Self-promotion for academics is a strange gap in the training. Nobody teaches it. In most cases, nobody even models it well. If you’re lucky, you land with a supervisor who’s worked it out and you can quietly copy their habits. Plenty of PhD students never get that stroke of luck, and end up guessing at how to talk about their own work.
Worse than being untaught, it’s often actively discouraged. Anyone who’s spent time in academic culture will recognise the phrases: stay in your lane, the nail that sticks out gets hammered, who do you think you are. These aren’t throwaway lines. They shape how people behave for years, long after they’ve left the environment that taught them.
What authentic self-promotion actually means
We define it as confidently sharing your accomplishments, skills and strengths, openly and honestly, in a way that aligns with your values, personality and style. That last part matters. Self-promotion doesn’t have to mean performing a version of yourself that feels false or pushy. It means being willing to say what you’ve done and what you’re good at, without shrinking it down to make other people comfortable.
We wrote a bit more about this tension a few weeks ago, in a piece on how humility and self-promotion can end up working against each other, because the discomfort usually isn’t about arrogance. It’s about years of being told that visibility is dangerous.
A reasonable place to start is small. Not a grand rebrand, just one honest thing said out loud this week about work you’re proud of.
If this is something you’d like support working through, it’s the kind of thing we help clients with in coaching.
