Bragging Right
How to Promote Yourself Without Ruffling Too Many Feathers

By Julia Feldmeier
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 13, 2007

Why, hello there! Surely you know me -- or you've heard of me, at least? You haven't? Huh. Perhaps you've seen my blog, where I write about my thoughts (brilliant, obviously) and my manifold accomplishments. Hey, aren't we friends on Facebook? Sweet. Then you saw that I updated my profile to include a quote from my boss, who said I'm "smart, funny and ambitious." And didn't I elbow past you at Bourbon last week? Yeah, I know, it was crowded. But I'm great at pushing my way up front to get the bartender's attention. I make things happen for myself, I do.

I'm really good at a lot of things, actually. Including, of course, self-promotion. So, let's talk.

There is a reason the word "shameless" is so often paired with "self-promotion": We are taught that bragging is bad, and self-promotion is regarded as, well, bragging.

Or is it?

Modesty is endearing, sure, but is it always the best approach? Perhaps some peacockery is needed to get what we want. That's certainly the case on the campaign trail and in the boardroom, where success hinges on our ability to splay our feathers, but also in the dating world, where a little strut may be just the charm.

But what's the secret to pulling it off? Is it a matter of subtlety or simply confidence? And if we can make the case that self-promotion is necessary, then why are so many of us uncomfortable with tooting our own horn?

"There's nothing wrong with self-promoting," says Sam Solovey, a D.C. resident who was on Season 1 of NBC's "The Apprentice," vying for the tutelage of Donald Trump (himself an unabashed self-promoter). "If you don't do it, no one else is going to do it for you."

Indeed.

* * *

"Modesty: the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it."

-- Oliver Herford

If we're taught at an early age to be humble, perhaps it's because talent and success seem self-evident. Johnny is the starting center midfielder on the soccer team? He's a great player. Kate gets straight A's? Yeah, she's quite the student. Jane was the lead in the school play? We know; we saw.

With a school structure based on student performance -- tracked through class rankings, test scores and multi-tiered sports -- we've grown up believing that such measurements speak for us. "When you're in school, they assess you all the time, and you never necessarily have to put yourself forward," says Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University and author of "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success" (Random House, 2006), which examines how people's self-conceptions guide their behavior.

Dweck and her colleagues conducted a study in which fifth-graders were divided into two groups. After taking a relatively easy test, half of them were praised for their intelligence, the other half for their hard work. Dweck found that telling children how smart they are is, in essence, a false promise.

"It's saying you can just sit here with your brains and talent, and success will come," Dweck says. "In real life, you've got to go out and self-promote. In the real world, how are people going to know about your abilities unless you tell them?"

Logically, we need to become better self-promoters the moment we leave the familiar, which for many begins with college admissions.

"It puts on students the responsibility of figuring out how to present themselves to people whom they're never going to know," says Nina Marks, owner of Marks Consulting, a college-admissions counseling firm in Bethesda. "It's so much easier if they can sit across the table from the admissions committee and read some signals -- but they don't ever get to meet them."

Without cues to guide them, many students try to present themselves as some ideal that they think colleges want, Marks says, creating a discord that ultimately hinders their case.

In today's hyper-competitive environment, "we get this message that our accomplishments need to be as unique and as extraordinary as possible," she says. "We're so tired of reading about saints and victims in the college process."

Disingenuousness flops because, let's face it, how can you self-promote when it's not the real you? So, when one student wrote an essay about how training her puppy taught her patience and persistence, instead of how she represented Uganda at a Model United Nations conference -- what she thought she should write about -- admissions officials loved it.

"It's got to be authentic," Marks says. "It's got to feel right to you."

Still, although it's important to be true to yourself, it helps to take into account how you'll be perceived. When another student titled her essay "All About Me," Marks promptly nixed it.

"She was very confident and actually a great person, but she didn't have the sense of how somebody who didn't know her might look at that title and think, 'That might be a little self-absorbed.' "

* * *

"It's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am."

-- Muhammad Ali

The need for self-promotion in job interviews is indisputable. After all, you're there for one reason: to sell yourself.

But how do you do that when there's a thin line between confident and cocky? The balancing act is tricky, and to teeter toward immodest is to risk alienating people.

