How to Get Past Your Fear of Visibility and Build Your Brand

As I’ve created my business, worked with many clients, and had conversations with fascinating people about their impact, one theme has popped up repeatedly. In order to be successful and to have impact, you have to be visible. Not just your business. You.

That can be terrifying! I know it has been for me at times.

Visibility can stir up a lot of feelings you might otherwise be able to hide or disguise. When it comes to visibility, gluing a big mustache on your fear just isn’t enough.

Visibility goes beyond putting your picture on your website and other marketing materials. Visibility is about being authentically present, as you, in your interactions with your clients and customers and also in your marketing.

Gone are the days when you could remain invisible. We’ve had a cultural shift in business marketing. I don’t know if it’s because of social media or it’s manifested in social media. Maybe both.

The thing is, especially now, people want to have a person to relate to when they connect with your brand.

This requirement for visibility is even more heightened if what you’re offering is not immediately concrete. It’s harder to sell. So knowing, liking, and trusting the person doing the selling is essential.

For you to trust me, you need to get to know me. I need to be very visible. That’s part of why I decided to face my fears and start the 30-Day Video Challenge.  

Visibility can lead to connection. Being connected to a real person is the thread that brings people to a buying decision. So it simply doesn’t pay to be invisible, as comforting as invisibility might feel in the moment.

There’s another level to this too. Energetically, you can communicate a welcoming energy through your presence and marketing that invites sales. Have you ever been welcomed into a bricks and mortar business in a way that made you feel immediately welcomed and at home?

So, getting past your fear of visibility can be a defining step for your business.

Some of the reasons for not being visible I’ve heard from my clients are: “I don’t want to distract people’s attention from my product”, “my team deserves their own limelight”, or “I prefer to highlight my clients in my marketing”. These might be true in certain situations.

But there’s also the shadow side to these reasons. If behind all of these motives, however heartfelt they are, there’s also a desire to stay hidden because you’re afraid of what might happen, of how people will respond to you, it means you’re operating your business at least partly from a place of fear.

That fearful energy doesn’t attract people. It pushes them away. It saps your energy and the energy of the people who collaborate with you to create and provide your product or service.

It would be great if we could just make our fears go away, wouldn’t it? People talk about being fearless! Bumper stickers exhort you with, No Fear! The truth is, fear doesn’t go away. Pretending that it does just keeps you from your success.

Every successful entrepreneur, no matter how wealthy and influential, will tell you that it’s not about making fear go away. It’s about putting it in its place, moving through it and taking action anyway.

To do that, you need to first acknowledge the fear of visibility. Bringing those shadow motives I talked about, the ones operating in the background and keeping you from being more visible in your business, bringing those to light lets you deal with what’s underneath. That will benefit your whole business.

One way to get past that fear of visibility is to focus on your impact. That’s one reason why doing the impact work that I do with clients is so valuable. When they’re able to define the impact they want to have and establish an impact purpose, it provides a focusing point for their whole business, energizing them to take action.

This focus on my own impact has been compelling me to face my own fears about visibility and move through and beyond them.

Still, fear pops up. What if people don’t like me? What if they don’t care about what I have to say? What if they say bad things about me, or worse, dismiss me altogether?

Any of those things are possible when you choose to be visible.

BUT, and it’s a big BUT, the repercussions of those fears are nothing like they were when those fears first took root.

Once you can separate those feelings of fear from you, you can really start to work with them and move through them.

One way I work with my fears, and I’ve taught my clients to work with them so they can really focus on their impact is to put those fears into a personified figure. A pink lizard named Stella or a hairy beast named Floyd. This helps you detach a little. You are not your fears. Using this method, your fears start to be outside of you, and that’s when they become more manageable.

Once your fears are a little detached from you, you can begin to work with them. I started with my pink lizard Stella, a great representative of the limbic or primitive brain that we all have still operating. I started by patting her on the head to calm her down. That evolved into sitting her on my lap to comfort her. Eventually, she ended up on a beach chair wearing shades and sipping an umbrella drink and being pretty much unfazed by what I was doing.

You can also talk to your beastie. What’s it got to offer you? Your fears are really just trying to help. To show you where danger lies. The thing is, whatever it’s trying you warn you about often isn’t true for you anymore.

With these tools, you can acknowledge your fears and take them out of the driver’s seat. Once you do, it’ll be much easier to be visible.

I encourage you to take a look at where you can be more visible in your business.

Your business matters. Let people know about what you do by expanding your visibility.