You can love what you do and still find showing up for it exhausting.
Both things can be true.
If you’re an introvert and you’re building a brand based on you, today’s issue is for you.
Because there’s a decision with a cost you’re making every day. You just might not realize it.
That’s what we’re uncovering today.
Issue #013
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Last Friday, I was driving into Raleigh with a Starbucks in my hand and a 3-hour strategy session waiting for me at the other end.
My business coach, Kasey Brown (who runs the Brick by Brick community and is one of those humans who can see the five things you’re avoiding from across a room) had carved out the day for a deep dive into my business. I’d been excited about this for weeks.
Then somewhere just past the I-40 exit, my phone lit up with her name.
Oh, btw…
(Nothing good has ever followed those three letters. Nothing.)
It was going to be filmed, she said. For YouTube. Hope that was cool. (I might be embellishing. Not the YouTube part.)
Cool. Sure. Yup, totally fine.
I did not turn the car around (that was a win, honestly. I’m claiming it.) I did briefly wonder if I needed something stronger than a latte. But I kept driving, because being an introvert who is also building a brand means living with two wants that are permanently at war with each other:
You want to be known for your work (and for you.)
You also want to do your work from the couch, in comfortable pants, with the dogs nearby and nobody watching your face do the thing it does when you’re thinking. (My hubby knows that look well.)
Those two wants don’t resolve. They just negotiate, daily. And the version of you that shows up anyway isn’t some bigger, bolder, more extroverted version you summoned from the bottom of the Starbucks cup.
It’s just you. The actual one. Walking in.
I walked in. The cameras were there — lights, the full setup, the works. Microphone hooked in and everything. And I sat down anyway.
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🔎 Under the Magnifying Glass
There are two versions of you that can show up on the page, too.
Coffee Shop You (yes, this is what I call it) is the one who’d tell that car story over a latte, with the asides in parenthesis, and the tiny quips and self-deprecating observations where you admit you briefly considered turning around. (Okay, it was a long minute.)
Stage You is the one who shows up in a metaphorical blazer, clears her throat, and says, “As an introverted founder, I’ve learned that discomfort is where growth lives.”
(I yawned writing that. You yawned reading it. We’re even.)
Guess which one is costing you.
Stage You isn’t a more professional version of Coffee Shop You. She’s a costume of a person, and readers can feel the difference in about four seconds. When they land on the costume, they bounce. Not because they’re consciously rejecting it, but because their brain can tell there’s nobody home.
For all you fellow introverts in the back:
Stage You isn’t just less effective.
She’s more expensive. You pay for her twice.
Once in the energy it takes to manufacture her, which, for an introvert, is considerable. We are not running on spare performance batteries over here.
And once in the reach she fails to earn, because the reader can’t find you inside her. There’s no person on the page. Just the shape of one.
So the math goes like this: high cost, low return, and at the end of a week like that, you’re on the couch under a blanket wondering why it’s so hard. It’s because you’re paying double. And the version of you that makes it easier (for you and the audience) never even made it on to the page.
Your introverted-ness isn’t just a feelings thing. It changes the craft. It changes what’s at stake every time you sit down to write. Or talk. Or share.
Every time you try to become visible.
Getting Coffee Shop You onto the page isn’t a bonus. It’s the whole job.
🏛️ The “Rule” This World Runs On
Rule #1: When Stage You is on the page, nobody’s home.
The person is the signal. Not the title, not the credentials, not the brand voice. The person.
When you write as Stage You, polished and declarative and performing the expertise, you strip out the very thing that lets a reader recognize you as a human they’d want to know.
The asides (I do love a good parenthetical), the confessions, your “give me something stronger than a latte” thoughts. Those aren’t decoration. They’re the identity signal.
🧠 Why Your Brain Calls This Magic
I’m starting to think there’s brain science for everything, because yes, there’s one for this, too. (Who knew?)
There’s a concept in social cognition called warmth perception. Our brains use small, seemingly irrelevant signals to decide whether the person on the other end is safe to listen to. It looks like jokes. Funny asides. Admissions of uncertainty. The little self-deprecations.
When those signals are present, the brain relaxes and leans in. When they’re missing, the brain flags it as “performance,” raises the defenses, and refuses to let anything land.
This means Stage You isn’t only exhausting, it’s not doing the job you think it should.
🕳️ Watch Out for The Trap Door
I fall into Stage Jeannie more often than I’d like to admit.
She shows up when I’m tired, when I’m nervous, when I’m writing for a bigger audience than usual, and I start feeling the weight of it.
She shows up when I open a blank doc and ask “okay, what should I say” instead of “okay, what happened this week.” And lately, she’s got a new favorite hiding place: anywhere AI is involved.
I use AI. Most of us do. But I’ve learned the hard way that if I copy-paste from it, Stage Jeannie leads the way and lands in an empty room.
The AI takes a first pass at something that sounds like me — professional, clean, on-message — and strips out the little moves that make it actually mine. The aside that curls into a joke. The sentence that loops back on itself. The parenthetical I almost deleted but kept. Those are the first things to go, because they read as imperfect to a machine trying to optimize for clarity.
Except those imperfections are the entire thing. They’re how you know a person wrote it.
So now I have a rule: I don’t copy-paste. When I use AI, I type every last crossed t and dotted i myself. And every time, my voice comes back in.
Another thing I do if I’m not sure: I read the sentence out loud. I had a client do this recently, when she couldn’t land on two versions of a headline we were working on for her. The minute she said them out loud, she knew which felt right.
The point to all of this is to make sure you, the person, show up on the page.
Because Stage Jeannie is what happens when I stop paying attention. And for an introvert building a brand, paying attention to that is the job.
🧡 One Thing To Do Differently
Take whatever you’re working on right now, a post, an email, anything — and read it out loud
You’ll know, instantly, which sentences are you and which sentences are Stage You.
You’ll feel it in your voice. The ones that belong to you will come out easy. The ones that don’t will catch a little. They’ll sound a little stiff, land a little false.
Rewrite those. Not the whole thing. Just those. (And don’t take out your em dashes if you’d actually put them there. That’s where our little robot rebellion will start.)
Your brand (and your story) isn’t built in the big dramatic moments. It’s built in the decision to walk in the room when everything in you would rather not. That includes the online ones.
📌 Put This on the Post-It
Your story is worth telling.
And nobody’s hearing it from the couch.
(Which, frankly, is how we like it anyway.)
I spent Saturday under a blanket with two dogs and absolutely nothing on my calendar. Recovery mode. It was glorious.
If you’re an introvert building a brand and you needed someone to tell you that the couch day is part of the job, this is me telling you.
It is. Rest hard. Then walk back in the room.
Until next Thursday,
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Mollie was all in on couch day. (But she usually is.)
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