Why Posting Felt Gross and Salesy Until I Changed One Thing (It Wasn't My Confidence)

For about a year, I was teaching people how to build a personal brand on LinkedIn while my own LinkedIn was an embarrassing graveyard of posts that went absolutely nowhere.

I want you to sit with that for a second.

I had done everything right.

I'd studied the gurus.

I'd followed their templates, broken down their frameworks, reverse-engineered their best-performing posts.

I'd read the breakdowns of what worked and why and tried to replicate it.

Every tactical "this is how you write a post that performs" piece of advice I could find, I followed.

Nothing.

So I leveled up. I teamed up with a business partner who was one of the most gifted digital writers I'd ever encountered. She was absolutely killing it on Twitter. Her posts were clean, punchy, perfectly structured. She had the thing I was trying to figure out, and she had it in spades.

I'd write drafts. Share them with her. Sometimes I’d ask her to edit them — really edit them, make them better in every measurable way. I'd post them.

Crickets. Every single time.

Looking back, I think the audience knew. Not consciously, not in a way they could have articulated. But on some level, they could tell it wasn't actually me. That I was performing a version of what I thought a LinkedIn or Twitter post was supposed to sound like. That the person writing those words and the person who would actually show up to do the work weren't quite the same.

Meanwhile, I was on TikTok talking about my life. My feelings. The messy parts of being a person who had built and struggled and learned things the hard way. Nothing tactical. Nothing polished. Just me, being honest about what I was going through.

At the time, 50k people had already followed along.

I had an audience. Just not on the platform that was supposed to matter for my business. And I was standing in front of rooms of consultants telling them I could help them do the thing I couldn't figure out how to do myself.

I felt like a fraud. I just didn't say it out loud.

Here's what was actually happening, though I didn't have the words for it at the time.

I had two versions of myself, and I didn't know how to put them in the same room.

There was the personal Kasey — the one on TikTok, the one who talked about her feelings and her journey and the lessons she'd learned by doing things wrong first. That version felt natural. Alive. Like actually me.

And there was the professional Kasey — the one trying to show up on LinkedIn like a thought leader, like an expert, like someone who had it together. That version felt like a costume. Not fake exactly. But not whole either.

I kept trying to pick a lane. Personal content or professional content. Vulnerable or credible. Real or polished.

And it kept not working, because that was never actually the choice.

Here's the thing nobody tells you when you leave corporate: we're trained to keep work and life separate. Keep the personal stuff at the door. Show up as the professional, not the person. And in a corporate environment, that made sense — being fully yourself in those spaces often isn't safe. I learned that the hard way too.

But when you're building a business around your expertise, your perspective, your specific way of seeing the world? That separation isn't wisdom. It's the problem.

You cannot differentiate yourself in the market with a costume. You can only differentiate yourself with yourself.

I just didn't know how to do that yet.

In 2022, I took a day job.

I'm not burying that or softening it. My business was in feast-or-famine mode and it was exhausting and I was tired. I'd also had a hard realization that I'd been using entrepreneurship as a way to avoid feeling my feelings — staying busy, staying in motion, never quite stopping long enough to deal with what was actually going on. It wasn't healthy.

So when someone approached me about joining their professional services firm as a full-time consultant, I said yes. I needed the stability. I needed the pause. I needed to not be the person running the show for a while.

I wasn't a great fit for them — my outspoken style, my inability to play office politics, my constant ideas about how to do everything differently — and they weren't a great fit for me. But the year wasn't wasted. I got to reset. I got to breathe. I got to figure out what I actually wanted to build and why.

And then, on a Wednesday in July 2023, I got laid off.

I want to be clear about my intentions when I wrote this.

I was not trying to go viral. I was not executing a content strategy. I was not thinking about hooks or optimal post length or what time LinkedIn's algorithm rewards. I had just been laid off four days earlier. I was mildly terrified and wildly excited, and I needed the people who knew me to know what had happened — without me having to individually text fifty people.

