Personal branding. I have been hearing that phrase for years. In recruiting and talent acquisition, you cannot really avoid it. You talk about employer branding all day, and then someone turns it around and says: what about your own?
And then you become a founder, and the message gets louder. Every blog, every Reddit thread, every reputable outlet writing about the founder journey says the same thing. Show up. Be visible. Build your personal brand. Network. Grind. Connect. It is not bad advice. But it is advice that assumes you are already ready. That the confidence is just sitting there, waiting to be activated. That all you need is the right framework and a content calendar.
Nobody talks much about what happens when you hear all of that and still cannot make yourself do it. Not because you do not believe in the work. Because you are not sure you believe in yourself enough yet to put it in front of people.
And to be clear: I would not be where I am today without the books, the advice from people who have done it, the YouTube videos, all of it. That content exists for a reason and it helped me. I am not arguing against it. I am just saying it did not solve the thing underneath. That part I had to find a different way through.
For a long time, that was me. In recruiting and as a founder, the pressure came from both sides at once. And my honest answer to all of it was nothing. Not because I thought visibility did not matter. Because I did not quite believe in myself enough to do something about it.
That sounds strange, I know. I talk to strangers every day. I try to convince them to consider opportunities, to trust a process, to take a chance. If I can do that, why would visibility feel so hard? But that is exactly the thing about imposter syndrome that people underestimate. It does not care how competent you are in one room. It follows you into the next one.
What I told myself about why it was not for me
I watched people post pictures of themselves, write about their morning routines, document every small win. And I fought against it. Not because I judged them for it. Because it felt like a drain I could not afford. I was already building something in the evenings after a full day of work. The last thing I wanted to spend that energy on was figuring out what to post.
So I told myself it was a time problem. It was easier than admitting the real thing, which was fear. Fear of putting something out and being met with silence. Fear of writing something honest and being read the wrong way. Fear of the gap between how I see myself and how a stranger might decide to see me in thirty seconds.
There is also cancel culture sitting in the back of your mind when you work in a field where opinions are loud and subjective. You see what happens when people voice something that lands wrong. And you think: is it worth it? You become very careful. Maybe too careful.
What actually moved something
Building KLYNE forced me to answer a question I had been avoiding: if you believe in what you are doing, what exactly are you protecting yourself from?
I went back to books. I always alternate between something professional and something completely different, fiction or fantasy, because every book gives you something. Even the ones that do not fully land leave you with a residue. A different way of seeing.
Two landed particularly hard. Kubi Springer's "I Am My Brand: How to Build Your Brand Without Apology" hit because of the subtitle. I am someone who apologises for a lot. Opinions. Space. Existing too loudly. What stayed with me was not the tactical advice. It was the permission underneath it. Know your worth. Stop building a case for why you might not deserve to be seen.
Adam Grant's "Think Again" did something different. It asked whether I had actually examined my beliefs recently. I had been holding one about visibility for years: that it was performative, that it required becoming someone slightly different from who I am. Think Again did not tell me that belief was wrong. It asked me when I had last questioned it.
I had not. And when I finally did, what came up was not fear of being seen. It was something more specific. I had been watching people build visibility first and identity second. Post first, figure out what you stand for later. Grow the audience, then work out what to say to them. That order felt wrong to me at a level I could not quite name.
The metrics start to shape the message. The message starts to shape how you see yourself. And then one day you look at what you are putting out and you do not fully recognise it. That scared me more than silence did.
So I did it the other way around
Do I want more visibility? Yes. Do I have a driving ambition to grow an audience at any cost? No. Do I know it matters and will I keep showing up for it? Yes. Will I do it as someone I do not recognise, just to prove something? No.
Knowing that is what made the next step possible. I built kemmbelly.com. A quiet place first. Articles written in my own voice, on my own terms, without watching the numbers. Not as a strategy. As a way of getting clear on what I actually think and what I actually want to say before I say it to a larger room.
Not visibility then identity. Identity then visibility. Build the thing you want to stand for first, so that when the audience arrives, you are not adjusting yourself to fit them. They are finding something that was already there.
The responses I have received from people who know me and know the journey have not felt like external validation in the way I used to fear. They feel like confirmation that something real is coming through. Two things can be true at once.
Where this leaves me
There is one moment in this whole journey I keep coming back to. I wrote something on LinkedIn early on, before any of this existed. And one person responded in a way that was so genuinely kind that they probably did not think twice about it. They did not know what was behind that post. They did not know the doubt it had taken to put it there, or how close I had come to not posting it at all. But what they said made me feel, for the first time, that I could try this without losing myself in it. That I could be a little more visible and still be me.
I did not continue on LinkedIn the way I thought I would. I chose this instead. But I got here partly because of that one moment. So if you are reading this and you are that person: thank you. You probably have no idea how much it meant.
And this is the part that brings me back to why I am doing any of this. That moment was not just kind. It was a buffer. I walked into that experience carrying real emotions: doubt, exposure, the particular anxiety of having put something honest into a professional space and not knowing how it would land. One person's response shifted something. Not because it fixed anything. Because it met me where I was.
That is exactly what I think we do not talk about enough at work. Emotions do not stay at the door. They come in with us, shape how we show up, and either get buffered by the people around us or amplified. Most of the time we do not even notice it is happening. I built KLYNE because I think that deserves more awareness, not less. And I am grateful that I got to experience, firsthand, what it feels like when someone gets it right without even knowing they did.
That is what this whole thing is really about. Not building an audience. Not performing a version of yourself that fits a platform. Finding the way in that lets you stay intact. Mine took longer than I expected and looks different from what I imagined. And I would not change any of it.
If you are somewhere in the middle of this, resisting visibility but knowing it matters, I am curious: what is the belief underneath the resistance? Because it is probably not what you think it is.