Here’s your latest issue of Influence Anyone—where you get a strategy each week to change minds, shape decisions, and drive actions from Howie and the Behavioring Company team.

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I once asked a guest on the Influence Anyone podcast if it ever felt cringe to put herself on video. She said of course it did, everyone feels that at first. Then she told me something that stuck with me. Some of her most trusted work came from clips she never edited, bad lighting, visible nerves, all of it left in.

If you've ever held back from being visible because you were worried about looking foolish, this issue is about exactly that.

(If you want the deep dive, keep scrolling 👇🏽)

In 1966, psychologist Elliot Aronson ran a study where people listened to a recording of someone answering questions competently, then watched him spill a cup of coffee on himself right after. Participants rated him as more likable after the spill, not less.

This is the Pratfall effect. A small stumble makes someone believable, because it signals authenticity and helps people relate to them. Competence alone creates distance. A small visible flaw closes it.

This matters because the professionals who feel too self-conscious to be visible are usually holding themselves to a standard nobody asked for. Perfectly lit videos. Perfectly worded posts. Zero mistakes. Does that sound familiar to you?

And this is especially true for introverts. Introverts tend to run a constant internal audit on themselves, replaying conversations, rehearsing what to say before they say it. That instinct is useful in plenty of places. It backfires here, because it turns showing up into a performance to get right instead of a moment to just have. The more energy spent managing how you come across, the less energy is left to actually come across as anything.

A few weeks ago, I sat down with Goldie Chan. She filmed her first videos on an outdated phone with no editing, no professional lighting, sometimes visibly nervous. Her audience responded with real enthusiasm, because it was obvious nobody was managing her image.

The takeaway: stop trying to sand off your rough edges before you show up. For introverts specifically, that's not just a mindset shift. It's the cheaper option. Looking flawless costs energy most introverts don't have to spare. Showing up as you actually are costs nothing extra.

As promised, influence in 60 seconds.

Goldie Chan is the author of Personal Branding for Introverts. She was one of the original wave of LinkedIn video creators, posting 800 consecutive daily videos starting in 2017, work that later led to a global ambassadorship with WeWork, a partnership with Adobe, and years as a contributor to Forbes.

More confident. More camera-ready. The problem with that kind of advice is that it actually stops people from being more visible. It puts such a high bar on anyone (perfection) and because of that, introverted experts would rather stay hidden, or worse, self-sabotage their progression because of this fear.

Start with what introversion actually is, because most people get it wrong. An introvert isn't someone who's quiet by default. There's a useful reframe for this: introverts can be loud. A loud introvert is someone who can be genuinely passionate, talkative, even the loudest person in the room about something they care about, and still be an introvert, because their energy drains down over the course of the interaction regardless of how much they're enjoying it. A pure extrovert in that same conversation feels their energy climb.

It's also a spectrum, not a switch. Plenty of people are energized by conversation early in life and only later notice their tolerance for small talk shrinking, or notice their energy only rising around people who share their values and dropping fast around people who don't (this is me by the way.)

None of that changes the underlying mechanic. What drains or fuels you isn't a verdict on whether you're allowed to be visible. It's just information about how to sustain your energy.

Which is exactly why the Pratfall effect matters so much for this audience specifically.

In 1966, a psychologist named Elliot Aronson ran an experiment that still gets cited today. He had people listen to a recording of someone trying out for a quiz team, fielding a run of genuinely hard questions. In one version, the candidate answered almost everything correctly. Then came the twist. Right after the interview ended, some listeners also heard the candidate reach for a cup of coffee and knock it over, right onto his own suit.

Aronson expected the spill to hurt the impression. Instead, people rated the coffee-spilling version of the highly competent candidate as more likable than the flawless version of the exact same person. But there's a detail most retellings of this study skip: Aronson also ran the same spill past a mediocre candidate, someone who'd gotten most of the hard questions wrong. For him, the same clumsy moment didn't earn any goodwill. It just made him seem even less capable.

That distinction is the part worth sitting with. The stumble only works because the audience already believes the person is skilled. Take away that baseline, and the same moment reads as proof of doubt instead of proof of humanity. Competence has to come first.

That's the part that matters for an expert who already has the track record and is still invisible. Most of these professionals have already cleared the competence bar years ago. What's usually missing isn't more proof of skill. It's showing up and welcoming the unmanaged moments that let people actually trust them more.

So if you already believe your presence has to be corrected, softened, or perfected before it's acceptable, you're the person most likely to over-edit yourself into invisibility.

When Goldie posted her first LinkedIn videos in 2017, she filmed herself on an iPhone 5, cut off a little at the start and end, and posted the rest exactly as it happened. No captions. No editing tricks. She wasn't performing authenticity. She was just failing to hide anything. And it cost her early on. She lost friends over it. Someone printed one of her hate comments on a t-shirt as a joke, a full paragraph arguing she had the wrong content on the wrong platform. It affected her. She kept posting anyway, through the discomfort, instead of editing herself out of it. The recognition that came later, the mentions, people dressing up as her for Halloween, all traced back to two years of showing up unpolished before anyone had decided she mattered (Watch/listen to her full story on YouTube!)

That's the part most advice skips. Consistency is staying visible on the days even when you don’t feel like it.

For introverts specifically, a few things follow from this:

First, branding work is identity work. Goldie's own exercise for finding your real differentiators is done alone, with a notepad, phone on airplane mode, no AI, no Google. Write a list of twenty to fifty words describing yourself, hard traits and soft traits. The first five are always the obvious ones. The ones worth keeping show up past word fifteen, and you find them by sitting with yourself, reflecting on who you are.

Second, pick one detail beyond your main professional identity, not twelve. People can hold your job title and one distinguishing thing about you in memory at once. More than that, and none of it sticks, which means oversharing to seem "authentic" is wasted effort.

Third, and this one matters most for anyone worried about privacy: curating what you share isn't the same as being fake. You can be selective about your life and still be completely honest about the part you do show. Authenticity was never about disclosing everything. It was about not faking the part you chose to disclose.

Think of it like a house: some of it is the front lawn, visible to anyone walking by, and some of it stays behind the windows. Nobody questions your honesty because your curtains are closed. They question it when the lawn itself is staged.

The professionals who stay invisible aren't usually missing confidence or some specific skills. They're concerned with withholding the unpolished, ordinary parts of themselves because they've mistaken those parts for weakness. And so they choose invisibility.

Goldie's advice for every introvert she's ever worked with fits on a sticky note: I deserve to be heard and seen in this workplace.

If the fear of looking foolish has kept you quiet, try the notepad exercise this week. Twenty to fifty words, alone, no AI. Reply and tell me what showed up after word fifteen.

Ok beautiful people of influence, I’ll see you next Sunday!

Change behavior, change lives 🤘🏽

Howie Chan

Creator of Influence Anyone

P.S. Aronson called it the Pratfall effect after that coffee-spill study. Worth remembering the next time you flub a line on camera and reach for the delete button.