The Tug-of-War Between Being Taken Seriously vs. Being Yourself Online

How to get over this and integrate your brand in an explosive way

I was on a group call with my private community, Brand Inner Circle, recently, and one of the things that's been a genuine joy lately is watching a handful of members hit a tipping point all around the same time — gaining speed, gaining followers, paying opportunities, and generally gaining the kind of momentum that's hard to manufacture and impossible to fake.

It turned out one of them, Justin, had already said it out loud. When another member asked him point-blank,

“How are you blowing up right now?”

He answered without hesitating:

”Easy, I stopped giving a shit.”

We all laughed, and then we sort of looked at each other, because underneath the joke was something completely true — something most of us have felt in other corners of our lives…which is the person who seems to care the least is almost always the one who pulls ahead. (I certainly felt that in the world of dating while I was still out in the single streets.)

What's actually sitting underneath that dynamic isn't indifference, though. It's confidence in yourself paired with commitment to the goal, but without the white-knuckle attachment to exactly how it has to happen.

This raises an obvious problem, because as a master strategy for building a personal brand, "stop giving a shit" is fantastic — and as an instruction you can actually act on tomorrow morning, it's completely useless. So let's talk about how you actually get there.

Like curing any illness, the first step to getting better is accurate diagnosis, and when it comes to posting online, I find most people mislabel the thing really stopping them. They call it “imposter syndrome,” but imposter syndrome is something specific — it's the belief that people think you're more competent than you privately believe yourself to be, and the low-grade dread that you'll eventually be “found out.” That's a real experience, but it’s rarely the one keeping people off the page.

In more than a decade of helping people build their brands, what I've come to believe is that the thing standing in the way was almost never imposter syndrome at all. It's something that's only now starting to get a name: “visibility shame.” A deep-seated, often unconscious reluctance to being seen, promoted, or heard — and it tends to trace back much further than your career.

For most of us, it goes all the way back to childhood, to some early moment where you showed off, or got a little too loud, or took up a little too much space, and someone told you to stop. When you're small, you can't process that as feedback about a single moment. It gets absorbed as something much larger and more permanent: you are too much.

I remember the exact moment it happened to me. It's one of my earliest memories — I was outside trying to keep up with my older brother and his friends, and to match them, I pulled my shirt off and hollered as loud as I could, at which point one of the little boys turned to me and asked why I was doing that, because I was a girl. That was my first lesson in doing too much, and in needing to shrink myself to fit a situation. (I legit think I was 3 or 4. Wild how early these things sink in and shape our beliefs.)

This distinction is really important, too, because shame and guilt are not the same thing. Guilt can actually be a productive learning tool — it points to a behavior and says that was wrong, which gives you somewhere to go and something to repair in the future.

Shame doesn't point at the behavior, though. It points at the self, and concludes that something about you is fundamentally wrong. Psychologists who study it describe shame as an attachment threat — the nervous system's read isn't I made a mistake, it's will I still belong if this part of me is seen?

That's why it's so good at keeping us small! It learned its job in childhood, and it has been doing it faithfully ever since.

Now, take that machinery and point it at an audience, and you get visibility shame in its natural habitat. It sounds like a very specific set of what-ifs:

What if people think I’m a try-hard or cringe? What if I start a fight in the comments? What if my peers see me and respect me less?

Those fears are not unfounded, either. When I started posting, I was horrified to discover that a guy I'd gone to college with had screenshotted one of my updates and circulated it to a group chat. It felt like a dagger. And a couple of years ago, a friend of mine, in front of a group of our other friends, said, “How embarrassing it is to watch someone you know try to be an ‘influencer’?” To this day, when I'm in a room with her, some part of me wonders whether that was subtly aimed at me. So no, I'm not going to tell you the risk is imaginary. The judgment is real.

But the cost of the alternative path — staying quiet— adds up big time…

You have almost certainly watched this happen in real time — someone less qualified than you, less experienced than you, less good at the actual work than you, walking off with the opportunity you'd have been better suited for. It's maddening, and it isn't random. The research on how advancement actually works is fairly blunt about why.

Decision-makers — the people handing out promotions, stages, clients, and deals — rarely have the time or information to evaluate everyone's real output. So they lean on what they can see. Visibility functions as a shortcut: it's simply easier to reward the most noticeable person, because managers operate with imperfect information and rely on observable cues. Which means the work being invisible isn't a neutral state. Even highly capable, committed people get overlooked. Womp womp.

It compounds from there. The extent to which someone is perceived as a leader actually shapes their odds of becoming one — the perception becomes self-fulfilling, and the person labeled "one to watch" tends to get the prompt promotion. And the mechanism underneath a lot of senior advancement is sponsorship — a more senior person advocating for you in rooms you're not in. As economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett's research on sponsorship lays out, advancement is heavily predicted by access to high-visibility assignments, and one of the most reliable ways to earn those is to have someone with clout putting your name forward. Nobody sponsors a person they can't see.

So the bill for visibility shame doesn't come due as one dramatic career loss; rather it arrives in pieces again and again.

