Stop Chasing Visibility. Start Creating Trust.

Why Trust, and Not Attention, Is The Real Driver of Career Growth.

Key Takeaways

• Visibility gets attention. Trust creates opportunities.

• The biggest career opportunities often come through the hidden market — conversations happening when you are not in the room.

• Your personal brand is not your LinkedIn profile; it is the reputation you build through your actions.

• In the age of AI, credibility and judgment become more valuable because polished content is easier than ever to create.

• The goal is not to become the loudest person in the room. It is to become the person others confidently recommend.

One piece of career advice keeps showing up in my LinkedIn feed.

"You need to be more visible."

Post more often and become a thought leader. 

Build your personal brand, and grow your overall audience. 

I understand where that advice comes from, and to some extent, I even agree with it. Visibility matters. If people don't know you exist, it's difficult for opportunities to find you.

But over the last several years, I've become convinced that visibility isn't what changes careers.

Trust does.

The biggest opportunities in my own career, and in the careers of so many people I've had the privilege to coach, didn't happen because someone had the loudest voice or the biggest following. They happened because someone was willing to say, "You need to meet this person."

That's a very different kind of visibility.

Looking back, I don't think I understood that for a long time.

Early in my career, I believed that great work would naturally speak for itself. Every promotion reinforced that belief, so I kept doing what had always worked: I solved difficult problems, raised my hand for the challenging projects, and became the person everyone could count on when something needed to get done.

It served me well.

Until I reached a point where I realized something uncomfortable.

People knew I was capable, but they didn't necessarily know what I wanted to be known for.

There's a difference.

One helps you build a successful career inside the work you're already doing.

The other opens doors to opportunities that haven't even been created yet.

It took me years to recognize that distinction, and once I did, it completely changed how I thought about personal branding.

Not because I suddenly wanted to become more visible.

Because I realized I wanted to become more trusted.

The Hidden Market Runs on Trust

One of the conversations I have most often with executives is about the opportunities they never seem to see coming.

Someone is invited to join a board, and someone else is asked to advise a startup. 

A leadership role opens, and before it's ever posted, someone already has a shortlist of people they'd like to talk to.

From the outside, those opportunities can look random, almost like luck.

But when you look a little closer, a different pattern starts to emerge.

Very rarely does someone say, "Let's find the person with the most LinkedIn followers."

Instead, the conversation sounds more like this:

"I've worked with her before."

"He's incredibly thoughtful."

"I trust her judgment."

"You should really meet him."

Those are the conversations that happen in what I call the hidden market. This is the space where relationships, reputation, and trust quietly create opportunities long before there's a job description or an application.

Once you start paying attention to those conversations, you begin to realize that trust isn't simply a nice quality to have.

It's one of the most valuable career assets you'll ever build.

Trust Is Earned Long Before You Need It

When I left corporate and started Leap Academy, I wasn't building a brand.

At least, that's not how it felt.

I was sitting in my apartment with a bed tray balanced in front of me, trying to record videos with terrible lighting and a logo that, looking back, was... let's just say there was a frog involved. It's probably best we leave it at that.

There wasn't a polished studio or a marketing team. There certainly wasn't a community waiting for me.

What I did have was a belief that the lessons I'd learned, the hard ones, especially, could help someone else navigate their own career a little differently.

So I started showing up.

I taught classes that only a handful of people attended, and I answered all the questions. 

I had coffee conversations, and I spoke anywhere that someone invited me. 

Some days it felt like I was talking into the void.

Looking back now, I realize I wasn't building visibility.

I was building trust, one interaction at a time.

Every client I helped introduced me to someone else.

Every conversation led to another conversation.

Every promise I kept made the next opportunity a little easier to earn.

That's how Leap grew.

Not because one post went viral or one video changed everything, but because trust quietly compounds before anyone notices.

In the Age of AI, Trust Becomes Your Competitive Advantage

One of the reasons this conversation matters even more today is because AI has changed the way we create.

I use AI almost every day. It's an incredible tool. It helps me organize ideas, challenge my thinking, and move faster. Used well, it can make all of us better.

But I've also noticed something that concerns me.

It's becoming easier than ever to look like an expert.

You can generate a thoughtful LinkedIn post in a matter of seconds. You can rewrite your bio, polish your resume, build a website, or create content that sounds confident and convincing.

None of that is inherently bad.

The danger is believing that polished content and genuine credibility are the same thing.

They aren't.

AI can help you communicate your expertise, but it can't replace the years of experience, difficult decisions, mistakes, and lessons that shaped your judgment in the first place.

That's the part people trust.

When someone recommends you for a board seat, an executive role, or a consulting engagement, they aren't recommending your LinkedIn profile. They're recommending what it's like to work with you. They're remembering how you handled uncertainty, how you made decisions under pressure, how you treated people, and whether you delivered when it mattered.

Those are things no prompt can manufacture.

If anything, I think AI is making trust even more valuable.

When everyone can produce polished content, the differentiator isn't who sounds the smartest. It's who has earned the confidence of the people around them.

That kind of credibility is built over years, often in ways that feel completely ordinary at the time.

What Personal Branding Really Means

This is one of the reasons I'm so passionate about personal branding.

