Why self-promotion feels awkward

Self-promotion still makes me uncomfortable.

I know that frustrates my business partner. He regularly reminds me that I need to speak more confidently about what I have created, what I can offer and what I have achieved. He is right, which is particularly irritating because it means I cannot dismiss him as easily as I might like.

I am getting better at it.

I have appeared on podcasts, delivered webinars, given interviews and written articles. I have spoken publicly about neurodivergence, masking, identity and leaving policing. I travelled more than 180 miles to London to help make a film that began as an idea inside my own head.

Yet there are still moments when saying any of that feels uncomfortably close to showing off.

That response did not come from nowhere. It was shaped by decades spent in an environment where acceptance often felt transactional and where the currency of the realm was something I have come to call conformalism.

Yes, it is a word I made up.

It also describes something very real.

Raising my hand

Before Gary and I properly committed to making MASKS, he invited me to a screening of a short film in 2024.

It was the first time we had met in person. Around ninety minutes after meeting him, I found myself sitting in a room surrounded by actors, directors, producers, writers and other people who appeared completely at home in the creative world.

As a lifelong film fan and a writer, I should have been excited.

I was.

I also felt completely out of place.

Before the screening began, the director addressed the audience and asked everyone who was a creative working in the industry to raise their hand.

Gary raised his immediately.

He was already an established and bloody talented actor. Many other people around the room raised theirs too.

I did not.

Gary nudged me and asked why my hand was still down. I cannot remember exactly what I said, but whatever excuse I offered clearly failed to convince him. He told me to raise it.

Then he effectively made me.

It sounds like a small moment, but it mattered.

I was already a published author. I had written multiple books, built fictional worlds and developed stories that people had read, reviewed and enjoyed. Writing was not something I occasionally thought about doing. It had already become a substantial part of who I was.

Yet I still believed everyone else in that room was more deserving of the word creative.

They belonged there.

I was visiting.

They had earned the right to raise their hands.

I had not.

My day job still felt like the primary part of my identity, and everything creative remained something I was permitted to do around the edges.

When being yourself has to be earned

Some people might call that imposter syndrome.

For me, it was more complicated. It was compartmentalising, conditioning and fear.

It was the result of spending much of my life feeling that any opportunity to be myself had to be earned.

Masking can become deeply transactional. You learn to perform the expected version of yourself for long enough that you might occasionally be allowed to express the real one.

Behave correctly.

Meet the standard.

Keep people happy.

Do not become inconvenient.

Do not take up too much room.

Once you have completed all of that successfully, perhaps you can have a little time to write, create or explore the things that actually make you feel alive.

That was certainly how I experienced policing.

The message, whether stated directly or reinforced through the culture around me, was that I was a police officer first and everything else came afterwards.

That included family, friends, spare time and, especially, creative outlets.

Writing was treated as an unusual additional activity rather than a legitimate part of my identity.

Who are you to write a book?

Why are you doing that?

Isn’t that a bit strange?

Where do you find the time?

Why would you waste your time doing something like that?

Not every question was intended maliciously. Some came from curiosity. Some were probably meant as jokes.

But repeated often enough, they became checks.

Small reminders not to become too confident. Not to take the work too seriously. Not to imagine that I might become anything beyond the role people already understood.

Eventually, other people did not need to keep me in that box.

I learned to do it myself.

The currency of conformalism

Conformalism is the pressure to sacrifice your own growth, acceptance and expression in order to preserve everyone else’s comfort.

It tells you that belonging must be earned through obedience.

It encourages you to stay recognisable, predictable and safely within the boundaries of what other people have already decided you should be.

It is not simply about following rules. Some rules are necessary and some conformity is part of existing alongside other people.

Conformalism is what happens when compliance becomes identity.

It is the belief that you must suppress the parts of yourself that do not fit the accepted mould, not because those parts are harmful, but because they challenge the assumptions of the people around you.

In a conformalist environment, standing out is dangerous.

Celebrating yourself can be interpreted as arrogance.

Promoting your work can be dismissed as attention-seeking.

Trying something new can be framed as believing you are better than everyone else.

Success is tolerated, provided it does not disrupt the hierarchy or require anybody to reconsider the version of you they have already accepted.

The safest option is to remain useful, capable and quiet.

That was the culture I had internalised when I entered that screening.

I had only just arrived in that environment. I had only recently met Gary. I had not done enough to earn acceptance from the people in that room.

Surely I needed to work harder before I could raise my hand.

Surely somebody else had to decide whether I belonged.

Wrong.

Nobody told me to put my hand down

I raised my hand.

Nobody scoffed.

Nobody demanded evidence.

Nobody asked who I thought I was.

Nobody reminded me that I had a different day job or suggested that writing books did not count.

After the screening, I spoke to members of the cast and crew. We talked about stories, filmmaking, acting and the process of bringing an idea to the screen.

I spoke as though I belonged there.

Because I did.

The only person in the room still trying to exclude me was me.

That does not mean the years of conditioning disappeared in a single evening. They did not. The screening happened in 2024, several years after I had started consciously trying to accept my neurodivergence and become more comfortable with who I was.

Self-acceptance was not a switch I flicked.

It was a slow dismantling of the rules I had absorbed.

The rules that told me my creativity was secondary.

The rules that told me I had to earn the right to speak.

The rules that told me confidence was dangerous unless somebody more important had authorised it.

Raising my hand did not complete that process, but it interrupted it.

