The Introvert Leader

How to Brag Without Being Braggy

• Austin Hopkins

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0:00 | 10:07

Why is it so hard to brag without sounding like a douche? You want people to know about your value, but you don't want to come across as arrogant. I figured out how to tell my story without it feeling braggy. Let me teach you how to do it.



Timestamps

1:02 – Personal Update: Back from Lisbon. Here is what I loved about Portugal.

1:48 – Reframe Your View on Self Promotion: It's not bragging if you are telling your story and showing your value. 

4:27 – Find Your Lane To Share Wins: Find an authentic way to tell your story. Do it in your voice, your way. 

7:04 – Rinse & Repeat: Make sharing wins a part of your routine. 

9:18 – Challenge for Listeners: Find one small win to share this week.




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Engage

Jealousy Sparks A New Plan

SPEAKER_00

Bragging about your work is pathetic. If you have to tell everyone how good you are, it probably means there isn't much to back it up. So I worked with his leader back in the day. I really liked her, but we were total opposites. She was loud, she was flashy, and she knew everyone. Month after month, she kept getting recognized. People were singing her praises. They were giving her dope opportunities. She was getting all the love. I was getting ignored. I started to feel jealous and I was like, how is this even possible? I'm a better leader. I was a better communicator, and I was dripping with executive presence. Oh, and by the way, I gotta mention I was an introvert and I hated attention. So eventually, something in my brain broke. I realized I had to come up with a plan. I had to do something different. I had to find a way to show my value and tell a story that people couldn't forget. And so today, I'm gonna show you how to brag without bragging. I ate way more seafood than I'd like to admit. I felt like I walked a million miles. I saw a castle on the top of an amazing hill. I spent time with my parents, my sisters, we got to celebrate their 50th anniversary. It was an amazing time. I totally get the charm of Europe. There's something special about it. But I appreciate you bearing with me. Well, I took a little break. I'm back. I got some exciting content coming out the rest of the month. Now, if you haven't subscribed to the show, do me a favor, take 10 seconds, click the follow button. I drop new career and leadership content every other week. I don't want you to miss anything. So with that, settle in, it's time to learn something. Self-promotion feels icky. I grew up hearing just be about it, don't talk about it. And so I've always kind of struggled with that, right? If I have to go around telling everyone how good I am, am I really that good? I want to kick things off by talking about how important it is to reframe your view on self-promotion. So self-promotion and bragging are two completely different things. I want to cover the differences and why it matters for your career. I think bragging is about trying to look cool. It's about trying to sound impressive, it's trying to get people to like you. Now, self-promotion, totally different, right? It's about advocating for yourself. It's about getting people to understand your value and your contributions. I think something that people forget is that self-promotion allows you to tell a powerful story. So without some level of self-promotion, a story is getting written for you. People can fill in the gaps. You're at the mercy of office gossip, office politics, and God knows what else. But when you strategically self-promote and share your contributions and your value, you get to tell a powerful story that you control and the narrative is yours. You don't have to let people fill in the blanks with things you don't agree with. You control what people perceive about you and what they think. I think you can agree with me that getting ignored sucks. So if no one knows you exist, if no one knows of the effort you put in or the value you add, that sucks. But if you're able to get in the conversation and show people your contributions, I don't mean be annoying, but I mean be in the conversation. Allow them to know that you exist and that you add value and who you are. Man, it feels so much better than getting ignored. So I want to give you an example to kind of pull this into focus. So let's say your boss reaches out and says, hey, I need help creating a deck that I can present at a senior leader meeting in the next week or so. Your other two teammates on the team decide not to help. They brush it off. So you work three or four hours a day over the next few days working with the business intelligence team to pull data, to put together a deck. You put it in a shared folder. Now there's three ways you could handle this. The first way, you could send that to your boss and say, hey, here's the deck. Take all the credit yourself and say, yeah, I worked on it and got it done. Option number two, you could allow someone on your team to simply send the deck. Maybe they give you credit, maybe they don't. Or option number three, you could send the deck to your boss and say something like this, hey boss, here's the attached deck that you requested. I want to give a special shout out to Carrie for her help on slide four. I think it turned out really great. So when your boss gets an email, like option number three, they're instantly gonna know who ran point. They're gonna know that you also recognize one of your people, and you're not having to overly brag or share that it was you who put it together. It's almost implied. Which option do you think is gonna be more impactful? Option three, obviously, right? So let's say you understand the difference between self-promotion and bragging now, but it still feels weird. It's probably because you haven't found your lane yet. So let me help you do it. So I think you got to realize that finding your lane is the key. So we're all different. So if you try to share your wins and be like your coworker, it's not gonna feel authentic. It's gonna feel weird. We all have a certain way of communicating, a certain comfort zone, a certain style. So when you find that, when you find your lane, it makes self-promotion so much easier. So