Ep. 398 When solopreneurs compare themselves to everyone else on LinkedIn

Okay, something I want to talk about today is something that a lot of us feel, but rarely say out loud. I want to start with a moment that I think will be familiar.

You’re scrolling LinkedIn – maybe first thing in the morning in bed, maybe in between calls, maybe on the toilet – and you see someone you know announcing something. A new offer, a sold-out workshop, a speaking gig at a conference you’d love to be on, a glowing testimonial from a client, a media interview. And the comments underneath are all fire emojis. “This is incredible, so well deserved.”

And you feel really happy for them. You probably do. But you also feel something else, something a little bit maybe embarrassing, a kind of question that reads: why does everyone else seem to have this so much more together than I do?

I want to address that question today, because the answer – in my experience, both from working with a lot of established independents and from my own honest experience of building this business – is that they don’t. They do not have it more together, or at least not all the time. They really do not.

And I think the gap between what we present publicly and what’s actually happening behind the scenes is one of the most tiring and under-discussed things about building an independent business.

So I want to talk about three things today. First, what is actually happening behind the posts – what the reality looks like for most people I know who are doing this. Second, where the performance comes from and what it’s costing us. And then third, what actually changes when you find a room where you don’t have to perform and play that game.

What’s actually happening behind the posts

Let me start with what I see and hear from behind the scenes. I want to pull back the curtain and share – not what gets posted – but what people actually tell me when it’s just us on the call. This is clients, it’s peers, it’s different people I’ve spoken to, and as I said, my own personal experience.

The person who looks like they’ve nailed their positioning, who has the clean LinkedIn bio and the clear niche and the confident content, looks amazing online – and is often in the middle of tweaking their headline for the 40th time because they still can’t quite land what they do in a sentence. They look really decided. They are not decided.

I cannot tell you how many people I’ve spoken to where I look at their LinkedIn and think, “I love the way you’ve phrased this, it looks like you’ve really nailed your niche.” That is not the reality when they speak to me.

Or the person who posts about their sold-out workshop has just 3 clients in their pipeline, has no idea where the next ones are coming from. Maybe it’s a free workshop. Maybe it’s a handful of people in it. Maybe it was just a good day, that workshop. But before that, they had 10 workshops that had no one attending. The feast and famine thing is very much still happening – they’re just not necessarily posting about the famine weeks.

Or the person who just announced a speaking gig. They clearly got the gig, they’re not lying. But they also said yes to the fee before they probably thought about it, and now they’re not so sure it was worth it. The announcement felt good, irrespective of what they’re getting from it.

The person who seems completely confident about their pricing had a prospect go quiet last week and spent 2 days stressing about whether their rates were too high, whether they should add more to the offer, whether the website needs changing – and they did not post about that.

And I am describing, at various points, myself, to be clear here.

This is not a case for despair. The work may well be very meaningful for that person. The progress is very real, and I don’t want to take away in any way from their achievement that they’re posting about. But I want you to understand that the image of it – the version that goes online – is edited. It is curated, as all images are. And pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.

Where the solopreneur performance habit comes from

So if that’s the reality, then where on earth does this performance and the pressure come from? Because I don’t think we’re consciously choosing to be dishonest. I think we’ve been trained into this, and we brought the training with us when we left corporate, where performance was the job – not just the work, the performance of the work.

There’s a lot now about performative busyness: staying late in the office, the appraisal cycle, the visibility, managing upwards, presenting your team’s results in the most favourable light, being seen in the right meetings, saying the right things, giving the right impression to the right people. We got very, very good at this because we had to.

And then we left. And I think a lot of us told ourselves that one of the things we were leaving behind was that – the office politics, the managed impression and brand, the version of yourself that’s designed to work for that kind of institutional eye.

What you may not have realised is that you bring that habit with you. You just change the audience to some extent. Now the audience is potential clients who need to believe that you know what you’re doing – because you’re the professional expert. Or existing clients who need to feel they made a good choice. Your professional network, who you want to think well of you. Your peers, who you’d obviously rather not admit a difficult patch to, because you want to show that stiff upper lip. And yourself as well, which is perhaps the hardest audience of all, because you can’t turn that one off.

The LinkedIn post gets written from the position of someone who has figured everything out, because that’s who you need to be on LinkedIn. The discovery call features the most confident version of what you offer, and downplays the uncertainty that might actually be present. The newsletter is written by the expert – not by the person who spent last Thursday wondering if any of this is working.

It’s not exactly lying. It is editing, and it’s showing the real parts that happen to look good. But editing takes a lot of energy, and maintaining that gap between the internal version and the external version takes energy too. The longer you do it and the wider the gap becomes, the more it’s going to cost you.

The real cost of carrying the performance gap alone

I think the real cost isn’t reputation or trust or any of the things you might worry about if people found out what was actually going on. It’s more the loneliness of it.

