In the Narrator Seat: Why Your Platform Isn’t About You

I was leading an executive coaching session recently when someone said something I’ve heard many, many times before — but this time it landed differently.

“I hate self-promotion. It feels like an endless sales pitch.”

Those first four words definitely made me realize this level of seething conviction wasn’t some kind of throwaway complaint. This was a belief — one that had been insidiously shaping every decision about what to share, when to speak up and whether to step into rooms where their perspective was not just welcome, but needed.

Here’s the thing: I understood it completely. And I think most of you reading this do too. And if I can be honest? I sometimes still have some of the same thoughts, even after being online for most of my career!

If you’re someone who builds in mission-driven spaces — health/care, social impact, community development — there’s a good chance you carry a version of this tension. You’re doing meaningful work. You’re seeing patterns others miss. You even know how to connect dots across disparate systems that most people experience in isolation. And yet, the idea of “putting yourself out there” feels awkward at best (and maybe sometimes downright disingenuous). I get it, you want to just focus on the work and the results from your superpowers.

So let’s reframe the situation, shall we?

The Narrator, Not the Subject

What if showing up with a visible presence and platform wasn’t about promoting yourself at all?

What if it was more about becoming the narrator of the things you care about most — the trends you’re tracking, the tensions you’re watching unfold (and want to rectify) or even the possibilities you see forming at the edges of your work?

This is the shift I walked through with that client and it changed the entire energy of the conversation. The moment we stopped talking about “self-promotion” and started embracing this concept of narration, the resistance quickly began to dissolve. What we made it about instead was their ability to distill complex frameworks, curate insights, connect various threads and eventually put a perspective out into the world that other people could learn from.

Because narration isn’t ego. It’s being in service.

Think about the people whose work you follow. The dedicated people who help you see your industry more clearly. They’re not standing on a stage saying “look at me.” They’re saying “look at this and this is why it matters.” Even those who pose a question to their colleagues to chime in on a perspective they have. They’re assembling patterns from disparate sources and offering a lens that makes the complexity more navigable. They’re doing the thinking in public so that the rest of us can build on it.

That’s not self-promotion. That’s leadership with a sense of responsibility.

The Cost of Staying Quiet

There’s a line I come back to often in my coaching work: your perspective and insights will always matter to those ones who need to hear it.

When you don’t externalize your perspective — when you keep your thoughts going on a laundry spin cycle internally, processing and re-processing without an outlet — two things happen.

First, you stall. Not because you lack ability or credibility, but because ideas that never meet the outside world tend to loop. They get spun around to the point of paralysis and then, most likely irrelevance. The brilliant framework you pulled together on a post-it note. The pattern you spotted six months ago never gets shared with the people who needed it most (like that colleague prepping for a keynote who could have been inspired!). You end up carrying the weight of insight without the relief of having put it somewhere useful.

Second, and more importantly, you become less visible in conversations where your voice actually matters. The rooms where strategic narratives get shaped and where the direction of your industry gets decided — those rooms aren’t filled by just the loudest voices but by people who have made their thinking findable. People whose perspectives are on the record somewhere, creating a trail that leads back to them when the right opportunity, collaboration, or conversation emerges.

This is the clearest argument in my opinion against the “promotion feels like a sales pitch” way of thinking. It’s really more about just showing up and giving yourself permission. More on that soon.

From Spotlight to Ecosystem

Here’s where the reframe gets practical and where I think it becomes especially relevant for people working in mission-driven spaces.

When you position yourself as a narrator and curator rather than a self-promoter, something interesting happens: you start building an ecosystem instead of simply an audience to speak at.

An audience watches. An ecosystem participates.

When you share your perspective on an aspect of improving healthcare such as orchestrating more dignity within the system as Jewel Jones just launched, you’re not performing — you’re creating a point of contact. Someone reads it and thinks, “I’ve been seeing the same thing. Let me figure out how to dig deeper.” Now you have a collaborator. Someone else reads it and thinks, “I hadn’t considered that angle.” Now you’ve expanded how they approach their work. Another leader reads it and thinks, “This is exactly the lens my team needs right now. Let me reach out to them.” Now you have a professional opportunity that came from the trail of thinking you left behind.

