Humility vs. advocating for yourself

In All Posts, Founders, Freelancers, Lessons Learned by Jay Clouse

I’ve gotten a peculiar piece of feedback several times over the last week.

“Why don’t you have more about yourself on your [Unreal Collective] website?”

For the last year as I’ve gone into marketing for Unreal, I’ve been using a lot of videos of myself talking about the program. I was pumped to have worked with nearly three dozen Unrealists to this point, and change my marketing strategy to be totally through the lens of the folks I’ve worked with.

In doing so, I almost completely removed myself from my marketing materials, even hiding my “About” page so that fewer people would click on it.

“You know that ‘About’ pages are the second most-popular pages on websites, right? People go looking for that immediately.”

It’s a strange paradox. By attempting to inject more humility into my work, and fade into the background, I removed a lot of the personality, credibility, and relational aspect from my marketing.

The problem was I was thinking of humility and being an advocate for myself as mutually exclusive. But that’s not true.

And so, today, I beefed up my About page (previously called “Facilitator”) and added a section to several pages with a short blurb about me.  And I get it — people want to know the person behind the company. Who they are going to be working with.

It’s a reminder that while humility is an attractive and laudable trait, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be an advocate for yourself and your work.

If I totally sat back and waited for someone else to rave about my work and be the sole driver of readers, listeners, and clients — it simply wouldn’t happen. Not this early in my business.

No one is going to be as big of an advocate for your work as you need to be. You need to put our your signal and make sure people know you exist.

So, on that note, I’m going to advocate for you to join the next cohort of Unreal Collective.

Unreal Collective is light on “curriculum” or programming, but heavy on structure. It’s not a time commitment, it’s a commitment to getting the real work done.

Whether you are just getting started on your project or business, or have been working for some time now, you understand the threat of getting caught up in the urgent day-to-day work that doesn’t truly move you forward. You’re accustomed to the treadmill of getting things done, but working in the business instead of on the business.

Unreal Collective is your solution to getting off of that treadmill.

With a minimum time commitment of just one hour per week, you’ll meet with a consistent set of incredible people like you. We help each other identify the important work, bust through roadblocks, and hold each other accountable for getting it done.

To this point, I’ve worked with:

  • A serial entrepreneur with a multi-million dollar exit
  • Several first-time freelancers who quit their job to start their own journey
  • A couple entrepreneurs who used crowdfunding to raise collectively over $150K
  • Two musicians finishing their albums
  • A former sales executive to write a memoir
  • A podcaster
  • an apparel company that went from $200/mo in revenue to $1,100/mo through the program
  • …and more

There’s so much more to discover in our amazing little community. And this is your chance to join us.