The Brand Within — Character Ahead of Competence
You spent decades becoming who you are. Then you covered it with a sheet.
"You wouldn't spend a month on an oil painting and then mummify it."
Anne Lamott
Anne Lamott also said that if you wanted her to write well of you, you should have been better. I love that. I love it because it refuses to be polite about something that isn't polite — which is the slow, steady burial of the most interesting thing in the room. Which is usually the person standing in it.
So. The painting.
You have been building it your whole life, whether you knew that was what you were doing or not. It started long before you ever thought about this industry. It started the first time you stood your ground about something that mattered and your legs were shaking while you did it. It started the morning you woke up next to someone and thought, without quite meaning to — oh. It's you. It was always going to be you. It started the day everything fell apart and you found out, to your considerable surprise, that you were still standing.
That's the painting. That's what went on the canvas. Not the qualifications. Not the years in the business. You.
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but the judgement that something else is more important than fear."Ambrose Redmoon
If you're the kind of person who has courage — and you know if you are, because courageous people always know, they just don't always admit it — then somewhere in your life you have walked into a room where the odds were bad and the outcome was uncertain and you walked in anyway. Not because you weren't afraid. Because the thing on the other side of afraid was worth more than the comfort of staying put. That moment is in the painting. Every client who needs someone steady in an unsteady moment is, without knowing it, looking for that exact brushstroke.
But you don't show them that. You show them your conversion rate.
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If family is your thing — if it is genuinely the axis around which everything else turns — then ask yourself what life looked like before it. The particular, specific loneliness of before. The version of you that came home to quiet and made peace with quiet because what else are you going to do. And then the version of you that didn't come home to quiet anymore, and stood in the middle of the noise and the mess and thought, I would burn everything else down before I let this go. That love is in the painting. It shows up as patience in impossible conversations. As the ability to hold a room without dominating it. As the instinct to protect people who have placed something precious in your hands.
Your clients feel it. They cannot name it. But they feel it, and they come back, and they send their people to you, and they are never entirely sure why. It's because the painting is showing, just a little, through the sheet.
"The most common form of despair is not being who you are. "Søren Kierkegaard
And if you're the person who is fundamentally, constitutionally, irreducibly here for a good time — if fun is not a reward you give yourself on Fridays but a value you actually live by — then I want to ask you something gently and with genuine curiosity: what on earth are you doing in this industry, and why are you pretending to be someone who isn't? Because the agents who light up rooms, who make the whole process feel like something other than a slow bureaucratic death, who have clients requesting them by name because something about the whole thing was actually enjoyable — those agents aren't performing professionalism. They're just being themselves. They hung the painting. It turns out the painting was full of colour.
Here is the thing about a mummified painting. It is preserved perfectly. Nothing can touch it. Nothing can damage it. It also cannot be seen, cannot move anyone, cannot do the one thing a painting exists to do. It just sits there, perfectly intact, in the dark.
Lamott was talking about writers. But she was really talking about anyone who makes something true and then decides the world isn't quite ready for it, or they aren't quite ready for the world, or they'll share it once it's a little more finished, a little more polished, a little more — safe.
The painting is finished. It has been finished for longer than you know. The cracks are part of it. The overworked corners are part of it. The places where you changed your mind halfway through and painted over and started again — especially those. Those are the places where your clients will find themselves. Those are the places where trust begins.
Hang it.
Here is something else worth sitting with. Cesare Pavese wrote that we do not remember days, we remember moments. Which means the painting you have been making is not a record of your career or your calendar or your carefully maintained LinkedIn profile. It is a collection of moments. The specific weight of your father's hand on your shoulder the day something went wrong. The conversation that turned on a single sentence and changed the direction of everything. The moment you laughed until you couldn't breathe and couldn't afterwards remember what was funny, only that you were completely, unreservedly alive. Those moments are in the painting. Every one of them. And you think they are worthless because you cannot put them on a CV.
"We do not remember days, we remember moments. "Cesare Pavese
They are not worthless. They are the whole thing. They are what makes you someone that another person would choose to trust with one of the largest decisions of their life. Not your track record. Your moments. The accumulated, invisible, irreplaceable evidence of a person who has actually lived.
And here is the part I most want you to hear. Hanging this painting does not mean you are finished. You are not finished. You have limitless canvas left. The capability to keep becoming, to keep adding, to paint something even grander — that does not expire. Every version of you that is still to come will be richer for what you have already survived and chosen and loved and built. The masterpiece is still ahead. There are whole decades of it.
But you cannot paint the next thing while you are still hiding this one. The world needs to gasp at this version first. Hang it. All of it. Then pick up the brush and keep going.
Hang this one. Then keep painting.
The masterpiece is not behind you. But it cannot begin until you stop hiding the work you have already done.
The Brand Within https://thebrandwithin.me
Character Ahead of Competence
Originally published on LinkedIn.