Topics: how to overcome your fear of being visible online, people pleasing, fear of judgement
How to Overcome Your Fear of Being Visible Online. It starts with this….
You can be liked by everyone—or deeply connected with the RIGHT ones. But rarely both.
This is where so many entrepreneurs find themselves…stuck between wanting to grow your business and shrinking yourself to avoid criticism. It’s the….softening your edges, second-guessing a post, or avoiding bold opinions because you don’t want to be disliked.
This is the episode that breaks all of that.
If you’ve ever felt afraid to speak your truth online, this episode is your invitation to stop editing yourself for approval.
We’re talking about the tension so many women entrepreneurs live in: being told to “speak up”—but punished when we do. All of this drives the fear of being visible online. Whether it’s the pressure to be the “good girl” who’s always palatable or the fear of being labeled too much, this conversation gets to the root of why visibility feels so triggering—and what actually happens when you stop people pleasing and start owning your message.
This is about the fear of judgment and the pressure to earn gold stars in business the way we were taught to in life.
Here’s how you stop performing and start connecting:
- Unhook from People Pleasing: How the fear of judgment shows up in your nervous system—and how to shift it.
- Rewire the Good Girl Reflex: How nervous system patterns (like the fawn response) keep you small—and how to shift them.
- Build a Brave Circle: The #1 way to feel better being bold—even when the trolls come knocking.
Listen to start connecting more deeply—with your TRUE audience and your own voice.
TIMESTAMPS
00:01:20 — The Fear of Judgment That Silences Female Entrepreneurs
00:06:45 — How People Pleasing Follows Us from Corporate Into Business
00:14:08 — How to Overcome Your Fear of Being Visible Online
00:21:33 — Why Being Liked Keeps You Average and Invisible
00:31:47 — Build a Brave Circle: The Cure for Fear of Being Visible Online
LISTEN TO NEXT: You’re Not Ready, But do It Anyway
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MORE ABOUT THIS ENTREPRENEUR MINDSET PODCAST EPISODE
“It’s not fear of visibility—it’s fear of punishment: rejection, judgment, cancellation.” – Chardét Ryel (Visibility Mentor)
- People pleasing keeps your brand invisible and your message watered down.
- A brave circle makes visibility feel safer
- You overcome your fear of being visible online by choosing authenticity over approval.
What would you say if no one could unfollow you? What would you post if you weren’t afraid of losing someone’s approval?
What truth would you finally share if the fear of judgement wasn’t in the room?
If these questions bring up a lump in your throat or a twitch of resistance, you’re not alone. For so many women building their first few years of business, being visible online feels like walking a tightrope: Say too much and risk pushback. Say too little and stay invisible.
And if you’ve been taught—explicitly or implicitly—to be the “good girl,” the people-pleaser, the peacemaker, or the polished version of yourself, visibility won’t just feel awkward. It’ll feel dangerous.
But here’s the truth we explore in this episode of Her First 3 Years: Your desire to be liked by everyone is the very thing keeping your business small.
Let’s talk about how to undo that.
Why the Fear of Judgement Runs So Deep
Most visibility advice skips this part. You’ll hear “just show up” and “post more,” but what’s rarely addressed is why showing up feels so raw in the first place.
It’s not just fear of being visible—it’s fear of what happens after you’re seen. Fear of criticism. Fear of being misunderstood. Fear of rejection. The fear of judgement.
This doesn’t come from nowhere. Many of us were raised and reinforced to be five-star girls—well-behaved, liked, agreeable, polished. We learned early on that rocking the boat meant risking love, praise, or safety. And that programming doesn’t just disappear when you launch a business.
Visibility, then, isn’t just a marketing skill. It’s emotional labor. It’s nervous system work. It’s untraining decades of conditioning and rewriting your relationship with self-expression.
As I said in the episode:
“We weren’t born afraid to be seen—we were trained to be five-star girls.”
People Pleasing Is the Silent Brand Killer
You might think you’re “just being professional,” or “keeping it clean,” or “reading the room.” But often, that’s code for people pleasing.
Trying to appease everyone leads to diluted messaging, generic branding, and content that falls flat. The irony? You don’t gain more clients by playing it safe—you lose the ones who would’ve connected with the real you.
“People pleasing keeps your brand invisible and your message watered down.”
There’s a cost to constantly softening your voice. When you’re curating your identity for likability, you’re hiding the very parts that make you magnetic. And if you’re trying to say something meaningful—something that builds trust and inspires loyalty—then safety mode won’t get you there.
The Myth of Being Universally Liked
At some point, you’ll have to decide: do you want to be liked by everyone, or deeply respected and remembered by the right ones?
This shift is hard because the fear of judgement shows up fast. Every unsubscribe, unfollow, or sideways comment can feel personal. But as long as you’re trying to perform for every audience, your real people won’t hear you.
“Being liked by everyone keeps you average and invisible.”
Let that sink in.
If your messaging is too neutral, too polished, too crowd-pleasing, it will blur into the noise. But if you speak clearly, if you stop apologizing for your truth, you create resonance—and resonance is how people say “I feel like she gets me” and “I want to work with her.”