It gave me evidence that the fear was not always telling me the truth.

Learning your worth

Years earlier, one senior officer encouraged me to pursue an application for a role elsewhere.

They openly told me they believed I should follow it through so that I could learn my worth.

That opportunity did not ultimately work out, but those words stayed with me because they came from someone who understood where I was and tried to offer support from within the limitations of their own position.

In many ways, they were also trapped within the same conforming environment.

They offered what encouragement they could without stepping too far outside their own lane or threatening the world they still needed to operate within.

It was a valuable moment, but it also demonstrated the problem.

My worth still felt like something that needed to be proven elsewhere.

It required an application, an interview, an offer or some form of external approval.

Someone else had to confirm that I deserved to believe in myself.

That transactional approach becomes ingrained.

You work hard enough to earn praise.

You achieve enough to earn confidence.

You endure enough to earn rest.

You conform enough to earn the occasional opportunity to be yourself.

When that becomes your default, self-promotion does not feel like communication.

It feels like breaking a rule.

Why promoting yourself feels wrong

Self-promotion carries plenty of negative associations.

Showing off.

Bragging.

Arrogance.

Delusion.

Falsified confidence.

Stepping above your station.

Claiming something you have not earned.

Presenting yourself as more important than you are.

For somebody who has spent years masking, these associations can become even more intense. Masking often depends on monitoring yourself closely and trying to control how other people perceive you.

You become accustomed to shrinking certain traits, editing your responses and avoiding anything that might attract the wrong kind of attention.

Self-promotion demands almost the opposite.

It asks you to become visible.

It requires you to state what you do, explain why it matters and allow other people to form an opinion.

It asks you to occupy space without apologising for being there.

That can feel threatening when visibility has previously carried a cost.

Certain influential individuals within policing seemed to relish the humiliation of others, whether in public or private. Confidence could be eroded through ridicule, undermining comments or reminders of your position within the hierarchy.

Over time, you learned that celebrating yourself created a target.

It became easier to talk about mistakes than achievements. Easier to joke about failure than admit that something had gone well. Easier to minimise your success before somebody else had the chance to do it for you.

Neurodivergent minds can also hold on tightly to criticism, rejection and embarrassment. One negative comment can remain painfully accessible while a dozen compliments disappear almost immediately.

I became highly skilled at remembering every occasion when I had got something wrong.

Allowing myself to celebrate what I had done well required far more effort.

The slow shift

I began making a conscious effort to accept my differences in 2020.

Even then, the process was slow.

Four years later, I was still sitting in that screening with my hand firmly down because I did not believe I had earned the right to describe myself as creative.

Fast-forward to now and I still get told off for failing to promote or celebrate myself enough.

The difference is that I no longer allow the discomfort to make every decision.

I have appeared on podcasts even when I worried I had nothing valuable to say.

I have spoken during webinars and interviews despite wondering whether somebody else was more qualified.

I have published articles, developed talks and spoken openly about my experiences.

I travelled to London to help produce MASKS, turning an idea I had written into something performed by actors and captured on camera.

I stepped onto the set of my own film.

That is not something the person sitting with his hand down in 2024 would have found easy to imagine.

The fear has not completely disappeared.

I have simply stopped treating it as an instruction.

Three positives for every negative

One practical exercise helped me begin interrupting the pattern.

Whenever I caught myself focusing on a failure, minimising an achievement or using negativity to hold myself back, I wrote down three positives.

They did not need to be enormous achievements.

They could be things I had handled well, progress I had made, positive feedback I had received or moments when I had acted despite discomfort.

The purpose was not to pretend the negative had never happened.

It was to stop allowing one negative event to erase everything else.

Try it yourself.

Think of one thing that has recently made you question your ability, worth or right to continue.

Write it down.

Then write down three pieces of evidence that present a fuller picture.

Perhaps you received useful feedback.

Perhaps you completed something difficult.

Perhaps you took an action that would once have frightened you.

Perhaps somebody benefited from something you created.

Perhaps you simply kept going when giving up would have been easier.

It may feel artificial at first. It certainly did for me.

That does not mean it is dishonest.

It may simply mean you are unfamiliar with giving positive evidence the same attention you have always given the negative.

Self-acceptance comes first

This is why self-acceptance is the first pillar of NeuroEdge.

Every journey needs foundations.

Without accepting ourselves, or at least beginning to believe that we deserve to understand ourselves, those foundations remain unstable.

Self-acceptance does not mean believing you are flawless.

It does not mean ignoring mistakes, rejecting feedback or claiming expertise you do not possess.

It means recognising that your right to exist, create, contribute and grow is not dependent on permanently keeping everybody else comfortable.

You do not have to earn permission to acknowledge your own work.

You do not have to wait for somebody else to raise your hand.

You do not have to treat every success as an administrative error that will eventually be corrected.

For many neurodivergent people, learning to speak positively about ourselves is not arrogance.

It is recovery from years of being taught to disappear.

The free NeuroEdge Starter Pack contains practical exercises to help neurodivergent people understand their energy, challenge overwhelm and begin separating their genuine needs from the expectations they have absorbed.

It will not remove every doubt or make self-promotion instantly comfortable.

It may help you create enough space to recognise when fear, masking or conformalism is making the decision for you.

Download the free NeuroEdge Starter Pack and begin with one simple exercise.

Write down one negative thought that has been keeping you small.

Then answer it with three pieces of positive evidence.

You may still feel uncomfortable.

Raise your hand anyway.