Back in 2016, I had the honor of being an Aspen Ideas Fellow for their Health programming. Three years later in 2019, I had a moment with the incredible leaders pictured below, who would shape the future of the company I built, Onboard Health. Our tagline “We All Go Up” was coined by Ivelyse Andino (on my left) and this adventure of us climbing a mountain and truly having a deep connective moment, would not have happened if it wasn’t for me speaking up, sharing my experience as a Fellow and bringing others along with me. I’ve been going back multiple times since, continuing to create a community.

2019 Aspen Ideas Health — The Original “We All Go Up” crew (from your left: Mai Hong, Tiffany Netters, Carlos Rodarte, Dr. Shelina Davis, me and Ivelyse Andino)

This is what I mean when I talk about intentional ecosystem building. It’s not networking in the transactional sense. It’s the act of making your perspective visible so that the right people — the ones who share your values, who are working on adjacent problems, who need exactly what you bring — can actually find you.

Your platform then becomes an invitational beacon and most certainly not a promotional ad to simply sell something.

Permission as the Real Bottleneck

Yep, I told you we’d come back to this. In my experience, the thing standing between most impact-minded leaders and a more visible presence isn’t strategy. It’s permission.

Not permission from anyone else — permission from themselves. Yikes! You knew I was going to take it there.

The leaders, executives and founders I work with don’t lack credibility by any stretch of the imagination. They don’t lack perspective. What they often lack is the internal green light to trust that their point of view is worth sharing publicly. They’ve spent careers building trust by supporting others, by being the person in the room who elevates the team rather than themselves. And that’s a genuinely valuable instinct. But it becomes limiting when it turns into a pattern of deferring your own voice indefinitely.

Also, if you’ve been a leader who has been working within the confines of rigorous areas such as academia or research, giving yourself permission to narrate — to share what you see/think and where you believe things are headed — feels like alarms will go off. We’re not talking about sharing trade secrets here. We’re talking about creating a mindset shift that allows you to show up as an act of generosity. It’s deciding that the patterns you’re noticing and the questions you’re sitting with are too valuable to keep to yourself. This builds trust, community and opportunities in the most organic way possible.

The most important trust being built here though...is with yourself.

What This Looks Like in Practice

If this resonates but still feels a little abstract, here’s what the shift from “self-promotion” to “narration” can look like in practice:

Instead of: “I should post about my accomplishments on LinkedIn.”

Try: “What trend am I watching right now that my network would benefit from understanding?”

Instead of: “I know I need to build my personal brand!”

Try: “What’s the throughline across my work that I want to be known for narrating?”

Instead of: “I don’t want to be one of those people who’s always talking about themselves.”

Try: “What would it look like to be someone who helps others see the bigger picture?”

Do you see how this shifts your thinking from “me” to the work? Ironically, that’s exactly what makes people pay attention to you — not because you demanded it, but because you offered something worth their time.

The Belonging You Didn’t Expect

Listen, leadership in any capacity can be isolating. Coaching has helped me become a better listener and trust me, being able to tap into a circle is one of the things I hear about quite a bit (I actually wrote about the importance of this). When you build a platform rooted in narration rather than promotion, you don’t just attract professional opportunities. You create a sense of belonging that extends beyond the work itself.

You find your people. Not just collaborators and customers/clients, but the broader community of thinkers who care about the same things you care about. The ones who are wrestling with the same systemic questions. The ones who will challenge your thinking and sharpen your perspective. The ones who make you feel less alone in the work.

For those of you building within thorny spaces like healthcare and social impact — where the problems are complex, the progress is slow and the emotional weight is real (especially these days)— that sense of belonging isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s fuel.

Your platform isn’t about you. It’s about the world you’re trying to help build and the people you’ll meet along the way because you had the courage to narrate it out loud.

Did this resonate with you? I'd love to hear from you: If you gave yourself full permission to narrate — to share your perspective publicly without it feeling like a sales pitch — what would you talk about first? Reply to this email or drop a comment. I'm genuinely curious what's been sitting in your head that the rest of us need to hear.