Self-promotion feels exposing for a reason, and it’s the same reason a lot of us get nervous walking into any situation where we’re the ones being looked at. One of our coaches learned this early in his career from a supervisor, who pointed out that you don’t get nervous when you’re in service. He used to get nervous going into coaching sessions, until his supervisor asked him why he was making it all about himself. Once he saw the session as being about the person in front of him rather than about his own performance, the nerves went.
That idea shows up constantly in the self-promotion work we do with the academics, researchers and professionals we coach. The instinct is to think of self-promotion as standing up and saying look at me, which is exactly why it feels so uncomfortable. Most of the people we work with didn’t get into their field to be seen. They got into it because they cared about a problem.
Start with the mission, not the message
In our self-promotion workshop, before anyone works on how they’ll pitch themselves, we ask them to write out their mission. Why are they doing the work they’re doing, and who does it actually help? That sounds simple, but it changes the whole exercise. Once that’s clear, putting yourself out there stops being about you and starts being about the problem your work could solve. You’re not performing. You’re passing on something useful.
This connects to something we’ve written about before, on how humility and self-promotion can end up working against each other if you let modesty stop you sharing work that could genuinely help someone. The fix isn’t to get louder about yourself. It’s to get clearer about who needs what you know.
If self-promotion still feels like exposure rather than service, that’s often worth exploring with a coach.
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