Is LinkedIn for More Than Bragging?

I used to only use LinkedIn to brag. Until I launched Broad Collective, I posted about:

• New jobs

• New series launches

• Awards for the shows I worked on

• Events where I was speaking

• Positive press for my projects or myself

• Success milestones of people on my team

• New headshots or marketing materials

• Job opportunities at the places where I worked

• The launch of my podcast

• Podcast interviews with people I thought LinkedIn would find impressive

• Podcast milestones - 2 years, 100+ episodes, 200,000 downloads (see, old habits die hard!)

Looking back, I realize this desire to project nothing but success was the way I showed up across all corners of social media.

I presented a hermetically sealed, shiny and successful version of myself pre-packaged for the consumption of former and future colleagues, business partners and employers. I wanted to seem hireable and impressive and, ultimately, inoffensive.

It’s what we all did, and what most people still do there.

Even with my podcast, I only posted clips where I showed up smart or funny or wise. The podcast itself is full of the hard, intimate conversations that come with midlife reinvention, but I wasn’t ready to be that revealed in a “professional” context like LinkedIn.

To me, it wasn’t a place for the MESSY STUFF that made up the entire subtext and backdrop of my successful career. Stuff like:

• How hard it was to be a working Mom of young twins during the most demanding and exciting season of my career

• How work took up more and more of my life the more successful I became

• How more money solved some of my problems and created a whole bunch more

• How I missed speaking for myself instead of for a company - and how I felt sure I had to choose

• How I feared for every job amid rumors of layoffs

• How I worried I had lost my edge, my spark, my voice

• How I didn’t have time for anything but work and parenting

• How friendships suffered the more successful I became

• How I neglected my health because doctor’s appointments cut into work hours

• How I watched bosses who had hired and championed me leave and feared I wouldn’t succeed long without their advocacy

• How I dreamed of a time when I wouldn’t have to work on the weekends

• How I loved traveling for business because it gave me a break from my domestic responsibilities

• How my dedication to my career became a problem in my marriage

• How I hid out in work to avoid the stress awaiting me when I went home

• How burnt out I was becoming and how scared that made me feel because I was terrified to lose everything I had built

• How I missed the artist I had been in my 20s before all this Adulting took over

• How I felt I had to keep my earnings up to maintain my family’s lifestyle and how that felt like an impossible bargain

• How I threw money at everything - housekeepers, nannies, summer camps, people to help me plan and organize at home - because I couldn’t afford to give anything but work my time

Writing this, I feel like I seemed like a crazy person. My feelings contradict each other. They’re not clean or neat or linear. Inside, I was all over the place.

And you can totally judge, it’s fine. But I am not the only woman I knew who was burning the candle at both ends and in denial about the professional version of life she was presenting as shiny and perfect on LinkedIn.

You hear a lot about the marketing power of authenticity these days. I read a lot of clearly AI-written (or at least deeply AI-influenced) “but here’s the thing” confessions on every platform. And the irony of writing an essay that’s attempting to be totally authentic on a Substack account that supports my business is not lost on me.

But it’s uncomfortable to be truly authentic about the cost of our “success” and the secret knowing that what it demands of us is ultimately unsustainable. And that’s not even addressing ageism or caregiving conflicts or lack of opportunities for advancement for senior executive women - that’s a whole other essay.

"When that estrogen drops, so too does our capacity to keep our mouths shut about all the real stuff going on behind the scenes."

I LOVED my career in corporate media. I loved who I was in that world and the work it enabled me to do. I loved the opportunities I earned and the access each job gave me to making interesting and innovative shows with talented people.

I know you probably think it sounds like I didn’t, because I’m telling you how it felt inside.

But it’s possible to love the work and the team and the mission and the results - and yes, the approval that came from bragging on LinkedIn - without loving the toll it took on my nervous system, my parallel life as a mother and a wife, my sense of myself as a woman and a creative person and a human being beyond the value I could deliver on the job.

Today my work is supporting other women in midlife who are building their own businesses and sharing their hard-earned expertise through content. It’s work I feel called to do, and these days I am living and working in a much saner way.

I miss the “cash and prizes” of corporate life - the direct deposit paycheck, the structure, the instant credibility that came from working for established brands.

But I know what I’m capable of BECAUSE of having worked that way for so long. And in midlife, it becomes harder and harder to pretend. When that estrogen drops, so too does our capacity to keep our mouths shut about all the real stuff going on behind the scenes.

Starting a business is also humbling, and sometimes there’s nothing at all to brag about that would impress anyone but me and my fellow entrepreneurs who have walked this path too.

But that’s ok. Because I get to write the rules I’m choosing to live by today. And I get to be vulnerable and flawed and human and real 100% of the time. Even on LinkedIn.

Love,

Erin