We heard a story recently about a mentor in academia who, by any measure, was a proper leader. Big network, plenty of papers, people who trusted him. When asked what makes a good leader, he said not to ask him, because he thought he was a horrible one himself.
His reasoning was that he never stood up in front of groups. Everything he did was by email and one-to-one. In his head, that didn’t count as leadership. But it clearly did. He’d just found a way of doing it that suited him, rather than copying the version he thought leadership was supposed to look like.
Self-promotion that suits you doesn’t need a stage
This is exactly what we say to the people we work with about self-promotion and networking. If the thought of standing up at a conference makes you want to disappear, that doesn’t mean you’re bad at self-promotion. It might just mean the format is wrong for you. Send the emails instead. Build relationships one person at a time. Make it your own, and it still counts.
We wrote a while back about how humility can quietly stop you sharing work that could help people, and this mentor’s story sits right alongside that. He wasn’t chasing visibility for its own sake. He was doing the work in a way that felt honest to him, and the recognition followed anyway.
A simple question worth sitting with: what would your version of self-promotion look like if it were actually enjoyable? Not the version you think you’re supposed to perform, but the one that fits how you actually work.
If this is something you’d like to think through properly, it’s the kind of thing we help people with in coaching.
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