me

In October 2024, I broke five bones in a cycling accident.

My life went from international travel, speaking and coaching to a wheelchair, rehabilitation and needing help with things I had previously done without thinking.

Very humbling.

Also, frankly, rather inconvenient.

During those months, I began using AI with my own methodologies — not simply to find information or produce answers, but as a personal mirror for reflection.

I brought together the Five Energies, Exploring Boxes™ and the patterns identified through the Beyond Boxes Index™. Through intentional conversations with AI, I could pause, examine my reactions and notice what I was sometimes too close to see on my own.

The reflection created the insight. AI created a new opportunity for that reflection.

That experience became BeBBY™ — a personalised AI reflection partner designed to help leaders see themselves more clearly, ask better questions and make more conscious choices.

BeBBY stands for Better, Bolder, Brighter You.

Not a different you.

Not a more acceptable you.

More of the person who was already there.

Where all the threads meet

Today, my work brings together more than twenty years of entrepreneurship, personal branding, leadership development, gender research, human behaviour and conscious reflection.

The Five Energies help us understand what drives us.

Exploring Boxes™ helps us recognise how we interpret what happens around us.

The Beyond Boxes Index™ helps make our recurring patterns and blind spots more visible.

BeBBY™ gives people a personalised space to reflect on those insights in everyday life and leadership.

Together, they help us move from being:

Awake — to what is happening.
Aware — of what may be shaping our response.
Attuned — to the choices available to us now.

Because brilliant, capable people do not repeat the same patterns because they lack intelligence.

Often, we simply cannot see the pattern while we are standing inside it.

Writer, speaker and professional question-asker

I am the author of three books and have spoken at the United Nations, HubSpot’s INBOUND, Enterprising Women, ELEVATE NORDIC and conferences across Europe and North America.

My work has been featured in HuffPost, The Times, The Telegraph, Metro and Psychology Today. In 2025, MSN named me one of its Top 10 Leading Speakers to Follow.

Awards and stages are lovely. I am genuinely grateful for them.

But the work has never really been about being the person on the stage with the answers.

It is about helping people notice the question they have not yet asked.

The box they have mistaken for reality.

The habit they have mistaken for personality.

Or the part of themselves they have been editing out because nobody told them it was an asset.

Because lasting change rarely begins when someone tells us who to become.

It begins when we see more clearly what has been running us — and realise that we have a choice.