They said my laugh was fake. They were wrong. (And it changed everything.)

About fifteen years ago, I did something called the Hoffman Process.

If you don't know it — it's an intense, week-long personal development retreat. Forty participants, a small staff of facilitators, and seven days of doing the kind of raw, ugly, vulnerable work that most people spend their whole lives carefully avoiding. By the middle of the week, we had all cried in front of each other. We'd seen each other fall apart in ways that most people don't even let their closest friends witness.

And then, about halfway through, they did this exercise.

Everyone — all forty participants plus the staff — got pulled into a room. One at a time, each person had to stand up and name three people they had an immediate, visceral, knee-jerk reaction to. Positive or negative. And they had to explain why — in detail, out loud, in front of the whole room.

The rule was: once someone got named five times, they were done. They couldn't be named again.

Out of 50+ people in the room, I was the first person to hit five.

Three positive. Two negative.

The two people who had a negative reaction to me didn't just say she bothers me and sit down. They explained it. Specifically. In a room full of people I had just spent four days being completely undone in front of — people who had watched me talk about some of the most painful, most vulnerable moments of my life.

One said my laugh was too loud. The other — or maybe both, the details blurred a little in the shock of it — said they thought I was fake. That my laugh, my energy, my intensity wasn't genuine. That I was performing joy rather than actually feeling it.

I want you to sit with what that means for a second.

I had just spent four days telling these strangers things I had never said out loud to anyone. I had bared my soul in that room in a way I had never done before and haven't fully done since. And someone looked at that — looked at the most unguarded, unperformed version of me I had ever shown another human being — and called it a performance.

That was devastating in a way I don't have a cleaner word for.

I found one of the facilitators afterward. She was a therapist who also ran sessions, and she could tell I was wrecked.

She said: I can see you're upset about this.

And I said: I just don't understand. People either love me or hate me. I don't understand why I can't be more likable.

She looked at me and said: You need to understand that you are a magnet. You are an intense person. Some people are going to love you for it. Most of them will. But some people will really not like you. And that is not something you can fix — and it is not something you should try to fix.

I didn't know what to do with that at the time.

It took me years to actually understand what she was handing me.

Here's the thing about magnets: they don't get to choose how they work.

The same force that makes them stick is the same force that makes them repel. You cannot have one without the other. That's not a design flaw. That's the design.

And most of us have spent our entire adult lives trying to engineer around it.

We learned early — in school, at home, definitely in corporate — that standing out was risky. That having a strong point of view made you a target. That being too much, too direct, too weird, too you was a problem to be managed. So we learned to soften. To round off the edges. To be likable instead of magnetic.

We carried that training out the door when we left corporate. And we're still running it now.

I see it constantly in the work I do with consultants and founders. This week alone:

That second one is worth pausing on.

The fact that her colleagues didn't see the problem doesn't mean the problem wasn't real. It means they weren't her ideal clients. The people who do feel that pain — who are living inside that exact chaos she watched unfold — are going to find her and think: finally, someone who gets it!

But only if she stops apologizing for seeing what others missed.

Here's something it took me a long time to fully internalize.

When someone has a strong negative reaction to you — to your energy, your laugh, your directness, the way you show up — it almost always tells you more about them than it does about you.

One disclaimer: If you are doing something that actively harms them or shows a fundamental misalignment in values, then it’s about you.

But if someone finds you annoying, obnoxious, cringe, or whatever other adjective you want to name solely for being yourself and living your life? It’s about them. Every damn time.

I'm not saying this to be dismissive. Sometimes values are genuinely misaligned, or you’re being a jerk, then their response is useful information.

But a lot of the time? When someone is intensely irritated by you — especially by the things that are most authentically you or where you are just living your life — it's because you are doing something they are afraid to do themselves. And that makes them feel something uncomfortable.

And they call it you being too much. Or that you’re being lame or cringe, obnoxious or annoying.

I know this pattern because I've caught myself in it.

And I had a very recent reminder of it. If you read my newsletters regularly you know exactly what I’m going to mention.

A few weeks ago, someone replied to one of my newsletters with two words: AI slop. She thought I'd written it with AI. I followed up, got curious. The things she called artificial — the phrasing, the tone, the voice — were the most distinctly me parts of the whole piece. The things I would never outsource because they can't be outsourced.

When I looked a little more at who she was — someone thinking about writing a book, no content published anywhere online — I recognized the shape of it.

She wasn't critiquing my writing. She was bumping up against something in herself. Her own fear of putting her unfiltered voice out into the world. Her own discomfort with watching someone else do the thing she hasn't done yet.

It was the Hoffman room, fifteen years later. Different person. Same dynamic.

When you soften yourself to minimize dislike certain people hold for you — you also minimize the love that everyone else will feel for you.

That's physics. (Can you tell I’m not a scientist?) You can't turn down the repel without turning down the attract. They run on the same current.

You can spend your entire career sanding yourself into something smooth and inoffensive and safe. The same people still won’t like you. They’ll just not like you a little less.

But you'll also have lost the ones who would have recognized you immediately — who would have felt that pull and thought yes, finally, someone who sees it the way I do!

That's your ideal client. The one who doesn't negotiate your rate, doesn't question your approach, doesn't need to be convinced. They just needed to find you.

And they can't find you if you're hiding.

Seriously, no one benefits from you playing small. No one.

Here's what I've learned from working with people who are building something real. The ones who can withstand criticism — who can read "you're too much" and not collapse — aren't the ones with thicker skin. They're the ones standing on a stronger foundation.

When your offer, your positioning, your messaging is built on the actual truth of who you are — your values, your expertise, your way of seeing the world — criticism doesn't land the same way. It becomes FAR easier to let that shit roll off your back and recognize it for what it is — evidence that those people are not YOUR people. So you can then double down your focus on the ones who are.

You are going to get criticized. That's not a possibility — it's a guarantee. The goal isn't to avoid it. The goal is to be so grounded in what's true about you that when it comes, you can look at it clearly and know: that's about them. Not me.

Showing up as a full, unedited version of yourself is genuinely risky. Some people will not like it. Some of them will tell you why, in detail, in front of other people.

I know. I've been there. I've sat in that room.

But this is how your dream clients find you. This is how you do your best work. This is how you build something that compounds instead of something you have to rebuild from scratch every few months.

You were never supposed to be liked by everyone.

You were supposed to be magnetic to the right ones.

In love, growth, and unfiltered authenticity,

Kasey

P.S. The thing they said was too much about you? The laugh that's too loud, the directness that makes people uncomfortable, the intensity that some people can't handle? I'd bet money that's the exact thing your best clients love most about working with you.

If you’re ready to build a business that amplifies all the beautiful, magical things that make you YOU, join me on Wednesday for a 75 minute workshop that will show you exactly how. [Grab your spot here]