The Many Paths of Visibility: Expansion
Unfettered expansion hasn't served the planet particularly well. Let's explore new ways of growing your audience, expanding your reach, and being visible as a creative, a founder, or a business owner.
Often when I speak about visibility, people assume it means becoming an influencer. This is not surprising really; it’s a very visible form of visibility!
But whilst being an influencer is a visibility option, it’s hardly the only one.
Visibility can be intimate or very public, it can look like speaking authentically after years of toeing the company line, or it can mean allowing yourself to be more emotionally vulnerable after years of shutdown. It can involve sharing the ins and outs of your life or it can mean sharing nothing about your life whilst sharing your work as widely as possible.
I started the School of Visibility because I wanted to encourage people to be visible on their own terms. I became tired of the cookie-cutter version of visibility I was seeing online and wanted to democratise the whole concept. I wanted introverts to feel just as comfortable with being visible as extroverts do and I wanted women, and all marginalised groups, to be as visible as straight, white men.
In working with people on this, I discovered that there are many paths you can take as you embrace and investigate the topic of visibility. Here are four paths I uncovered: the path of expansion, the path of justice, the path of wisdom, and the path of peace.
The path of expansion is for anyone interested in visibility as a way to expand your reach (hello creatives, business owners, contractors, consultants, and founders of NGOs).
The path of justice is for anyone operating in the advocacy space or wanting to speak up about systemic inequality, injustice and/or social change.
The path of wisdom is for those interested in leadership development, in exercising discernment as they become more visible, and in understanding the power of our words.
The path of peace is for people who are interested in inner peace and/or in reaching across worlds and building connections among people.
Throughout April, we’re going to be exploring these different paths.
Today we’re on the expansion trail.
The expansion trail is one of the many paths of visibility I’ve been exploring in my time as an entrepreneur.
It’s a funny path. (Not funny haha though.) It’s fraught with lots of potential pitfalls. It’s sometimes exhilarating, sometimes exhausting, and other times rewarding.
When I started my business I had quite debilitating chronic fatigue. I would work for an hour and then rest for two. Then I’d work for another hour and rest again. It was hardly conducive to visibility. In fact, I’d never been more invisible than in the years leading up to the creation of my business. (Disability, in all its forms, has a significant visibility problem in the ableist societies in which we all live.)
My capacity for visibility was further diminished by the fact that when I started my business, everyone working online was in hustle mode. ‘I blog 5 times a day!’ people proudly stated. ‘I show up for hours each day on social media’ exclaimed others.
Even if I’d been physically capable of that, that approach would not have appealed to me. I’d just spent four years leaning into the lessons of rest and sillness. I call it my apprenticeship in the energy of the Feminine, which, in essence, is the opposite of hustle.
Rather than learning another productivity tool or choosing to wake up at 5 am, I was learning to slow down. To do less and be more. To simplify. After four years of quite an intense education, I knew my body wasn’t going to allow me to overlook those lessons. I was never going to join hustle culture, so I didn’t bother.
Instead, I started exploring my own path. It didn’t feel like a path less trodden. It felt like a path never trodden. I’m sure others were taking similar steps, I just didn’t know them at the time.
Nevertheless, there’s something about spending years lying in bed staring at white walls that teaches you to listen to your body. To trust its wisdom.
So I asked myself what I could do when it came to being visible and I did that.
Rather than blogging 5 times a day, I blogged once every two weeks. Once I had stabilised that output and it felt manageable, I moved to once a week and have stuck with that now for 15 years.
Rather than showing up on socials all the time, I showed up in specific groups a few times a week and when I was there I was an active participant. I didn’t lurk. I engaged.
Rather than enrolling in a million courses and making as many connections as I could, I focused on a few really important courses and within those courses I made meaningful connections with a smaller group of people.
Rather than worrying about the students and clients who weren’t in the room and trying to reach them, I focused on the people who were there and I worked hard to ensure their needs were being met.
Rather than jumping on every shiny new platform that popped up, I chose the ones that I actually enjoyed being on and was consistent there. FOMO certainly popped up from time to time, but I reminded myself that what you say no to is just as important as what you say yes to, and refocused my efforts on what I was already doing.
And you know what? That was enough to build a business.
Of course, the School of Visibility® isn’t the largest business in the world and that’s never been my aim. In the pursuit of simplicity, I’m looking for impact that isn’t unwieldy and influence that doesn’t require me to show up in all the places or sit in a thousand meetings a week.
I’ve had to think very deeply about how to create that. About the business model that supports that aim. Naturally, I’ve made a lot of mistakes along the way, and I’ve had to get comfortable with building a business more slowly than many other people.
But that approach means that now there’s room for harmonious expansion. I can build a layer at a time, expand my wings a little more each year, and know that my visibility efforts won’t see me back in bed for weeks at a time and won’t undermine the integrity of what I’ve already built.
Thinking about the nature of your impact and influence isn’t something that comes up in conversations about visibility in business. Normally, it’s numbers, numbers and more numbers.
But how we build those numbers, and the environment we create around ourselves so that we might direct our influence, matters enormously.
Here are the principles I’ve developed as I’ve explored my non-hustle form of visibility;
The best form of visibility is one that suits your natural way of showing up and speaking up. Anything else is a waste of time and will eventually be abandoned.
The closer you get to speaking up authentically, about things that your heart feels compelled to speak about, the more likely it is that visibility blocks will arise. Clearing these out as you go paves the way for harmonious expansion.
Finding the places where people who are already comfortable being visible, in the way you’d like to be, is a fast track to overcoming visibility blocks and limiting beliefs.
Expanding your reach can unbalance you. Because of this, it needs to be met with grounding actions and habits. A scattergun approach to visibility and/or an approach that’s not supported by healthy visibility habits will create inefficiencies and inconsistency.
Visibility becomes sustainable when you build in cyclicality. Cyclicality or seasonality - I’ll use the terms interchangeably here - stopped me from thinking I had to reach a certain goal by a certain date or consider myself a failure. In that old, linear way of thinking, I would try to build every element I ever wanted into a launch, a program, or a social media strategy and exhaust myself in the process. When I started thinking cyclically, I took one layer from my ultimate vision and focused on creating that properly. Knowing that I would be returning to the project in the future meant I could rest easily in the knowledge that I wasn’t done and may never be done, but at least one component of the total picture was in place.
Eventually, I took all of these principles and used them to create Women Speaking Up. I saw that many people were teaching tactics for reaching more people and many people were encouraging people to leap without a net, but no one was speaking about how to expand in a grounded way. In a way that didn’t re-traumatise or further dysregulate an already dysregulated nervous system.
I looked for habits of sustainability and couldn’t find them.
I looked for conversations about how different identity groups experience visibility and wasn’t hearing them.
I looked for talk about visibility blocks. They weren’t happening.
So I poured all of this into Women Speaking Up.
We’ve been living through revolutionary times for quite a while now. They’re inherently unsettling. They shake up the foundations of what we think we know and invite us to visit things anew.
In such an environment, we need anchors. We need habits and systems that support us. We need community.
Growth for growth’s sake hasn’t served the planet particularly well. Let’s explore a path of expansion that retains its connections to the earth, to each other, to our inner truths. That’s a visibility path that serves us all.