At some point, staying under the radar stopped being a choice that you made and it actually became a habit. That habit started to present itself as something respectable: professionalism, discretion, humility, letting the work speak for itself. I think, for a lot of people, particularly Black women who have spent years navigating professional spaces that were not necessarily designed with us in mind, staying invisible is not always a professional preference, sometimes it's a protective response. You learn to be careful about how much space you take up, how much you say about yourself and how openly you talk about what you have achieved because you have seen what can happen when people decide that you are too confident, too ambitious, too outspoken or simply too much. Invisibility in and of itself becomes a form of protection. You become very good at doing the work without necessarily talking about the work and so inevitably you deliver, you achieve, you help other people succeed and you get on with it because somewhere along the way you have absorbed the idea that if you are genuinely good at what you do, people will notice. Sometimes they do but more often they don't.
I see this regularly in my work with professionals and organisations. Someone will tell me about an opportunity they wanted but did not get and when we start talking about who did get it, the answer is often someone who was simply more visible. That does not necessarily mean they were more talented or more experienced but it does mean that people knew who they were and remember them when it mattered, the people who get those opportunities make themselves known. It can be difficult to accept when you have spent years believing that your work should be enough. Your work can be excellent and your impact can still go unnoticed. You can have years of experience and still be overlooked. You can be the person everyone relies on and still not be the person they think of when an opportunity comes up. That is why I think we need to talk more honestly about the relationship between visibility and professional success.
Visibility is not about becoming an influencer or turning your entire life into content. It is not about sharing every achievement, posting every day or performing some exaggerated version of yourself online. Personal branding, when it is done well, is much simpler than that. It is about making sure the right people understand who you are, what you know, what you do well and what you want to be known for. There is also a difference between discretion and disappearance. I keep repeating this but you can be private and still be visible. You can have boundaries and still talk about your work. You can be humble without constantly minimising your contribution to the sector that you are in.
The question I would ask is whether you are choosing not to be visible or whether you have become so accustomed to protecting yourself that you have stopped noticing the opportunities that require you to be seen because there is a cost to staying under the radar. The client you want has to know you exist, the person who could recommend you for a promotion has to understand what you do. The conference organiser looking for a speaker and expert has to know that you have something valuable to contribute. The person considering you for that promotion has to be able to see you as someone who is ready for it. None of those things can happen if people have no idea what you are capable of.
I know that this is particularly complicated for Black women because visibility has not always been neutral for us. Being seen can mean being scrutinised. There are very real reasons why some of us have learned to manage our presence carefully which is not weakness, to be honest in many cases, it was a very sensible response to the environment we were working in. However we also have to be honest about when that response is no longer serving us.
Some of you are busy resenting others, jealous of their progress but you can't resent someone for being visible when you have chosen to remain invisible. I know that sounds blunt but I say it with compassion because I understand why people make that choice. Many of us were taught that real talent speaks for itself and that talking about our achievements somehow diminishes them but it doesn't.
Your ambition does not become less authentic because you are willing to talk about it. Your expertise does not become less valuable because you choose to share it and you do not become arrogant simply because you want people to recognise the work you have spent years becoming good at. You don't have to become someone you are not but you do have to give people a reason to know who you are. The opportunities you want may not require you to become more talented, I'd like to assume that you're pretty talented however you may simply need to become more visible to the people who need to know what you can do. So it's time to take the cloak off. Maybe not for everyone and certainly not all the time. Just enough for the right people to see you, understand what you bring and know that you exist.
If you've recognised yourself in anything that I've written here, don't just nod along and keep scrolling. Think about the one thing you want to be known for and ask yourself whether the people who need to know about it actually know you exist. Then do something about it, say it out loud. Share the work. Put yourself forward. Start making yourself known. You have spent enough time being great in silence. Stop holding back from what you know is possible.