The cringe is the price of being remembered

Since July I am officially off the unemployment benefits, paying my own health insurance (yikes) and making my own revenue (double yikes). 

The last two months I’ve been networking in real life and building my Laid Off & Fabulous community like crazy, this is why this newsletter is about the visibility skill. 

The one I spent the last year smashing my head against. The cringe, the self-doubt, the oversharing, the trauma-dumping on LinkedIn – all my challenges that I consider overcome.

After I’ve been laid off, I didn’t know what to communicate to the world.

“I was great at my job but kinda also didn’t enjoyed it and it showed so I got canned?” didn’t seem like the right content strategy. I was unemployed, I wanted to build my own revenue, and I had no idea how. The only thing I knew – no more jobs. So I tried everything, from hunting for the right co-founder and build a startup to trying to force connections that cannot be forced.

The truth is… Connection and progress happen over time, and it happens organically, somewhere in the middle between your ultra-polished version (nobody is actually like that) and your “I’m a traumatised child and no one likes me” version. It took me a while to land in that middle..

And i’m far from having it figured out or having consistent income. But I see it more clearly now: Building s product or a service is not so hard. Building an audience is harder. 

It asks for the exact stuff we avoid – being vulnerable, sharing, and hearing feedback. And my community, the people I’ve reached and learned with and from, are the reason I might actually pull off this whole “founder” thing.

When I talk about the visibility skill, in my world it means two things:

Talk to people you know – a much bigger project than messaging the five work friends from your last job.

Talk to people you don’t know – which goes way beyond a cringey “I’m open to work” announcement every three years.

So, I’ll do some more of that visibility before my break. 

But yeah, I know, when I say we should do it authentically, the cringe the the fear of not being liked is so strong that we’d rather send CVs into the void… Well, here’s my response: