Why You Should Brag About Yourself
Welcome to part five of Your Moment of Ambition a 20-part series brought to you by KoMedia Inc, and written by staff writer Kylie Adair. This series dives into the daily realities for women entrepreneurs and can land in your inbox every Tuesday at 9 am via our newsletter.
Running a Kickstarter successful campaign isn’t done without more than a little self-promotion. And while it might not have initially come naturally to her, Erin Bagwell quickly learned how to talk about her film to anyone and everyone who’d listen. The result was a doubled goal and over a hundred thousand dollars raised.
“I definitely have learned a lot about selling myself,” she says.
When we talk about women in business, we often hear the argument that women don’t climb the corporate ladder as quickly as men do because they don’t self-promote as much. In fact, one study found that, even when women have reached top management levels, they still struggle with “self-promotion, advocating for themselves and expressing their talents.”
Susan Colantuono, the founder of Leading Women, an organization that promotes women’s corporate leadership, agrees.
“I would say, at the most, 15 percent of women around the globe are comfortable either advocating for themselves for opportunities or in speaking favorably about themselves,” she says. “They’ll speak favorably about their teams, but not so much about their role in leading their teams.”
White women have been in the workforce since the ’50s, women of colour for much longer than that, so why is it that we’re still struggling with knowing our worth and letting those who matter know? In short, like everything else, it’s about socialization. While some might argue women simply need to try harder, to acclimatize to corporate environments more effectively, the problem is much deeper and more systemic than that.
Susan says it has a lot to do with messages we receive, consciously and subconsciously, from the time we’re children. As women and girls, that means being told, ‘It’s not polite to brag.’
“We discourage women from being ambitious and so women run up against all kinds of barriers and disapproval when we advocate for ourselves. It’s a huge double standard that we face,” Susan says. “And we frequently get labelled with negative words when we do. We’re too pushy, too aggressive.”
But on the flip side, if we don’t self-promote — or if we do so in a way that women are socialized to do, which is by lifting others up at the same time — we’re often told our kindness is weakness in business. That’s why Leading Women offers a training module on self-promotion with a catch: they never suggest promoting oneself at the expense of someone else.
“Being respectful of other people is a critical success factor for careers, and women — sometimes, our respect for others gets misinterpreted as the inability to make tough decisions,” Susan says. “I’ve often heard men say, ‘Well, she’s nice. Can she be effective?’ Meaning, ‘Her team likes her. Can she make the tough decisions?’ As leaders, we sometimes have to make tough decisions, and we can do that in a way that is either respectful of other people or that diminishes them. And the same is true of self-promotion. We can self-promote in a way that is respectful of others or in a way that puts them down.”
But the great thing about entrepreneurship is that, at least in the startup phase, we often circumvent those kinds of tricky corporate structures. The challenge instead is to navigate self-promotion in an arena without things like formal review processes, and where selling a product very often means selling the person behind it, too.
“I wish someone would have told me this years ago,” Susan says. “Most women entrepreneurs are uncomfortable selling themselves. So instead of thinking about selling yourself, sell the value of your company to your customers.”
Erin agrees. “Your creative is like a mirror and without a viewer it doesn’t carry energy or have an impact. So every time you feel like you are scared, or feeling unworthy of something, take yourself out of the equation. This isn’t about you anymore, it’s about the people you want to serve to make this world better,” she writes in a piece for Feminist Wednesday.
In fact, selling her creative work recently became the focus of Erin’s latest project, Creative Money. It’s a series all about the complicated, often painful, but ultimately rewarding process of selling one’s art.
Dream, Girl featured entrepreneur Marie Forleo says, “You have unique strengths you’re meant to give to the world.” And that’s exactly the message Erin hopes every woman and girl watching Dream, Girl takes with them.
“Women have the power already,” she says. “We have the intuition, we have the motivation, we have the passion, we have the skills. We have everything we need to create a business. We have everything we need to be entrepreneurs. We just need to see more examples of that. We need to feel more comfortable in that. We need to be able to embrace it and get smug with it.”
So go ahead and get a little smug.
After all, as Erin writes, “when you aren’t promoting your work, you are hoarding your art for yourself.”
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To book a screening of Dream, Girl click here. To check out Erin’s new web-series Creative Money, click here.
