When Putting Your True Self Out There Makes You Feel Anxious and Embarrassed

We all want to be liked and approved of.

For creative entrepreneurs, putting your private self into your public work is often a requirement—or at least it’s a current norm. Confessionary social media posts are in style. Being authentic and honest about your own journey, and sharing that with followers in a way that resonates with their own, is how business is done in the burgeoning creative economy.   For many, this is a challenge because it means revealing yourself in ways that feel deeply uncomfortable. This post is for those of you who are struggling with how to approach this new cultural and business expectation of a blended private/public life.

This is not a post about boundaries—that’s a worthwhile subject but one that has been widely covered elsewhere. This is about that icky feeling of anxiety mixed with embarrassment or shame that you get when you’ve revealed something about yourself publicly that feels very personal. These feelings originate in our primal fear of being rejected by the group. As one of my clients once asked me about putting my own private stories out there for public consumption: “Did anything bad happen when you did that?”

This amorphous “bad” thing that could happen if we share too much or if people see who we really are is the dark storm cloud blocking us from both delving too deeply into ourselves and putting what we excavate out there into the world. We want to be liked, approved of. This is totally normal. The problem is that after a while, being likable becomes unlikable, because it’s not real (or it’s not the whole truth). It’s boring. What we think will make us unlikeable, the stuff we keep buried and private, perhaps even from ourselves, is what provides nuance and depth to our public personalities. Think of it as a painting: you need shadow along with the light to create something with meaningful depth on the canvas.

I’m sure that sounds rather conceptual, but it’s a helpful image to keep in mind, because what people remember is that resonance they have with someone who has revealed themselves to be fully human. Part of this is the relief we feel when we realize we’re not the only screw-up in the room. Part of it is that we have a natural fascination with what in the olden days was termed a “human-interest story.”

Creative entrepreneurs may be required by the current norms of the creative economy to be their own human-interest story, but it also makes good business sense. In a world of product glut, people make purchases based on resonance, fellow-feeling, and values. It’s difficult if not impossible to offer anything truly unique these days. Every time I have a brilliant idea, a 3-second Google search shows me it’s already been done a dozen times.

What you can offer is your unique story, warts and all. Especially the warts. Just as Tolstoy says about families (all happy ones are alike, all unhappy ones are unhappy in their own way), our embarrassing, anxiety-producing quirks are what make us unique. Or to put it another way, being “good” always generally looks the same, but our secret struggles, dreams, insecurities, sorrows, and passions are what make us interesting human beings.

So has anything bad happened since I started putting all my “secret” stuff out into the world? Nothing more than the anxiety and embarrassment I tend to feel in waves. My guiding philosophy for putting anything out there is this: the way people receive your work (or you) is 100% about them, and you have 0% control over it. They’re going to judge you either way, so you might as well give them something to chew on!

You won’t ever get all the people to like you. When you start being honest, your overall approval rating probably won’t go down (and may even go up). Some people may decide they no longer like you (remember, this is all about them—perhaps they hate your honesty because they’re not being honest themselves), but some people who didn’t like you before might decide they do.

I can promise you that it gets easier over time. You can start small! Really, really small. Use self-deprecating humor if it helps. It’s all just practice and experimentation. No one’s saying you have to reveal all the stuff. I have many things I don’t talk about and probably never will. I only share stuff that measure up to about a 5 or maybe a 6 on the discomfort Richter scale. I started at 1.

And if you need a final piece of wisdom to ease your mind about sharing your true self with the public, there’s this: often the worst thing that happens is you find out nobody actually cares that much anyway!