Most of my clients and readers have something in common.

They've been "different" their whole lives.

People, for whatever reason, whose brains or bodies or backgrounds don't fit the "typical" corporate mold.

If any of that resonates, you already know what I'm about to say.

You learned early that to succeed, you adapt. You code-switch. You soften your edges. 

You learn which parts of yourself are "acceptable" and which parts need to be tucked away. You perform "professional" — which really just means "make the people in power comfortable."

And it worked. You survived. Many of you thrived — at least by external metrics.

Then you went out on your own.

The whole point of going out on your own was supposed to be freedom.

No more performing for a boss who doesn't get you. No more navigating systems that weren't built for you. No more shrinking yourself to fit into someone else's idea of "professional." Finally — finally — you get to do it your way.

But then... you kept hiding.

You softened your opinions on your website. You wrote copy that could belong to anyone in your industry. You created proposals that sound like corporate templates because that's what felt "safe." You held back your real thoughts on sales calls because what if they think you're too much?

You performed "professional" in your content, in your positioning, in how you show up online — because that's what you learned to do to survive.

Or you just plain refused to show up online, worried about what people will think and how they’ll judge you. 

The masking is so deep, so automatic, you don't even recognize you're doing it.

You escaped the environment that required you to hide. But you brought the hiding with you.

You and I have talked about how I’ve done this too. Years ago, I built a TikTok following of 94,000 people by just... being myself. Talking about life, about weird thoughts, about the messy reality of being human. It felt effortless. Natural. Like I'd found a place where being authentically me was celebrated.

And then I started thinking about how I could change it to better serve my business and thinking about ways I could talk more about work. I got overwhelmed by it and I just… stopped. 

I let something that was working — something that felt good — get tangled up in overthinking until it disappeared entirely. Because even when hiding isn't required anymore, the instinct is so deeply wired that we do it anyway.

This is the part most people miss: hiding isn't "playing it safe." It's not a neutral choice. It's actively draining.

Every time you soften an opinion, write in a voice that isn't yours, show up as "professional you" instead of real you — you spend energy. That energy doesn't come back.

Think about what it takes to maintain the mask:

You have to remember which version of yourself you're supposed to be in each context. You have to edit your instincts before they come out of your mouth. You have to translate your actual thoughts into something more palatable, less risky, more "acceptable." You have to hold back the thing you really want to say and replace it with something safer.

That's not nothing. That's work. Invisible, exhausting work that nobody sees and nobody pays you for.

You've been spending energy on masking for YEARS. Decades, maybe. And when you go out on your own and keep masking? You don't get relief. You just get a different flavor of exhaustion — with no PTO, no benefits, and no one to blame but yourself.

The exhaustion you feel isn't from the work. It's from the pretending.

And over time, something worse happens. You start to lose confidence. Not because you're not good at what you do — you are. But because you're operating outside your authentic self. You're doing things that aren't quite right for you, saying things that aren't quite true to what you believe, building something that doesn't quite fit who you are.

Something inside you knows it. That knowing eats away at you — even when you can't name what's wrong.

Here's what's actually underneath the hiding:

You're not afraid of losing clients. You're afraid of being fully seen — and then rejected for who you actually are.

When you perform "professional," rejection doesn't sting as much. They're rejecting the mask, not you. You can tell yourself they just weren't the right fit, or they didn't understand what you were offering, or they weren't ready for your level of work.

But if you show up as your full, authentic, weird self — with your spiky opinions and your unconventional background and your contrarian views and your particular way of seeing the world — and THEN get rejected?

That feels like annihilation.

That feels like, "I showed them the real me, and it wasn't enough."

So you keep hiding. Not because it's working — you already know it's not. But because the alternative feels too dangerous.

The brutal irony is that by hiding to protect yourself from rejection, you guarantee that every win feels hollow.

Because when someone chooses to work with you based on the mask? They didn't really choose you. They chose the performance. And somewhere deep down, you know that. So even success doesn't land the way it should.

You're protecting yourself from a rejection that would hurt — by creating a success that doesn't nourish.

Here's what I want you to remember:

You've already survived being different.

You've been navigating spaces that weren't built for you your entire life. You learned to mask because you had to — because the environments you were in punished difference. Because being yourself came with real consequences.

But you're not in those environments anymore.

The fear is outdated software. It's protecting you from threats that no longer exist.

You already survived being different. The only question now is whether you'll let yourself actually freaking benefit from it.

I've talked to so many consultants — especially women — who tell me the exact same story.

They had creative ideas for making things better. They saw problems everywhere and felt compelled to fix them. They couldn't accept "that's how we've always done it" as an answer. They spoke up when they saw better solutions.