Experts say the best way to work around this is -- surprise! -- to show, rather than simply tell.

"I'd much rather hear 'I achieved this and really enjoyed it' than 'I'm great at this,' " says Anne Jones, director of career management at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. "Then it's not so much self-promotion, it's just making things clear."

One mistake that interviewees make, she says, is offering up bits of self-promotion that are irrelevant and not necessarily valuable to a company. But if you can use unusual experiences to demonstrate traits the employer is looking for, all the better. For instance, one student played pro basketball in Europe -- a tangential experience that, told alone, might sound like bragging. But when mentioned as evidence of his capacity for quick decision making and working with a team, the detail made him a memorable candidate.

Of course, the need for self-promotion doesn't end at the interview. Say you get the job. Then what? Do you work hard and wait to be noticed?

Good luck with that.

"You get what you demand, not necessarily what you deserve," says Mikelann Valterra, author of "Why Women Earn Less: How to Make What You're Really Worth" (Career Press, 2004). "You've got to learn to toot your own horn."

When it comes to playing up what you're worth, it's easier said than done. In a 2002 study that examined the starting salaries of students graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with master's degrees, only 7 percent of the women negotiated for more money, compared with 57 percent of the men. The students who negotiated increased their starting salaries by an average of 7.4 percent, or $4,053.

For many women (and men, too), the hesitancy to fight for what they're worth is rooted in a fear of inconveniencing people. Asking for a raise, after all, requires your boss to reconfigure the budget or to haggle with superiors on your behalf. And what if that ticks people off?

"It's the 'good girl' syndrome: 'I want everybody to like me,' " Valterra says. "But people that make good money are not afraid to stick up for themselves, and they're not afraid to rock the boat."

* * *

"My dear Watson," said he, "I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers."

-- Sherlock Holmes in "The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter"

And what of the dating world, where self-promotion may elicit more rolled eyes than fluttered lashes?

"In my experience of dating guys that are overly self-promotional, it's such a turnoff, because it almost comes off as an insecurity," says Renee Kostick, founder of Dinner at 8, a local dating service. "If you're that great, why are you telling me about it?"

Ergo, the importance of self-promoting without sounding overly self-impressed. But "that's where people's feet get tangled," says Evan Mark Katz, head of E-Cyrano, a firm that helps clients write online dating profiles.

"There are three things you never need to say in a profile, and yet people will say them," he says. "They will talk about how they are intelligent, how they are attractive and how they are funny. Those things are completely subjective."

Instead, Katz says, there are easy ways to demonstrate these qualities. A picture shows you're attractive. A smartly written bio suggests you're smart. Witty asides reveal humor.

"It's speaking in anecdotes in a matter-of-fact way," he says. "Here's what I did; draw your own conclusions."

Done right, self-promoting is all well and good -- but, still, wouldn't it be nice to have somebody do our boasting for us? Like, say, our own publicist to sing our praises, leaving us to look endearingly bashful. Aw, shucks.

Consider the bar scene, where Joe Blow chats up the ladies, and his friend -- the wingman -- sidles up, throws his arm around Joe and casually lets drop that Joe is, in fact, the man with the money, the power, the skillz, yo. Joe looks sheepish, the ladies starry-eyed and . . .

Don't have friends smooth enough to do that? Yeah, neither do we.

So, Solovey, the "Apprentice" candidate, had it right: Ultimately, no one else can promote for us.

Solovey never became Trump's lackey -- he was fired in the show's third episode, although he returned in the finale to offer a briefcase with $250,000 in exchange for the apprenticeship. (Trump turned him down, and it was later revealed that Samsonite paid Solovey to present the briefcase in front of 28 million viewers. How's that for stealth promotion?)

"Every day we're selling ourselves," Solovey says. "People are secondarily buying the product -- they're buying you and your beliefs and what you present."

Easy for him to say: He makes his living as an auctioneer.

But, come to think of it, maybe self-promotion is really about taking a stand on the auction block, about laying out your best qualities and accomplishments. It's a gamble, of course, but have heart: After all, don't you deserve the highest bidder?

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