That was the whole plan. A life update. Posted at 10am on a Saturday, which is essentially the worst possible time to post on LinkedIn.

I threw out every piece of advice I'd been given. Every template, every framework, every "this is how you write a post that performs." I just wrote what happened and how I felt about it.

Within 24 hours: 600,000 views. 5,000 reactions. Hundreds of comments.

On a Saturday.

And because I was also talking about my work — what I was building, who I wanted to help — that one post closed multiple one-on-one clients. $37k in revenue. From a life update I posted so my friends would stop worrying about me.

Here's what it actually was: I had nothing left to protect.

The performance was over. The image of the successful entrepreneur, the LinkedIn expert, the person who had it all figured out — none of it was relevant anymore. I wasn't trying to maintain anything. I was just a person telling the truth about what had happened to her.

And in the complete absence of the performance, the real person showed up.

The one 600,000 people had apparently been waiting for.

I don't say that to be dramatic. I say it because I think most of us are one honest post away from something that changes everything — and we keep not writing it because we're too busy protecting an image that isn't even serving us.

Let’s be real here. One post doesn't hand you your voice. Not permanently or in a way you can replicate on purpose.

It took me weeks to understand what had worked. Longer to figure out how to do it intentionally. Even longer to figure out how to connect the personal stuff to the actual work I was doing — how to make it relevant instead of just confessional, how to talk about my business in a way that felt like me and not like a LinkedIn coach trying to sound like a LinkedIn coach.

The bridge only fully appeared when the positioning became clear.

When I finally had a real answer to: who exactly am I for, what makes me genuinely different from everyone else doing something similar, and why is my specific life experience actually the point?

Once I had that, the personal stuff wasn't just personal anymore. It was evidence. It was the reason I was the right person for this work.

The TikTok stories about my mess and my feelings and what I'd learned the hard way — those weren't separate from my professional credibility. They were my professional credibility. They were proof that I understood the thing from the inside.

That's when posting stopped feeling like a constant negotiation — is this too personal? is this too salesy? does this make me look credible or does it make me look like a mess? — and started feeling like one coherent thing.

And here's the thing I didn't expect: the process of finding my voice online changed my voice in real life too.

There's something that happens when you start writing publicly and paying attention to what feels true when you write it, and what lands when you share it.

It forces a kind of clarity that's hard to get any other way. You start to figure out what you actually stand for, what you genuinely want to talk about, how you really see the world. It pulls things out of you.

It's one of the reasons I talk about building a personal brand as something that can genuinely change your life — not just because of how people respond to it, but because of what it does to you. The business results are almost a byproduct of getting that clear about yourself.

You probably have a version of this split, too.

A professional self you show online — polished, credible, safe.

And a real self you keep a little quieter, because you're not sure it belongs in a professional context, or you're not sure people will take you seriously if they see it, or honestly you're just not sure it's relevant.

Here's what I want to ask you, and I want you to actually answer it rather than read past it:

What would you post if you weren't trying to protect the image?

And before you talk yourself out of it — I want to be very clear. I am not telling you that you have to be as raw and as vulnerable as I am.

My version of authentic is unfiltered, oversharing, feelings-first. That's who I ACTUALLY am. Anyone who knows me in person knows I'm exactly like this offline. It would be weird if I showed up any other way online.

Your version of authentic might look completely different. Quieter. More measured. More wry. That's fine. Better than fine — that's the point. You don't have to be me.

You just have to be you. Fully. Not the costumed version you've been performing for an audience that can tell the difference anyway.

The work of building a business that feels like you — where the professional and the personal aren't two different people you're trying to keep from running into each other — that's the work. And it starts with getting clear enough on who you are and what you're actually doing and why you're the one to do it that you stop needing the costume.

If any part of this resonated, I want to hear from you.

Hit reply: what's one thing that makes showing up authentically online feel scary? I read every single one.

In love and growth,

Kasey

P.S. Thursday's newsletter is the strategic side of this same coin — what actually makes content convert, and the data from the post that proved it. Read it here.