here are a couple of things to consider. I think the first thing to do is to test and learn. So for me, I always found that if I could just observe the people around me, the people that have already done the hard work on learning how to self-promote in an authentic way, it helped me out. I didn't have to reinvent the wheel. So what I would do is I'd find someone that I respect, see how they would self-promote, and then I'd put my own spin on it. I'd test, I'd learn how that worked, see if it felt uncomfortable, if it felt good, if I got a positive response, I'd make it my own and keep doing that over and over again. So I think another thing that's really helped me is starting small. So when I was just starting to self-promote for the first time, I wanted to start with something really small and maybe not super flashy. It probably doesn't make sense to raise my hand at an all hands call and say, hey everybody, look at how amazing I am. That's not gonna feel good. That's gonna make me crash and burn super quick. So instead, maybe start with just your boss, maybe just your immediate team. Just try self-promoting just a little bit, see how that feels. Don't go too fast too quickly. That is how you burn out. So I want to give you an example of something that's worked for me. So a few years into my leadership career, I found my lane. So I think I mentioned in the beginning that I hate attention, but I don't mind giving the attention to other people. So what I would do is I would wait for someone on my team to do something impressive. I would then send a quick email to my boss and his boss, seeing the employee, recognizing them for their contributions. A couple of sentences. My boss and my boss's boss would love this. They would give some recognition to the employee so they would feel great. And they would also know that my fingerprints were on this contribution. Through my coaching and development, they were able to achieve this win. So here's what I might say in an email like this. Hey, Sean, I want to give you a huge shout out for the marketing project you worked on. I just heard back from our marketing team and they said you were an absolute dream to work with. They loved how much attention you gave to all the details. Thank you so much for representing our team. So, three or four sentences, my employee feels great, my boss and my boss's boss understand the contribution of my employee. They see my fingerprints on it, it's a win-win. I felt good about it, the attention wasn't on me. I could bang these out all day long, never get tired of it, never feel uncomfortable. So that's what worked for me. Now, when you find your lane and stay in it, no one can touch you. It's like being on autopilot. It's smooth, it's easy, baby. So something else that I think is really key is the power in rinsing and repeating. So when you find something that works, you gotta stick with it. You have to make it part of your routine. So two or three things that I think will be really helpful for you. So the first thing, you gotta make it automatic. When you're just starting to self-promote at work, it can be really easy to skip. You're uncomfortable with it, you put it off, you don't want to do it, you forget about it. The key, though, is to make it part of your identity. And when you make it part of your identity, it's consistent. And the best way to make it consistent is to make it impossible to ignore. And for me, that was creating a calendar invite. So I put a calendar invite bi-weekly that said, tell your story. I'd see that calendar invite pop up on a day that was slow. I always made sure to schedule it appropriately. And I would spend 15 minutes finding a way to tell my story. And I never skipped it because I knew it was so important in my career. And eventually, I was expecting that calendar invite. I didn't have to be reminded, I just knew I needed to do it, so I would already be thinking about it as it led up to that day. So twice a month I spent time strategically telling my story. And if people are consistently seeing your value, it's impossible to ignore. So something else that really helped me was making small tweaks to keep self-promotion fresh. So there were times where I did cool stuff and it was just my own. No one else helped me, and so I couldn't really recognize anyone else on my team. And in those moments, I didn't want to just let them pass. I wanted to find a way to share that with my boss. So what I would do is I wait for my one-on-one and I'd say something like, Hey, do you mind if I spend a minute just telling you something I'm really proud of? They'd say yes, I'd cover my cool contribution, and I felt authentic when I did that. I didn't come across as braggy. I was still telling my story and I was still authoring the narrative. Okay, so I gotta be honest. As an introvert, I was never gonna like talking about myself. I hated attention, but I knew I needed to find a way to tell my story. If I didn't tell my story, I was either gonna get ignored or somebody was gonna tell it for me. Now, I never had to be loud or flashy like that leader I mentioned in the beginning. I was able to find my lane, stay in it, and use public recognition or strategic intentional self-promotion to get people to understand my value and tell my story. Now, I guess it worked because I was lucky enough to get promoted 11 times in 15 years. Now, P.S. If you want to learn how to get promoted faster than your peers, I know I can help. Click the link in the description. I'm gonna help you learn how to use self-promotion to tell your story. Now, before we wrap up, I want to give you a quick challenge. This week, I want you to start small. I want you to find a way to self-promote something you did this week. Send one email. Say one thing during a one-on-one. Start small, share one win this week that's gonna help tell your story. Now, once you start authoring your story and creating a positive narrative, it becomes addictive. You're gonna wonder why you didn't start so early. You won't have to hope people are gonna remember your value. They won't be able to ignore it. Now, don't forget, next episode, May 27th, something special coming. Can't wait for you to see it. I want to say thank you so much for listening. Make it a great day.

Contributor

Austin Hopkins

Host