Marketer Do Unto Thyself

Overcoming the fear of putting myself out there

There’s a particular irony in being a marketer who struggles to market herself.

I’ve spent the last two years building a business helping wine brands tell their stories, connect with their customers, and show up consistently in the market. And yet when it comes to doing the same for myself — I freeze.

I know I have a lot to offer. I’ve built a solid roster of clients, and I genuinely love the work. But I’ll confess that I’ve been taking the safer path — leaning into B2B referrals and letting business come to me rather than putting myself out there. And the only honest explanation I have is good old-fashioned imposter syndrome, a healthy helping of fear of rejection, and a deeply inconvenient tendency toward self-doubt.

Those who know me would probably laugh at this. I’m an extrovert by most definitions — my husband teases that I’m always making friends with the strangers sitting next to me at the bar. But there’s a difference between being outgoing in person and being willing to stand up and say I’m good at this, and you should hire me. The first comes naturally. The second? Still working on it.

A great example of what this looks like in practice: I spent more than a year telling myself I needed to overhaul my website and personal branding. I knew it. I talked about it. And I did almost nothing about it — until recently.

It’s not a bandwidth problem. It’s a me problem.

Because here’s the thing about imposter syndrome — it’s sneaky. It doesn’t always show up as paralysis. Sometimes it shows up as busyness. As prioritizing everyone else’s marketing over your own. As convincing yourself that the client work is more important than the thing that will actually grow your business.

I started this business because I genuinely love wine and I believe in its magic. I knew going in that there would be things I didn’t know — about running a business, about building a client base, about navigating an industry that can feel like an insider’s club. What I wasn’t prepared for was discovering that my biggest obstacle wasn’t any of those things:

It was me.

And I don’t think I’m alone in that.

Thanks to my good friend and coach Marina, the brilliant mind behind PurposeBuilt, I’ve done a lot of work over the past four-ish years on understanding why I hold myself back — and what it actually costs me when I do. This post is part of that work. Saying it out loud, putting it here, is part of that work.

So, consider this article a few things at once:

An acknowledgment that building a business is deeply personal — and that the hardest obstacles are sometimes the ones we put in our own way.

A reminder to fellow entrepreneurs that imposter syndrome doesn’t discriminate. What matters is that we keep going anyway.

And a public promise to myself. This Substack is part of it. Showing up more consistently on social is part of it. Saying yes to things that scare me a little is part of it.

I have a lot to offer. It’s time I started acting like it.

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