Because think about who you can actually be honest with about the hard parts of this. Your clients? No – there’s a professional boundary there and it should exist. They’re not paying you to hear about your difficult month. Your family – yes, maybe to a point, but they worry. If you’re telling your partner that you’re not quite bringing in the money you need to be bringing in, they also don’t quite understand the territory. They’re going to worry about you. The pipeline anxiety, the feast and famine, the specific texture of what it’s like to be the person responsible for everything in your business all the time – so you filter, even for your closest loved ones.

Maybe your old corporate peers? Well, no – they’re playing a completely different game now. They’re still in corporate and they look at what you’re doing and think it looks amazing. You don’t want to be the first person who corrects that impression. And your LinkedIn network? Obviously not, because you see what people post there.

So you carry the real picture basically alone. And the performing version – the one that goes out into the world looking clear and confident – becomes something that you maintain with one part of your brain while another part is tracking the actual situation.

I don’t think this is unique to independent working and being a solopreneur. But I do think it is particularly acute for us, because there’s no team to absorb it. There’s no institution behind you, no shared experience of the difficult quarter. And there’s no salary coming in irrespective of how you’re feeling. It’s just you and this gap.

What actually helps: finding a room where you don’t have to perform

What I’ve found, and what I keep coming back to, is that more strategy is not going to fix this. Strategy helps a to-do list, it helps you move forwards on your goals – but it doesn’t help this gap between the performance and the reality.

What helps is a room where the agreement – explicit or not – is: you do not have to perform here.

What does that actually look like? What does it sound like? Well, it could be: “I’m bringing this to my mastermind group. I have no idea if this pricing is right and I keep changing my mind about it. Help, what do you think?” Or: “I said yes to a project last month, and I knew already that I should have said no, and now I’m dreading delivering it.” And other people say: “Yeah, I know that feeling, that’s so frustrating. What could you do next time to hold that boundary better?”

Or it sounds like: “I had a great month, but I still feel behind.” Or: “I’ve been tweaking the same page of my website for 3 weeks, and I think I’m just avoiding something, but I don’t know what it is.”

And the response from the people in that room isn’t: “Oh, have you thought about this framework? Here’s a strategy for that.” It’s more likely to be: “Oh my goodness, yes, me too. Here’s what I noticed when that happened to me. Here’s what I think might actually be going on and this is what might help you as well.”

That’s different from advice. It’s recognition first and foremost. And for a lot of established independents who are carrying that performance mostly alone, recognition is actually what’s missing.

The difference between genuine peer support and performed vulnerability

I’ve been in rooms like this over the years. I’ve also been in rooms that claim to be like this, but were actually just a more sophisticated performance – where everyone shared just enough vulnerability to seem authentic, but the underlying competition for status was very much still running. And those rooms are exhausting in a different way.

The rooms that work, I’d say, are quite small. They kind of have to be. And the people in them are at a similar enough stage that they actually understand the territory. There is a level of trust built up over time – not in a single session, but really over several sessions, over interactions, over conversations – and that makes it possible to say the thing you wouldn’t say anywhere else.

What I’m quite proud of in my Offscript community, and also in one-off in-person workshops or in the founder conversations I do in a local co-working space, is that I get the feedback – and I will own that I believe I’m quite good at establishing that psychological safety, leading with my own vulnerability, and therefore quite rapidly getting people to trust me, to trust the room, and start sharing quite vulnerably what’s going on for them. And that gives you immediate access to a very different type of conversation than if you’re feeling like you’ve got to put on your professional face and tell everyone how amazing everything’s going.

How to stop comparing yourself to other solopreneurs’ highlight reels

So the point of today is this. If you think that people have it all together, they probably don’t. Most likely, underneath, they’re also obsessing about their LinkedIn headlines and their pricing and their boundaries and their clients. A good day could be a good day, and they could have had many bad weeks before it.

This isn’t to take away from anyone else’s achievements. But please don’t compare yourself, and please don’t feel you have to keep performing to bring yourself in line with other people’s performance – because that gets a bit silly. We’re all just performing to each other, putting pressure on each other, and no one’s really winning in that scenario.

So take everything that gets posted on social with a pinch of salt. Understand that we all have our own internal reality. And then try to find those rooms where people are having a different kind of conversation – where you can celebrate the wins honestly and also be honest about the things that are not as polished, not as celebratory, maybe not deserving of a LinkedIn post (although that could be interesting in itself).

Have those conversations with peers who get it. That is what Offscript is for. Doors are closing this week for this intake, so if you’re interested, I’d encourage you to apply quickly at offscript.club – and you could be on a call with us in just a couple of weeks.

We’d love to have you in if that sounds like something you’d like to be part of. Apply at offscript.club.