Episode 320 - Discover the idea of “productive cringe” and how the slightly embarrassing moves you avoid are often the exact moves that unlock new roles, better opportunities, and a more sustainable career.

Most of what you want in your career sits on the other side of something currently labeled as cringe. The promotion, the dream career pivot, the visibility. Between you and those goals, there is usually a very human fear of looking silly, try hard and awkward. In this episode, I want to explore why avoiding cringe might be the quiet reason your career has plateaued.

and how leaning into a bit of embarrassment can completely change your trajectory.

This has been a pattern with my coaching sessions for a long time. Clients will say things like, I know I should post on LinkedIn, but it feels cringe. I know I should message that person in my dream company, but that feels cringe. I know I should negotiate the salary, but I don’t want to be that person. And it struck me that this quiet fear of cringe is not just a social media problem. It’s a career design problem.

So today I want to explore how cringe shows up in our professional lives, why it has become such a powerful force and how you can start doing the slightly embarrassing things that are usually the getaway to growth, confidence and the work you really want to do.

Look, if you are new here, please press like plus subscribe. Follow us if you’re looking for work, if you’re interested in your career and know that I have a weekly newsletter that I think you should sign up for because it offers extra resources and tips and advice that I don’t include here in my podcast because I only think about it later, to be honest, and I put it into a format that you can apply as soon as you get the newsletter.

There’s a link in the episode show notes, go there and sign up.

Okay, let’s talk about cringe.

And when I say cringe, I’m talking about that uncomfortable feeling of social embarrassment. It is the worry that other people will think you are trying too hard, that you are out of touch, or that you are making a fool of yourself. I have felt that, you must have felt that at some stage as well. We all have our own version of it.

For one person, posting a photo or LinkedIn feels fine, and for another, it feels like walking on stage with a spotlight and no script.

The fear of cringe has always been there, but social media has turned it up several notches and I have felt that more so in the past couple of years, especially with LinkedIn. Because I felt that before we could opt out of LinkedIn, but not anymore. We know that anything we say or post could be screen-shotted, shared, commented on. Even if nobody’s actually watching, we feel like the whole world is watching.

So we start editing ourselves down, we start muting ourselves, we keep our ambitions quiet, we aim for cool, unbothered look instead of that honest, engaged, vulnerable personality. Here is the problem with that. The career you want only happens when you do things that stand out. You speak up in rooms when silence feels safer. You…

ask for opportunities that might not exist yet, you show your work, your ideas, your failures. All of that will feel a bit cringe at first because you are stepping out of the comfortable image you have built and you are inviting judgment. Let me tell you the story of how I became a career coach. It’s cringe for even for me, you know, it was so hard for me at the beginning.

I had been the CEO of a prestigious rather small not-for-profit, but still very prestigious. dealt with high net worth individuals, senior politicians, yes, including the prime minister, including governors and state premiers in every state. So state premiers for those in the US, I am in Australia, it’s equivalent to governors and governors are not governors like yours. Governors are the…

⁓ King’s representatives and they are in, in Australia. So yes, it was, it was very high profile before that I had worked in a think tank again, dealing with that similar, group of people, ⁓ captains of industries and organizing, ⁓ important events throughout my career in the most amazing venues, dealing with, endowments and donations.

by wealthy families into ⁓ important causes. Then I worked, of course, before and after that, I worked in the higher education sector. My last job was working directly with the vice chancellor and in the vice chancellery, ⁓ setting up an important part of that portfolio, ⁓ central portfolio for the biggest university in Australia.

All of a sudden I go from that, you know, including being offered to go back into CEO roles after I left Monash University to say, no, I want to work for myself and I want to be a career coach. That felt cringe at the time. I had to overcome my own ⁓ assumptions of what people would think about that. I had to go into my network and

explain myself to them and let them know that I was completely changing careers. And it wasn’t easy for me. And I know it’s not easy for clients that lose their jobs, for clients that want to change their careers, for clients that have been laid off and now have to be on LinkedIn to ⁓ showcase their, you know, experience, their thought leadership. I know how you feel. I just wanted to share that with you.

and it’s possible for you to overcome that. And frankly, the monster is in your head. It’s not out there, frankly. You will get a lot of support, maybe not from people you think you will, which was, I think, surprising for me at every point in my career where I had to overcome cringe, but you will find amazing support out there.