So what do we actually do about it? What does stop giving a shit and build anyway look like in practice? Here’s my 3-part prescription:

I was listening to a podcast with Jesse Itzler recently, and he said something that reframed this for me:

When you run an ultramarathon, your feet are going to blister. That's not a sign something has gone wrong — it's a known, scheduled feature of running a hundred miles. And if you go in expecting the blisters, the experience of getting them is completely different from the experience of being blindsided by them.

The cringe phase is your blisters. It is coming, it is normal, and in my experience, it lasts somewhere between thirty and ninety days. The mistake people make is treating its arrival as evidence they were right to be afraid, when really it's just mile four. Push through it, and something shifts, because while cringe is temporary, credibility and visibility start to compound.

Fun footnote on the man who screenshotted my post and sent it around to his friends: years later, he reached out to me — because he'd landed a new role and wanted my advice on how to build his personal brand. I told him to kick rocks. Kidding! I was happy to help. Look, we’re all human, I used to make fun of people I kinda envied too.

Key point being: the judgment really is temporary. Give it enough time and your results start doing the talking, and a surprising number of the people who once smirked come back around to applaud.

Which is the other half of this: it's a volume game. At an event recently, Stan co-founder John Hu said something that stuck with me — that they'd studied the millionaire creators in the room against everyone else, looking for the one differentiating factor, and the factor was simply this:

Amount of content.

More content = more money.

It’s not because every post is a masterpiece; it’s because the reps are what build the muscle and carry you over the hump. And when you've already accepted that the cringe phase is part of the deal, you stop spending your energy resisting it and start spending it on the next post and refinement of your craft.

Very few people — outside of the genuine narcissists and the fully work-consumed, and yes, we all know a couple — build a personal brand from a place of pure confidence and good fortune. Many people build it from a place of pain, and there's no shame in that being your starting line.

I started building my brand when I was in corporate, in a role and an environment I couldn't stand, and the brand began as a creative outlet and slowly revealed itself as a possible exit. In my next job, I doubled down on it specifically because I was expected to sell and I hated making cold calls, so the brand became the bridge out of the thing I dreaded.

That arc is everywhere on this platform — the layoff that became the origin story, the firing that turned into the underdog narrative, the "I got let go, and now I run my own thing, and I'm kind of a big deal" story that performs so reliably precisely because being an underdog is a full arc.

This isn't true for every single person, but it's true for far more of us than admit it. And here's why it matters: the personality you've been hiding, the part that started all of this from a place of hurt or restlessness or wanting out, is the most relatable thing about you. It's the part people actually connect to.

This is the one that matters most to me. I'd argue one of the deepest desires any of us carry is to stop being a slightly different person in every room — one self at work, another on LinkedIn, another at dinner, another on Instagram — and the constant low-level tax of managing all of them.

My favorite thing about having built a brand is that I finally get to be the same person everywhere and have that be enough. I get to put real parts of my personality out into the world and have them not just tolerated but embraced — and then watch actual opportunities come back through that same door. I did this recently with something I was afraid to embrace for fears of “not being taken seriously” — my love of fashion (yes, even a decade in, the head goblins still get me). But I accepted the cringe phase and knew that at the end of the storm was a path to even more self-integration and liberty.

Building a personal brand, done honestly, is a vehicle toward an integrated life, where the way you make a living and the way you actually are stop being two separate performances.

If you've been editing yourself down before you post — or worse, talking yourself out of posting at all — I'd put good money on visibility shame sitting somewhere near the center of it. Name it for what it is. Then hold onto the three things we covered here: expect the cringe and treat it as part of the course, accept that most people start from pain and that the pain is the relatable part, and keep your eye on the integrated life waiting on the other side.

If you feel like you have to choose between being taken seriously and being yourself, come back to this. You don't, and the choice was always a false one.

🎁 My gift to help you start putting this into practice: The Visibility Confidence Challenge​

A 30-Day Plan to Become More Visible Without Losing Yourself: Check your mindset, get comfortable being seen, share ideas, share yourself, build your public voice.

Next week I'm getting tactical — the specific frameworks, guides, and moves for actually showing more of who you are on LinkedIn without torching your credibility. Follow along so you don't miss it. And if you want to put in the reps somewhere with a net under you, that's exactly what we do together inside Brand Inner Circle.

What is Brand Inner Circle?

Fortunately, this awesome video Max Partain made for me explains it way better than I could!

About the Author Kait LeDonne is a New York-based personal branding strategist and LinkedIn coach who helps thought leaders, executives, and corporate teams turn expertise into visible authority, influence, and qualified deal flow. She is a featured instructor for CNBC Make It's "How to Build a Standout Personal Brand," bringing practical executive-grade playbooks to a broad audience. Her LinkedIn audience and "Build a Brand" newsletter community exceeds 80,000 professionals. She has delivered training for organizations, including the United States Air Force and Kia. Listed by Favikon among the Top Personal Branding Influencers in the U.S., Kait is frequently cited in the media for clear, results-driven personal brand strategies professionals can sustain. ​ ​

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