Not because I think everyone needs to become an influencer or spend hours trying to outsmart the LinkedIn algorithm.

That's never been what personal branding means to me.

Your personal brand is simply the story people tell about you when you're not in the room.

It's the answer to questions like:

"Who comes to mind when we need someone who can lead through change?"

"Who do we trust to solve this problem?"

"Who would you introduce without hesitation?"

Those answers aren't created by a logo or a carefully crafted headline.

They're shaped by hundreds of interactions over the course of a career.

Every project you've led, every promise you’ve kept, every difficult conversation you’ve handled with true integrity. 

Every person you've helped without expecting anything in return.

Every time someone walked away from an interaction with you thinking, "I'd work with her again in a heartbeat."

That's your brand.

The LinkedIn profile, the website, the keynote, the articles, they matter. However they are simply the vehicles that help people discover it.

They don't create it.

I Had to Learn This the Hard Way

If I'm honest, there was a period in my own career when I focused almost entirely on proving myself.

I wanted to be prepared, and I wanted to have all the answers. 

I wanted people to see that I could solve difficult problems and deliver results.

There's nothing wrong with that.

In fact, those habits helped me build a successful corporate career.

But when I left that world and started building something of my own, I realized that proving myself wasn't enough anymore.

People couldn't see my resume every day.

They couldn't watch me solve problems inside a company.

Instead, they had to decide whether they trusted me based on what they experienced when they interacted with me.

That changed the questions I started asking myself.

Instead of wondering, "How do I look more impressive?" I started asking, "How can I be more useful?"

Instead of trying to convince people I had the answers, I became more interested in sharing what I was learning.

Instead of trying to build an audience, I focused on building relationships.

Looking back now, I don't think those were separate decisions.

I think they were all part of learning that influence isn't something you claim.

It's something people give you after you've earned their trust.

The Careers That Inspire Me

One of the privileges of doing this work is that I've had the chance to meet extraordinary leaders from every imaginable industry.

Some lead Fortune 500 companies, and some have built successful businesses from scratch. 

Some sit on boards, invest in startups, or mentor the next generation of leaders.

From the outside, their careers often look very different.

But there's one thing they almost all have in common.

People trust them.

Not because they're perfect or because they never failed. 

It’s actually quite the opposite.

Many of them are remarkably open about the setbacks they've experienced and the mistakes they've made along the way.

What makes them exceptional is that people know what they'll get when they work with them.

They often have consistency, integrity, curiosity, generosity, and good judgement. 

Those qualities don't always attract the most attention on social media.

But they are the qualities that continue opening doors year after year.

I've come to believe that's why some careers continue expanding long after others plateau.

Trust has a way of creating opportunities that no algorithm can predict.

A Different Question to Ask Yourself

As you're thinking about your next chapter, and that may be an executive role, consulting, a board seat, a business, or something you haven't even imagined yet. I want to leave you with a different question.

Not:

"How can I become more visible?"

Instead, ask yourself:

"If someone I admire were recommending me tomorrow, what would they say?"

Would they talk about your judgment? Your integrity? The way that you lead? Or even the way that you make people feel? 

Do they have confidence in you and your abilities to know that things will get done the right way?

That's the conversation that shapes careers.

Visibility may help people notice you.

Trust gives them a reason to remember you.

And over time, that's what builds the kind of reputation that opens doors you never even knew existed.

Because the opportunities that change our lives rarely begin with an application.

They begin with a conversation.

Someone, somewhere, says,

"You should talk to her."

"I know exactly who you need."

"Let me make an introduction."

Those conversations aren't driven by algorithms.

They're driven by trust.

And if there's one lesson I wish I'd understood earlier in my own career, it's this:

Don't spend your energy trying to become the most visible person in the room.

Spend it becoming the person others feel confident bringing into the room.

That kind of reputation takes longer to build.

But once you've earned it, it has a remarkable way of creating opportunities long before you ever start looking for them.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is more important for career growth: visibility or trust?

Trust is the foundation of sustainable career growth. Visibility helps people discover you, but trust determines whether they recommend you, hire you, promote you, or invite you into bigger opportunities.

How do you build trust professionally?

You build trust by consistently demonstrating expertise, integrity, generosity, and good judgment. Trust grows through small actions over time: keeping commitments, helping others, sharing knowledge, and becoming known for solving meaningful problems.

Do I need to post constantly on LinkedIn to build my personal brand?

No. Posting can help amplify your reputation, but your personal brand is created through your experiences, relationships, and the way people describe working with you.

Your LinkedIn profile supports your reputation. It does not create it.

What is the hidden job market?

The hidden job market is the world of opportunities that are never publicly posted. These opportunities happen through relationships, recommendations, and conversations.

Someone says:

“You should meet her.”

“I know exactly who can solve this.”

“Let me introduce you.”

That is the hidden market in action.

 AI makes it easier for everyone to create polished content. That means expertise alone is no longer enough. The differentiator becomes credibility: your experiences, judgment, leadership style, and the trust you have built with others.

How can executives build a stronger professional reputation?

Start by getting clear on what you want to be known for, identifying your unique strengths, sharing your expertise, building meaningful relationships, and consistently creating value for others.