Of course, there are truly unprofessional behaviors that are criticized. So I don’t want you to think that you can just go out and say anything you want and that you need to overcome cringe in that. This is not what I am encouraging. I’m talking about what I call productive cringe, the discomfort that comes from stretching, from being visible, from talking about yourself and your career seriously in public.

And with that in mind, let us look at some very specific things in job search and career advancement that my clients regularly label as cringe.

The first one is very common, it’s the reason why I’m doing this episode in the first place, it’s posting on LinkedIn. New role, new promotion, when you have to leave a job, it’s an important post to make, an award, speaking engagements, a podcast feature. Many professionals say to me, I do not want to sound braggy. My colleagues will roll their eyes, it feels cringe.

From the outside, what I see is someone quietly hiding their very signals that recruiters and hiring managers need to recognize and they value in your resume and the way that you showcase it on LinkedIn. A simple reframe here is to treat it as reporting, not boasting. Here’s what I did, here’s what I learned, here is how it might help you.

That tone of service makes the post useful and still gets you on the radar.

And that’s why I love working with my private LinkedIn group. It’s called RB LinkedIn Club. If you want to join, I will put a link in the show notes. It’s not on my website. I do not know why I’ve treated this like as an experiment and it has been, you know, I received such great feedback from the members. It’s a monthly membership to get

people supported on LinkedIn and for me to be able to have a weekly conversation with the members and provide feedback on what they posted and provide tasks that they can follow weekly so that they’re not overdoing anything on LinkedIn and they have a strategy behind it and a mentor in myself and frankly in others as well because we get a lot of amazing feedback from members. So if you want to join and try it out, you know, it’s a

monthly membership, ⁓ there’s a link in the show notes. Go there and we will support you.

Another one is sharing personal stories, talking about redundancy, burnout, a health challenge, a big mistake. I have posted last week on LinkedIn about how people feel when they have to go to family events, especially during the holiday season when they don’t have a job. That post has now 50, over 50,000 impressions, over 400 likes.

Lots and lots of comments. I think we have 70 comments. Go have a look. I’ll have a link in the episode show notes because I don’t know what came came to me. I mean, I always do posts like this at the end of the year. If you go back into my LinkedIn profile, you will see every year since 2019, I’ve been posting about how I used to feel at the end of the year. So I think it really did resonate this time more than I have ever seen.

And I would love for you to go there and read it and give it a like as well. But look, for many mid-career professionals, senior professionals, it’s hard to feel vulnerable. They say to me, ⁓ my life is not what I wanted it to be, Renata. And that can feel, especially at the end of the year when I’m recording this, when that post came out on LinkedIn, it feels even more…

of a pressure on everyone. My view is that you still get to choose the boundaries, but when you share a selection of your story with a clear lesson, it becomes the most memorable thing about your professional brand.

And the idea here is to be focused, is to ⁓ stay within your area of expertise and provide insight to other maybe younger professionals or the colleagues of yours that may have ⁓ similar experiences to you. that sharing that’s still professional, it’s still within your career DNA and it’s not about oversharing. LinkedIn is not a place to overshare.

I’ve been saying this for a while, if you want to overshare, go to TikTok. If you want to see other people oversharing about their redundancies, their layoffs, the experiences ⁓ dealing with difficult managers, their experiences dealing with recruitment and selection, go to TikTok. You will have so much fun there.

Now let’s talk about cold outreach and networking, which is another source of cringe.

So things like messaging someone at a company you admire or a leader that you respect or even somebody you worked with a long time ago and you lost touch. This is peak cringe for many, many people. And they imagine the recipient rolling their eyes and showing their friends.