And it got them in trouble.

Managers loved that energy at first — then found them tiresome. Employers valued the results — then found ways to undercut them. They were rewarded for solving problems, then punished for noticing too many.

Here's the thing I wish someone had told all of us earlier:

What made you dangerous as an employee makes you invaluable as a consultant.

The relentless drive to improve. The inability to accept mediocrity. The compulsion to speak up when you see better solutions. The impatience with politics and BS.

These things made you "difficult" in corporate. But now, as a consultant, they make clients love you.

A few months ago, I told you about my client Pam, an HR consultant. When we started working together, her offer documents read like every other HR consultant on the planet. Polished. Professional. Completely generic.

But Pam's secret weapon? She thinks most of HR is pretty dumb. She has strong opinions about what's broken in the industry and exactly how to fix it. Her original materials talked about "improving HR efficiency through strategic initiatives." Corporate-approved language that said absolutely nothing.

When we rewrote everything to sound like Peak Pam — sassy, opinionated, unafraid to call out industry BS — something shifted. Not just in her marketing. In her. She started networking with more confidence. She had clearer conversations with clients. She stopped apologizing for having opinions and started owning them.

She went from $10K to $70K months in eight months.

The thing she was hiding — her impatience with corporate BS — was the exact thing her ideal clients were desperate to find.

The whole point of going out on your own is that you get to choose.

Choose your clients. Choose your positioning. Choose your content. Choose who you want to be in your business.

You can choose to keep performing "professional" — keep hiding the things that make you different, keep spending energy on the mask, keep building a business that requires you to be someone you're not.

Or you can choose to build a business that rewards you for being MORE yourself, not less.

A member who just joined the Collective told me something that stopped me in my tracks. He loves to read. Like, loves to read. And he has this habit of recommending books to clients — sometimes they appreciate it, sometimes he can tell they find it annoying.

He mentioned it almost apologetically, like it was a problem he needed to fix. "I need to learn to stop doing that," he said. "It's not always well received."

I pushed back hard.

No. You don't need to hide your nerdy energy. You need to find clients who love your nerdy energy.

His ideal clients aren't just defined by their business problem — they're defined by whether they light up when he slides a book recommendation across the table.

The clients who roll their eyes? They're not his people. And that's not a problem to fix. That's data to use.

Your quirks are data. Your weird is data. The things that make some people love you and other people not get you at all — THAT is your positioning.

Here's the tricky thing about hiding: when you've been doing it long enough, you don't even notice anymore. It just feels like "how things are."

So let me give you some patterns to look for.

In your messaging:

Your website sounds like it could belong to anyone in your industry. You've scrubbed the personality out of your LinkedIn posts. Your proposals read like corporate templates. You avoid stating strong opinions because "what if someone disagrees?" You use words like "strategic" and "optimize" instead of saying what you actually mean.

In your client relationships:

You take clients who don't quite "get" you — and spend the whole engagement feeling slightly off. You find yourself justifying your approach instead of clients trusting it. You dim your personality on sales calls to seem more "professional." You have clients who roll their eyes at the things that make you YOU.

In your body:

Client work drains you more than it should — not because of the work itself, but because of how you have to show up for it. You feel relieved when projects end, even successful ones. Something feels hollow even when you're hitting your numbers. You're exhausted, and it's not from the workload.

The question to sit with: If I were being fully myself in my business — my real opinions, my actual personality, my authentic way of working — what would I do differently?

On Thursday, I shared the Authentic Authority Audit — five questions to surface the differentiators you've been hiding. If you haven't done that audit yet, start there. That newsletter is about WHAT you've been hiding. This one is about WHY.

You didn't go out on your own to build another cage.

If your business requires you to hide who you are — to mask, to perform, to soften yourself into something acceptable — you haven't built freedom. You've just built a better-branded prison.

Being the CEO of your business means you get to decide how things work. Being the Chief Experience Officer of your life means you get to decide what kind of life you're building.

And here's what I know for sure: you cannot build a life you love while being someone you're not.

If you're exhausted, if you're losing confidence, if success feels hollow even when you're hitting your numbers — check whether you're still hiding.

Because the life you actually want? It's on the other side of being seen.

———

You've spent enough energy hiding.

You've done enough performing.

You've proven — over and over — that you can succeed while being half yourself.

Imagine what happens when you stop.

The clients who are looking for exactly what you offer — exactly who you are — they're out there. They're waiting. But they can't find you while you're hiding.

It's time to let them see you.

———

In love, growth, and being unapologetically, authentically you,
Kasey