Stop Trying to Fit In With the Cool Kids
Most personal branding advice fails for the same reason, and it has nothing to do with strategy.
We spend hours crafting messaging frameworks, refining our niche, and picking brand colors that signal the right things to the right people. But underneath all that strategy, something else is happening in the background: we’re editing ourselves down.
We call it professionalism or positioning, but a lot of the time, what we’re actually doing is trying to fit in with the cool kids.
That winds up costing us more than we realize. We spend three hours creating one piece of content because it doesn’t come naturally, hide behind a brand that doesn’t feel like us, and end up with clients who aren’t quite the right fit.
In this episode, I share a story about finding my way back to the unapologetically ME version of myself I was in middle school, how you can do the same, and what changes when you do.
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The Part of You That You’ve Been Leaving Out
There’s a version of you that existed before you absorbed all the messaging about what “professional” or “credible” looks like, and started shrinking yourself as a result.
That version of you had a quality that was undeniably hers: a particular energy, a way of seeing things, a sense of humor, an obsession with one weird topic. At some point, though, you got the message, directly or otherwise, that it needed to be toned down because it didn’t fit the mold and would make people uncomfortable.
So you toned it down. You built your brand, or your business, or your online presence around the toned-down version, and you’ve been wondering ever since why it feels so hard, why the content doesn’t flow, why the clients who come to you are fine but not quite the ones who make you think, “yes, this is exactly who I’m here to serve.”
The thing you’ve been editing out is your actual differentiator. No competitor has it, because it isn’t a skill or a service or a niche; it’s just you. And the people who are meant to find you are looking for exactly that, but they can’t see it yet because you’ve buried it under professionalism.
Why Trying to Fit the Mold Repels the Right People
When we build our brands from a place of trying to be acceptable to everyone, or to whoever we’ve decided the cool kids are in our industry, we end up with something that appeals deeply to almost no one.
The irony is that the thing we think will make us more magnetic (looking the part, hitting the right notes, sounding like a “serious” business owner) is exactly what makes us invisible. Nobody’s internal radar is scanning for generic, and nobody wakes up thinking, “I’m looking for a coach or a consultant or a designer who presents herself in a way that could apply to literally anyone in my situation.” They’re looking for someone who makes them feel immediately, viscerally seen.
That can only happen when you’re operating from something specific and true, when your content, voice, and whole brand presence says: this is who I actually am, and I’m not trying to be anyone else. The people who need exactly that are going to feel it. The ones who don’t (and this is the part we have to make peace with) were never going to be your best clients anyway, and the best thing that can happen is that they self-select out quickly.
Watching the wrong people disengage is evidence your marketing is doing exactly what it should.
Personal Brand Is a Structural Decision
I want to push back on how the word authenticity gets used in marketing conversations, because it’s become a totally empty buzzword.
When people say “just be authentic,” what they usually mean is: post a casual selfie sometimes, use a conversational tone, don’t be too salesy. Those things are fine, but they’re not what I’m talking about.
What I’m talking about is the choice of whether to build your business around who you actually are or around who you think you’re supposed to be. That choice has real downstream consequences for how hard your marketing feels, for whether the clients you attract are the ones you actually want to work with, for whether your work still feels good to you in three years. It’s a structural choice, even though it’s usually treated as a stylistic one.
The women I’ve watched make this shift, who’ve done the real work of excavating who they are and letting that drive their brand, end up in a different place. Their content feels better to create, sure, but the bigger change is that they become more effective. Their messaging gets sharper because it’s coming from a real place, and their ideal clients start to recognize themselves in what’s being put out. The whole thing starts to compound in a way that grinding out “strategic” content never does.
I think we need to retire this question once and for all: “What does a credible business owner look like?”
Let’s replace it with this one: “What does a business built on who I actually am look like?”
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A Note on Timing
I know what some of you are thinking, because I’ve thought it too: this is all well and good, but I can’t just blow up what I’ve built and start over. I already have clients, a reputation, a brand that sort of works. I can’t just suddenly decide to be the weird kid now.
Don’t worry, you don’t have to blow anything up.
Think of what I’m describing as an orientation rather than a full-on project. It can happen in small increments. You write one piece of content that’s a little more honest than usual, or you talk about the thing you’ve been avoiding because it feels too personal, or you drop the word you’ve been using because it sounded more professional. You show up in a way that’s 10% more yourself than you did last week.
That’s the whole strategy: more of the real you, less of who you think you should be. The compound effect of that, over months and years, is a brand that people trust deeply. That’s what we’re building toward.
The Question Worth Exploring
If someone who knew you really well, a best friend or a sibling or a person who has seen you at your most unfiltered, looked at your brand right now, what would they say is missing?
What part of you is nowhere in your content? What thing do you say or do or think in your real life is something you’ve decided has no place in your professional presence?
That gap is worth your attention, not because you need to put everything on the internet (boundaries are real and they’re yours to set), but because somewhere in that gap is almost certainly the thing that would set you apart, the thing that would make the right client read one post and think, “finally, someone who gets it.”
Go listen/watch this episode for the full story, including the “Rachel lunchtime show,” and the friendship that started because of a very public sibling argument in metallic platform footwear. Then come back to this question.
What part of you have you been leaving out?
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