That doesn’t happen. Nobody does that. In practice, what usually happens is either they ignore it because they are busy or they think that is a well written message and then they respond. So let’s talk about this podcast. When I started this podcast, my gosh, it was so cringe, so cringe. I recorded the first episodes on my phone.

So there was no video. you’re listening to this on Spotify, Apple, know that you can watch on ⁓ YouTube. Hardly anybody does. So this podcast has thousands and thousands of listeners on Spotify and Apple. It blows my mind how big it is considering I record it by myself. It’s edited by my husband. Like this is really a tiny team.

This is no Stephen Bartlett, it’s not Diary of a CEO and still here we are doing weekly episodes for you. But it started off really cringe. I started off very much like Stephen Bartlett in my kitchen ⁓ and doing, you know, recording episodes on my phone, on my iPhone. And my first videos, fortunately Facebook has deleted them.

They were horrible, right? It was in the middle of the pandemic. I didn’t know what I was doing. I persevered. I knew that if there were 10 people listening, five people listening, it was already making an impact. I had so much to say. I had interesting ideas about career planning and design, job hunting, job searching, and I…

Also saw a lot of things that I disagreed with in the markets during the pandemic. There were a lot of outplacement companies saying, ⁓ don’t, don’t look for work right now. Everybody is locked down. And I’m like, do don’t follow that advice. Go and look for work. That’s when people are, you know, doing nothing at home. They would really value having a conversation with you because everybody’s sort of craving craving interaction.

I even went on TV and they interviewed me about this. keep it short, keep it specific and be respectful of everybody’s time and you can reach out. ⁓ The thing I wanted to say about the podcast as well is that I get now that we’re big and you know, we’re quite well known, we get lots and lots and lots of people trying to be guests on the podcast and

I sometimes have to ignore the requests because they are below par. They are not well written. They are not tailored to this podcast, which is for ⁓ professionals in the corporate world who are looking for work, who are interested in their careers, you know, from a career ⁓ advancement point of view or sustainability point of view. They want to make sure that they take control over their careers. So that’s what

podcast is all about. If the guest pitch is not for that then I don’t even reply. If the guest pitch is for this sort of audience but I don’t feel that I can fit it in my schedule because I already interviewed lots of people along the same sort of topics for some reason or another it doesn’t fit I will reply and I say look maybe not this show but maybe you can go on another show and I usually even give a few ideas or

where to go because we kind of know each other in this space now. you know, reach out and many of the guests that you see on the podcast have reached out to me. Now, I used to reach out to them a lot and now they come to me and if they hadn’t come to me, they wouldn’t be on the podcast. So this is what I mean. I want you to be.

respectful of people’s times, but you can absolutely reach out to them and nobody’s going to roll their eyes. You can say something like, I have followed your work, I’m exploring roles, would a short call in the next few weeks be possible? Or if you don’t want to burden them with this idea of a call, you can say, look, I’ve been thinking of doing X, Y and Z. Is that something that you would advise me to do? I would really value your input and your feedback.

something that they can write back, that would be great too. Something like, you know, is there somebody that you would recommend that I speak with? That’s also, you know, if they, you can even say if you’re very busy or you don’t feel like ⁓ this is the right connection for you, would you recommend somebody else that I speak with? I usually offer the podcast to the guests that I don’t ⁓ show on my show.

But they could have asked like Renata if this is not the right podcast for me, would you recommend another podcast show that I could be a guest for? Right? That would be something that they could add to their pitch. So make sure that it’s clear that it’s professional and much less dramatic than the story in your head. That’s also important.

