How to Be Visible Without Being Loud

On finding your voice your own way

My mom likes to tell the story of my pre-K teacher pulling her aside to say I was the quietest child she’d ever met. She tells it now with a kind of disbelief, because that same quiet kid grew up and went into sales. A job that, on paper, requires you to be very much the opposite.

I have always received it as something heavier than she means it. I was only four. I had not yet done anything. And a verdict about me had already been made.

The progress reports that followed were, more or less, the same. Could participate more. Could raise her hand more. Could be more proactive, could speak up without being called on. I want to point at that word for a second. Could. It’s such a gentle word. Encouraging, even. It is also, unmistakably, a correction. Year after year, a new teacher, the same note: there is a louder version of this child, and we are waiting for her.

Spoiler alert: she never showed up. I did just fine. But I did so in my own way.

I spent a long time assuming I’d grow out of it, or into something else. That adulthood, or at least a job, would finally hand me the volume knob everyone kept gesturing at. Instead, I went into sales.

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If you have spent any time on a sales team, you have likely taken the tests. The personality assessments, the color frameworks, the four-letter profiles. They get rolled out at the offsite, you answer the questions, and a few days later your team is sorted into types like a bag of candy.

At Twitter, my team did the Colors version. You fill out a questionnaire, the results come back, and you get slated into a section: Red, Blue, Green, or Yellow. Every seller around me came back a Red. Bold, fast, driving. I came back Blue. Cautious, Analytical, Precise. They had us stand in different corners of the room, depending on our color profile. I was literally in a corner, alone.

Years later at Reddit, my team did a different framework: the DISC assessment. Every other seller, a D: direct, results, strong-willed. I was a CS: conscientious, steady, reserved.

I remember looking at those results and feeling something I could not name for a long time. It wasn’t quite embarrassment. It was something closer to exposure. Everyone clustered neatly in one place, and there I was, somewhere else. In a room where sameness reads as alignment, I had results telling me I didn’t fit.

It took me a long time to realize what I was actually holding. It was the same information I’d always received, just now laundered through an HR framework instead of a teacher’s cursive. The pre-K teacher, the report cards, the colors test, the DISC profile. Different decades, different cities, different frameworks. One consistent evaluation of me.

And for a while, I believed the results meant that I was a Blue doing a Red’s job. That I didn’t belong there. That I wouldn’t succeed.

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The early part of my career was mostly spent trying to close that gap.

I watched the loud closers. I studied them a little. They walked into rooms a certain way, they took up space, they were unmistakably bold, and that got noticed. My style was a bit more reserved. And because of that, I spent a fair amount of energy trying to perform a version of it that would help me blend in.

It really didn’t work. You can push yourself a bit outside your natural setting, but you cannot live there. People can tell when you’re not being authentic. What I felt, more than anything, in those years, was a low and constant doubt: am I actually built for this?

This certainly came at a cost. There were years where louder colleagues got the recognition first, where my style read as a thing to develop rather than a thing to deploy, where I genuinely could not tell if I was good at my job or just getting away with it. The doubt was not cute. It was the texture of a decent stretch of my twenties.

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The turn, when it came, was not a decision. I did not read a book or sit in a workshop and choose to believe in myself.

What happened is that the evidence kept coming in, and it kept saying the same thing.

My clients stayed. They came back for the next activation with a larger budget. They followed me from one platform to the next. They referred me to other people. They told me when something was wrong on their end before they probably should have, because they trusted me to do something useful with it. They believed that I was invested in them, more than I was chasing a number. The relationships outlasted the individual deals, sometimes by years.

And slowly it became impossible to ignore the pattern. They were not buying what I was selling. They were buying from ME. Not because I had charmed them, exactly. But because they had decided, over time, that I would tell them the truth, including the truth that something they wanted wasn’t going to work. A loud pitch gets you noticed. Being the person who will level with them is what gets you the partnership that’s still alive five years later.

These were the moments the personality tests flipped meaning for me. The CS profile, the Blue, the quiet, conscientious, steady read on a room. I had been carrying it as a problem. When in reality, it was a description of the exact thing my clients valued most in me. I wasn’t a Blue surviving in a Red’s job. I was doing the same job my own way.

I should note, the personality tests were never wrong. I really was the Blue. I really am the CS. The assessment was accurate. What was wrong was the assumption baked into the room (and my own self assessment) around it. The assumed conviction that the Red, the D, the loud closer, was the correct profile and everyone else was a deviation from it.

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Here is the real reason I wanted to write this at all.

It would be a tidy essay if I told you the doubt ended and I have been at peace ever since. But that is not how lifelong feedback works. It doesn’t end. It just gets more sophisticated.

In a recent performance review, a manager I respect was encouraging me, kindly, to be louder. To put myself out there more, to make sure people saw the work. And then he said a line I have not been able to put down: I feel like you’re quietly killing it.

I know what he meant, and he meant it as a compliment. But for me, it was a compliment disguised as the same feedback I’ve been getting my whole life. Quietly is the part I’m supposed to fix. Even if I’m “killing it” my way, it doesn’t count unless I’m loud.

For most of my life I took that as a to-do. I am not going to anymore.

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this essay that becomes a defense of staying invisible, and I don’t believe that. Visibility absolutely matters. Advocating for your own work is real and necessary, and quiet people who refuse to do it are leaving something on the table. That part of the feedback is not wrong.

But there is a difference between being told to be visible and being told to be loud. Visibility in a register that isn’t yours doesn’t read as confidence. It reads as a performance. The work was never to get louder. The work was to find the version of visible that is actually mine, and to notice that quiet and visible were never opposites in the first place.

I have a voice now. I’m using it, here, every week. That took a long time, and it didn’t arrive by getting louder. It arrived by getting clearer on what I want to say. There’s a difference between volume and conviction, and the second one is the one that actually carries.

What I’ve landed on, after all the assessments and all the encouragements to project more, is something closer to quiet confidence. I know my work. I know it’s good. I don’t need to perform that for it to be true. The renewals, the clients who follow me from one platform to the next, the relationships still alive years after the deal closed: all of that speaks, so I don’t have to.