Getting clients without talking about yourself
This week's way to find clients works better the less you talk about yourself. Here's the mechanism.
This is the fourth in my series on five ways to find clients, and the one I suspect will land most personally for a lot of you.
Because it’s about visibility. And visibility is where a lot of us get stuck.
I speak to purpose-driven independents and business owners every day, and something comes up constantly, usually lowered to half-volume, as if it’s a little embarrassing:
“I know I should post more. I know I should put myself out there. I just… can’t quite bring myself to do it.”
It’s usually followed by a small apology. As though the inability to self-promote were a personal weakness, a discipline problem, a thing to fix with more willpower.
I want to offer a different reading. By the end of this, I want to show you that the way out isn’t to get louder or better at talking about yourself. It’s something different. And it starts somewhere you might not expect.
We think visible equals successful
Here’s a belief almost all of us hold without examining it.
We assume the people we see most often, the ones posting, speaking, showing up in the feed, are the most successful. We equate visibility with success. More visible, more legit. Quieter, presumably struggling.
There’s a grain of truth in it. Being visible increases what I’d call the surface area of luck. The more people who understand what you do, the more chances the right opportunity finds you. Learning to be visible matters.
But the equation has a hidden cost nobody prints on the label. And that cost is not paid equally.
Visibility doesn’t feel equally safe for everyone
There’s something we don’t talk about enough: visibility doesn’t feel equally safe for everyone.
A 2023 international study of 4,710 women across 103 countries found that nearly 87% had experienced hostility because of their success or achievements. Many also reported having achievements downplayed, or feeling penalised for being seen as ambitious.
It even has a name: Tall Poppy Syndrome. Being cut down precisely because you stand out.
For many people, self-promotion isn’t just uncomfortable. It carries a real social cost. The instinct to stay quiet isn’t always a confidence problem or a lack of discipline. Sometimes it’s a rational response to past experience.
I know this one personally. It took me a long time to understand why being visible felt almost physically hard for me, until I traced it back to being bullied as a child for the way I spoke.
When being seen feels risky, staying quiet starts to feel safer. I wrote about that here, if it resonates:
So if putting yourself out there feels harder than it “should,” you’re probably not imagining it. I don’t think the only answer is to push through. There’s another way that works differently.
The strongest opportunities often come from someone else saying your name in the right room
It is excruciating to say “I’m really good at this.”
It costs almost nothing to say “she’s really good at this.”
That asymmetry is the whole opportunity.
When you promote yourself, you’re transferring information. Here’s what I do, here’s why I’m good. The listener has to decide whether to believe you, and some part of them discounts it, because of course you’d say that. And for anyone carrying internalised tall poppy wiring, sounding confident in your own skill can feel, to yourself most of all, like arrogance.
When someone else says it about you, something different happens. They’re not transferring information. They’re transferring trust. Spending a little of their own reputation to vouch for yours. We believe that in a way we can never quite believe self-praise.
This is why one sentence from a respected peer, “you should really talk to her,” outperforms months of your own careful posting. And it’s why the visibility that wins the most work often happens in rooms you’ll never enter: a conversation where your name comes up, a “do you know anyone who…” answered with “actually, yes.” You can’t be in those rooms. But your work can be, carried in by someone who knows it well enough to describe it.
This is the system. Getting clients through someone else saying your name works better the less you rely on talking about yourself. But it doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be tended.
Here’s the part I find genuinely moving
Look again at what Tall Poppy Syndrome actually is. It’s people cutting each other down for succeeding. Downplaying. Diminishing. Making sure no one stands too tall.
Spotlighting someone else is the exact opposite move.
When you publicly celebrate another person’s work, you’re not just helping them. You’re refusing to participate in the thing that keeps everyone small, including you. You’re doing the precise inverse of the syndrome.
Daniel Priestley makes a point I keep coming back to: the most influential people are almost always the ones who spotlight others. They lift, they introduce, they vouch. Generosity isn’t the opposite of status. It’s how status is built.
So peer promotion does three things at once:
It sidesteps the tax you pay for self-promotion.
It builds your own influence rather than spending it.
And it dismantles the culture of cutting-down, one celebration at a time.
That’s why, inside IMMA, we practise this deliberately rather than leave it to chance.
But none of it works without one thing first
Here’s the part people often miss: someone can only recommend your work if they understand it clearly.
If your description is vague, “I help mission-driven organisations,” or “I do strategy consulting,” even the most generous supporter can’t explain what makes you valuable.
But a clear story? That travels. “She worked with a founder who was involved in every decision, and six months later the team was running without him.” That sticks. That gets repeated in rooms you’re not in.
That’s why, inside IMMA Collective, we spend time helping members get specific: who they help, what changes because of their work, what story someone else could easily repeat. In our monthly cross-pollination sessions, we have one counterintuitive rule: don’t pitch your offer, tell a story instead.
Because visibility works differently when it isn’t just you carrying it. The best opportunities often begin with someone simply saying: “You should talk to them.”
This is also, honestly, where the peer-powered part of IMMA reaches its limit, and where the closer work matters.
The community can surface and celebrate your wins. But getting your positioning crisp, the kind of crisp that makes you effortless to recommend, usually takes someone giving you direct, honest feedback.
That’s the closer work we do with members. Clarity first. Then everything else can grow. Your own visibility, others speaking on your behalf, IMMA being visible on your behalf, all of it has something to root in.
We’ve started doing that last part more deliberately. We are going to publish a newsletter for organisations that, alongside funding opportunities, spotlights individual members’ work. So the right people get to know them without the member having to stand on a chair and wave. The collective doing the visibility work, at scale. But it only works because the clarity work came first.
Something concrete you can do this week
Don’t promote yourself this week. Promote someone else.
Pick one person whose work you genuinely admire. Write a short, specific post about them. Not a vague endorsement, a real one. What did they do, for whom, and what changed because of it.
A simple structure:
I want to spotlight [name]. [One sentence on who they help.] Recently they [specific thing they did, and the outcome]. If you’re someone who [the situation their ideal client is in], talk to them.
Post it. Tag them.
Notice two things. How much easier it is to celebrate someone else than to celebrate yourself. And how good it feels. That feeling is the small proof you’ve just done the opposite of cutting someone down.
If you want a few real examples to make this concrete: Ariel’s work, Eliza’s work.
This was the third of five ways to find clients I’m walking through in this series. (Earlier instalments: 1. intro, 2. referrals, 3. opportunities.)
Next week: outreach. What we’ve actually learned reaching out to 1,500 ideal clients. What’s working in 2026, what isn’t, and the statistic that changed how I think about the whole thing.
With you in this,
Lilli
P.S. If you write a spotlight post this week, tag me or send it over. I’d love to read it, and there’s a good chance I’ll share it.
P.P.S. We’ve opened the waitlist for IMMA Collective, 20 new members in June. If getting aligned clients more consistently is a priority this year, that’s what IMMA is built for: creating a steady flow of aligned opportunities together with others. If this series has resonated, here’s the door.