The other thing that is ⁓ cringe is asking for referrals. Asking for referrals is a classic. People tell me I do not want to put them on the spot. It feels needy. We didn’t get along that well. ⁓ We weren’t so close at work or I left and I didn’t say goodbye because I was angry that I had been laid off. Look.

none of that matters. People will want to help you. They will 100 % want to help you. When you frame it as an invitation instead of a demand, you give them a very easy way out to say no. Most of them will say yes. You might say something like, I’m applying for a role at your organization. If you feel comfortable doing this, I would appreciate a referral.

or any context that you can share about the hiring manager, about the department. This is a polite, clear communication with them. It gives them an out. The cringe is mostly in the anticipation that you have, not the actual request. And remember that many times they have a financial benefit if they refer you to a role and you get a job.

Right? If you get the job and they have referred you to the role, it’s possible that they might get a bonus for it.

Now, the other cringe factor that is very popular with my clients is negotiating salaries.

very little chance that you will get a job and not be able to negotiate your salary. Negotiation is often described to me as the ultimate cringe.

People think that they should be just grateful that they have a job after a long search. But if you cannot have a clear respectful conversation about your compensation at the beginning, it becomes harder to advocate once you are on the inside.

You do not have to be aggressive or ask for a ridiculous amount or ridiculous benefits, but you can say, look, based on my research and the scope of this role, I have a range of X to Y in mind. How much flexibility is there? That sentence might feel uncomfortable the first time, but it is very normal. And the people on the other side of the call, they are used to this. They have heard this many times before.

and it is normal in that recruitment world, in talent acquisition. If it’s not about salary, it could be about benefits, it could be about flexibility. So make sure that you don’t feel pressured to just accept whatever ⁓ offer comes your way and know that you can do negotiations.

Another cringe factor is naming your ambitions. Even saying it out loud, I’m targeting a director or VP role. ⁓ have a client at the moment who is moving from one C level role to the CEO role. I have a couple of clients that would be very keen to move from C level to CEO. And they feel cringe about

positioning that as part of their pitch. But that’s how people become CEOs eventually. They come up the ladder, they improve in their ability to lead and they go from managing functions to managing ⁓ the whole organization. So we need to worry less about what people will think and more about how

how we will present that pitch and be persuasive with ⁓ your elevator pitch, with your introduction to people that might enable you to achieve your career advancement. And I’m talking about C level, but this could be from a product manager to a senior product manager, from an accountant to a financial controller. It could be at any level and you need to be ready to have that conversation.

You may worry that other people will think you are arrogant, but that’s how people elevate their positions and advance in their careers. If you never state your ambition, your network and your leaders have no way of helping you move in that direction.

And then there is speaking in senior meetings. So inside organizations, a big cringe moment is when you have to speak up in senior meetings or any meetings. You know that you have a point of view, but the fear is that if you say something obvious, what if I misunderstand the politics? But over time, the habit of staying silent becomes part of your brand.

You become the safe pair of hands who never shapes the agenda and that’s not good for your career. A small step is to prepare one thoughtful question or one succinct point before each meeting. Your goal is not to dominate the discussion, just to be present in the room as a contributor and not just a listener.

And finally, there is this cringe of reinvention, which I mentioned at the start, which was my example in my own career. Maybe you are moving from corporate into consulting like I did, and then consulting and coaching. ⁓ That was the next step. Or from one sector to another, or you’re taking a sabbatical, or you’ve been unemployed for a year and you want to make sure that you have

a narrative around it. Many people would rather disappear for a while than explain that change and they worry they will look confused or lost and a clear narrative usually sounds more confident. I’m now workshopping with a friend of mine. We’re both sort of re-establishing our goals for 2026.

And she has been sending me her pitch in daily messages. So I wake up, she wakes up earlier than me. I wake up and I get a lovely message from her. What about this? And then I give her feedback. And then the next day she will send me a new pitch and my God, this is sounding better. And I’m about to do the same with her. I’m going to send her my, my new pitch for 2026 on how I want to show up for my clients. And I really value her.

her advice. So if you have somebody like this to practice with, if you don’t, you can hire me, you can hire a coach that you trust to work with you because that clear narrative where you sound confident, courageous and you’re ready for questions once you start, you know, stating what you want to do, people will be curious and they will have questions for you, so you have to be ready for that as well. This is really important.

