The power of a "humble" win!

Have you by any chance ever seen something like this?

Someone wins a big contract. Gets promoted. Lands a speaking gig. Wins an award. And then they go straight to LinkedIn or other social media to tell everyone about it.

Of course you have - it's everywhere and to be honest that's great. You should celebrate your wins.

But then comes the post. And it goes something like: "Incredibly humbled and grateful and proud blah blah blah to announce that I have been recognised as one of the top fifty leaders in my field..."

And we all start to feel a bit....well you know!

Not because the achievement isn't real. But because the performed humility, the highlight reel narrated in the third person of your own life, makes everyone reading it feel slightly worse about themselves. And slightly less interested in you.

Start with a wet Tuesday in month three!

I worked with a client who had just led her team through a genuinely extraordinary twelve months. Real results. Everyone staggered by a big turnaround. But a real cost to her personally. She was keen to share the success!

Every version she showed me started with the numbers. The percentages. The headline (The WHAT)

I told her to start instead with the wet Tuesday in month three when she genuinely didn't know if any of it was going to work. The problems that were brewing, the way she was feeling about the task, what others were saying etc! (The WHY)

Everything changed.

Here's why. The achievement itself isn't the interesting part. What's interesting is what it cost her personally. What she had to figure out. What she got wrong before getting it right.

The trophy/accolades/rewards tell people what happened. The story tells them who you are.

And the paradox: the more you lead with outcomes, the less impressive you become. But the moment you're honest about the process, the doubt, the difficulty, the moment it nearly went sideways, you become way more magnetic. Because that's the part people recognise. That's the part that sounds like them.

Nobody truly identifies with your success, but everybody identifies with your uncertainty.

What does this mean for you!

Before you share a win, answer these three questions:

What was genuinely hard about this?

What did you learn that you didn't expect to?

What would be useful for someone reading this right now?

The achievement doesn't disappear. It just gets context. And context is what turns a brag into a story worth reading.

The leaders building real presence aren't the ones shouting loudest about their results. They're the ones who make you feel, reading their words, that they understand what it's like to do hard things in an uncertain world.

So the big question...what's the win you've been sitting on? What's the real story behind it? I look forward to hearing all about it and sharing the joy and the experience with you!