The Lost Art of Being Yourself.

Trying Too Hard to Be Liked

Don't laugh. This is genuinely happening.

An identity crisis, entirely self-inflicted, quietly making the job harder. An image polished and perfected to the point where it barely resembles the person underneath it anymore. It usually starts small — a strength emphasised here, a flaw conveniently left off there. Before long, plenty of agents are competing harder for the media spotlight than for the actual listing.

Braggadocio doesn't land well with vendors, whatever anyone tells themselves. And yet it's become the dominant note on LinkedIn and everywhere else. The grateful homeowner's box of chocolates. The boss's bottle of something bubbly. The trophy that supposedly means you've arrived. The new car. The relentless self-congratulation every time a property sells. The new job announcement.

Who's all of that actually meant to impress? If the theory is that potential clients or employers will scroll past and be quietly won over, think again.

An online profile that keeps getting shinier by the week sets an expectation that real life eventually has to live up to — and rarely does. People generally don't choose the best of anything, or the worst. It's why supermodels famously struggle to get asked out. "Out of my league," goes the excuse, every time.

Homeowners look for an agent who's better than average. Not necessarily the best. And every time you tell them how great you are, in person or online, that's one less reason for them to actually choose you.

Sensible employers look for cultural fit over raw competence. Homeowners, similarly, are mostly after one thing: affinity. A natural liking for, and understanding of, someone.

Your success doesn't generate much natural liking. Your competence doesn't generate much genuine understanding — how many vendors actually grasp what your local knowledge is really worth? Your agency's brand name means little either, however many free valuations or discount fees get dangled in front of them.

Natural liking is reserved for someone on the same wavelength — shared values, shared convictions, forming the image a vendor carries of you, rightly or wrongly. If the version of you they've seen online doesn't match what they're actually looking for in an agent, they'll quietly cross you off the list, and find a perfectly logical-sounding reason to justify it to themselves. In reality, they're choosing based on how you made them feel, not the argument you made.

The genuine difficulty is trying to create affinity with absolutely everyone. Some vendors simply won't like you. Others won't have an opinion either way. No amount of polish changes that — you're just not their cup of tea, and no training course fixes that particular mismatch.

The actual answer is simpler than any of it. Be yourself. Not the imagined ideal agent — competent, gregarious, knowledgeable, endlessly personable, a perfect listener — because that agent doesn't stand out. She's identical to every other agent who's already knocked on that door.

What vendors are actually hunting for are small signals that you're someone like them. Mostly, people trust people who remind them of themselves.

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." — Oscar Wilde

Chase likeability without being genuinely yourself, and it's an exhausting road with no real destination. Some trainers will tell you to mirror a vendor's breathing, posture, gestures, tone — classic rapport-building technique, straight from the NLP playbook. Others will simply hand you a script.

Honestly. Just be yourself. How difficult is that, really? Aren't you likeable enough already, without the performance?

You're not chasing approval from the widest possible audience. You don't need vendors chasing instant gratification with no interest in understanding the process. You need the right people — and the only route to them runs through actually being yourself. Tell them who you are. What you believe, and why it matters to you. Tell them the story only you can tell. Not how good you are. Not the state of the market this quarter.

It's personal. It's The Brand Within.

Stand out. Be different. It's a genuinely lost art in this industry, which is exactly why agents keep getting treated as a commodity — unable, or unwilling, to differentiate themselves from the next name on the shortlist without resorting to manipulation. Which is a shame, honestly.

It takes real nerve to be authentic, vulnerable, and transparent — to document the setbacks alongside the wins, rather than only the highlight reel. Vendors become aware of your agency for as long as the advertising budget holds out. The Brand Within is what they'll actually remember, once they understand who you genuinely are.

— The Brand Within

thebrandwithin.me

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Originally published on LinkedIn.