Something that will sound like, for example, after 15 years doing X, I am now focusing on Y because that’s where I can create the most value for this type of organizations. So that kind of statement feels bold when you’re saying it the first time, but it

becomes a stable part of your professional story. You will become more more comfortable with it the more you say it.

So those are some of the everyday cringe moments in job search and career and life. I also want to show you that even very visible leaders with huge platforms go through their own public cringe and they still come out ⁓ on the other side with more experience. So let’s look at some leaders who used cringe to benefit their brands and their businesses. We have Richard.

Branson’s wedding dress stunt. I don’t know if you remember this, but it’s one of my favorite cringe examples is when Richard Branson in the 90s launched a business called Virgin Brides and he went around London in a full wedding dress and makeup to promote it. The business itself did not succeed.

many people thought it was a ridiculous stunt, but he is a smart man. And a part of his broader career, a part of his brand and a part of the Virgin brand is that willingness to take risks and not feel the embarrassment. His brand is.

It’s it’s bold and he uses himself often as the marketing asset of his brand. And he accepted the personal cringe as part of that building up of that larger storytelling around the Virgin brand. The other example that’s more recent is Tesla’s Cybertruck. We still make fun of the Tesla Cybertruck and still it sells.

Right. I don’t know if you remember that when it was launched,

at the launch, they threw a metal ball at the armored window. It was supposed to be armored and it was supposed not to shatter, but it did. Not only it shattered once, it shattered twice. So that clip went viral and it was the beginning of the mockery around the cyber truck.

and it was considered a disaster launch and yet there was interest in the product. The company leaned into that moment. They even made, I believe they made a t-shirt with the photo of the shattered window in the Cybertruck. So it’s like, if it happened, you might as well go for it. ⁓ Then there’s the cringe era of LinkedIn and content creators. ⁓ On a smallest scale,

I think of content creators and professionals who share more personal and sometimes slightly awkward posts on LinkedIn. They get teased, people call it cringe. At the same time, those posts often generate more conversations, the most inbound opportunities for them and the most speaking invitations. So these

influencers on LinkedIn and other social media platforms, they are willing to tolerate the possibility that someone in their old office is rolling their eyes because they are focused on the people who find value in what they share. Generation Z and Generation Y have this cringe mountain

concept that I think might really benefit older generations like mine. So I can see a lot of it being written in the media. I’ll put a couple of ⁓ articles for you to read in the episode show notes if you’re interested. But younger creators have talked about climbing this cringe mountain. They have posted videos about it. ⁓ It’s really about not

worrying about being mocked by their friends and doing it anyway. It looks uncomfortable from the outside, but with repetition, eventually it leads to mastery and audience and options. And you can see a lot of that happening ⁓ on YouTube, on social media, like Instagram or TikTok, when somebody’s trying to skateboard or jump rope or do hula hoops or

learn how to knit and they start really not knowing what to do. And with the videos, you know, one by one, you can see the progression of their ⁓ learning experience and then becoming masters. So the common thread in all of these examples is not a particular personality type. It’s a willingness to hold that feeling of embarrassment and keep going. Okay.

Now, I want to share with you a practical cringe plan that will be in my newsletter. So I would love for you to sign up for the newsletter, the cringe plan for you to get over it with exercises to identify your cringe and actions that you can do to overcome your cringe will be in the

newsletter that’s coming out this week. If you sign up for it a little bit later and you don’t see the newsletter, just email back when you receive an email that you’re now subscribed and I will send it to you. I will send it to you. Okay? Thank you so much for joining me for this interesting episode.

I know that this is an important one and I hope that many of my clients are also listening because even with my help, I know it’s hard to overcome cringe and show up, especially on LinkedIn. When you lose your job, when you get a new job, when you want to showcase an expertise that you think might not be very visible externally. And this is the episode for you.

I look forward to seeing you subscribing to my newsletter to get that action plan and I will leave you now and hope to see you next time. Bye.