In 2007, the Washington Post tried an experiment. They got Joshua Bell, one of the best violinists in the world, to put on jeans and a baseball cap and play anonymously in a DC metro station during morning rush hour.
He played Bach for 45 minutes, on a violin worth around $3.5 million. In the metro, about a thousand people walked past him. Seven stopped to listen. He made $32 and change.
Just three days earlier, he’d sold out Boston Symphony Hall, where seats started at $100!
My point?
Nothing about the violinist changed between the concert hall and the metro. He played the same act on the same violin. What changed was the setting, and the setting said “open violin case in a metro” → “busker.” So people treated him like one.
People do this with you too. Most people you meet have no idea what you’re actually good at. All they’ve got is what you tell them or what they see.
So whatever version of yourself you put out is the version they work with. If you shrink it, they don’t know it’s shrunk. And whether or not they’ll admit it, how they perceive you affects many decisions - e.g. whether to take your advice seriously, remember you, recommend you for something, or hire you.
The fix sounds obvious: stop shrinking it. But I think a lot of us struggle with this. We hate cringeworthy people who exaggerate claims, and people who find a way to bring up their achievements in every conversation. So we become careful about saying anything that might sound impressive.
But that can go too far!
So how do you give people an accurate picture of yourself without sounding full of yourself?
Something reflecting well on you isn’t the same as boasting
Say someone asks what you’ve been working on.
“I led that project” and “I’m an incredible leader” are very different answers. The first tells them what you were responsible for. The second asks them to accept your opinion of yourself.
Most of us are so worried about sounding like the second that we water down the first. If you led the project, you’re allowed to say so! You don’t have to downgrade it to “I was involved” just because the accurate version sounds more impressive.
Same with mentioning that you train new colleagues, organise events, or have years of experience with something. These are facts about what you’ve done, and they help someone understand what they could trust you with.
Of course, accuracy matters in both directions. Being part of a successful team doesn’t mean you personally caused everything it achieved. Explain your contribution and give others their credit.
If you’re unsure whether something sounds boastful, consider whether you’d hesitate to say it about a friend who’d done exactly the same thing. If you’d happily mention it for them, you might be holding yourself to a different standard.
People don’t necessarily know you’re being modest
With people who already know you well, you can leave quite a lot unsaid. They’ve seen your work. They know what you’re capable of. They can recognise when you’re playing something down.
Someone meeting you for the first time doesn’t have that background!
Take someone who’s spent years learning photography but introduces themselves as “just an amateur.” The other person will likely take that at face value and won’t remember them as someone who’s a photographer, so they miss out on gigs, referrals or intros.
“It’s a serious hobby of mine. I’ve been doing it for years” tells people the truth without claiming to be a professional. Stand behind your skills - you’ve worked hard for them, you deserve to talk about them!
We do things like this day-to-day too at work. If we’re complimented, a lot of us immediately explain why it wasn’t that impressive. “Oh it was nothing, AI did most of it! 🤥” You can say thank you and give others credit without shrinking it.
Similarly, when you’re delivering work - if a task took real effort, say so in a sentence before you hand over the result, otherwise it looks routine. I wrote a short note about it here.
Lead with the right things
Most of us tend to lead with the wrong things.
I’m guilty of this too. For ~a year, my LinkedIn headline was something like “I write 80% good career advice, 20% jokes.” I liked that it sounded like me, thought it stood out and showed my laid-back personality.
But that headline appeared alongside my name everywhere, including to people who didn’t know me or read anything I’d written. It made people think I was an unserious dude making jokes about careers - and it probably cost me intros and partnerships. Execs who came across my profile bounced because I didn’t look credible.
So I changed it to mention the companies I run and their scale. It’s less fun, but a stranger reading it can see there’s experience behind the advice. Anecdotally, inbound has been much stronger too and I’ve worked on some cool opportunities since then.
(Side note: It was actually our Coached elevator pitch tool that called this out on my LinkedIn and made me fix it -- yes, I use our own tools myself!)
I’m still figuring out the balance here. I like humour and personality! But I was leaving out information a new reader might reasonably need.
A few practical things
I think it’s worth checking what you’ve decided isn’t worth mentioning. We tend to look for big numbers or impressive titles, but there’s plenty someone could appreciate without either. A skill you taught yourself, for example, can become so familiar that you forget it took any learning at all.
Sometimes it’s the circumstances we leave out. Say someone asks about an event you organized. You describe it as “a small thing,” but don’t mention that you had no budget and persuaded local businesses to provide the space and equipment. You’ve told them its size, while leaving out the part that shows what you did.
We can dismiss previous experience in the same way. If you’re changing careers, “I’m starting from scratch” might feel accurate. But a teacher moving into corporate training already knows a lot about explaining difficult ideas and helping people learn. Career changers undersell themselves a lot because their past experience doesn’t feel transferable, when it is.
I hope this helps you catch yourself the next time you’re about to play something down. You’ve put time into getting good at these things. It’s okay to give yourself credit for that, and let other people see it too!