How to Overcome Your Fear of Being Visible Online
This doesn’t mean you need to overshare or go live every day. It means you learn to trust your inner voice more than the comments section. And that trust builds gradually, with practice and support.
So, how do you overcome your fear of being visible online when that fear feels so real in your body?
Start here:
- Notice where you’re still seeking gold stars. Are you filtering your words for palatability? Are you making decisions based on who might leave?
- Write your “anti five-star” affirmation. For example: “I am not for everyone. I am for the ones who get it and want to build something real.”
- Choose alignment over applause. The truth you’ve been softening? That’s probably the thing that builds the most trust.
And when the fear of judgement creeps in again (because it will), remember:
“You overcome your fear of being visible online by choosing authenticity over approval.”
Visibility Is a Team Sport—Not a Solo Quest
One of the most important insights from this episode is this: Visibility is easier when you’re not doing it alone.
You need people who see you clearly and hold space for your boldness. Whether it’s a business friend, a group chat, a coach, or a podcast community—you need what I call a brave circle. Not just to hype you up, but to co-regulate with you when the fear hits.
Because being visible online isn’t just an individual effort. It’s collective bravery. It’s building muscle over time with the support of others who get it.
“Your bold voice needs a brave circle—visibility gets easier when you’re not doing it alone.”
So find your people. Let them remind you of who you are when you start shrinking. And be that person for someone else, too.
You Came Here for Impact, Not 5 Stars
You didn’t leave your job, start this business, or dream this dream just to be agreeable.
You came here to create something meaningful. And meaningful work doesn’t always get five stars. It gets conversation. It gets connection. It gets clarity.
So here’s your invitation:
Pick one platform—Instagram, LinkedIn, your podcast, your newsletter—and say the thing you’ve been softening.
Don’t perform it. Don’t overedit it. Just say it. Clean or messy. Bold or trembling. But true.
Your voice is powerful. Let’s stop burying it in people pleasing and perfection.
FULL TRANSCRIPT WITH CHARDÉT RYEL
One of the hardest challenges as a female entrepreneur is this idea of being visible. And if you try to explain it to someone who doesn’t have this experience, it’s very hard. But I know for you, you probably have felt this, that the things with being visible bring a lot of baggage for us. Things like judgment. Things like people pleasing coming up.
where we just want to be liked, we don’t want people to dislike, we don’t want people to leave comments, to unfollow, to unsubscribe, and it causes us to either not show up, to hide, or to hide parts of ourselves, the parts we really believe, share, stories, things that we feel are too strong, quote unquote, for people to hear. And so the goal in this episode is to take you from
feeling like you’re hiding a part of this, or maybe you’re afraid to show up, to fully embrace it. To fully embrace the thing that you feel, but you’re afraid to show. So we’ll go through overcoming fear of judgment, being visible, a lot of the people-pleasing that we kind of fall into, and I will share with you all the stories of how that has definitely happened to me and held me back, and how we can get ahead.
Now I started this because the previous mini episode was called Not a Five Star Girl and it came from the realization that I think a lot of us want to achieve the maximum and we want to have the five stars, the A plus. And it’s very hard to accept that you can’t really do that if you want to get ahead, meaning you can’t be A plus student because you’re gonna have to fail to learn.
You can’t have five stars all the time because if you’re really true to you and what you believe, not everyone is going to like it. Some people will dislike it and some people will get pissed off. So it’s not the goal to be liked by everyone. It’s actually a block to growth and it’s something that I struggled with for many years.
Because bottom line here, are not here to collect gold stars. You’re here to connect, lead, create impact. So this episode is about unhooking you from the need to be universally loved or rated and start embracing the power of your true voice, the deeper one, to start choosing what aligns and what you feel over approval.
as a way to actually grow your business. So this is for any woman who’s ever shrunk their message, softened their edges, or stayed silent to avoid offending. This one is for you, so we can stop doing that crap.
Let’s start with the first idea here is if you feel like you are always trying to get the approval and not get the dislike, it’s because we were trained to be that way. We were trained to be five star girls. We weren’t necessarily born afraid to be seen, but we’re kind of trained that way. And the way that I compare it the most is if I think back to my corporate days, they weren’t very long, but they were a couple of years.
And there was so much emphasis on not being the upstart, especially as a woman. You don’t want to be painted as the bitch, basically, right? You don’t want to be painted as the one who always has something to say and who is always saying it. You don’t want to be the super loud one. Even the way you dress needs to be done a certain way. And I totally get professionalism, so we’re not talking about that. We are talking about the little silencing that we do.
or someone at work does something you don’t agree with and you are supposed to be silent. You’re not supposed to voice it. And the biggest example for me will hands down be the last day that I ever spent in corporate where I said to my boss something that I felt was inappropriate that he did.
that he did and that he said when he was drunk. And I talked to him about it when he was sober in the office and he brushed me off basically. And then I will never forget the last thing he said to me at the end of the meeting where I felt like I had to just accept it and say, okay, yeah, everything’s fine. Even though knew deep down nothing was resolved, right? Even though I wanted to scream, was he said, you’re a really good girl. You’re gonna do well here.
And the moment he said that was the moment I knew I was gonna quit. Because if I had to be a good girl to get ahead, I wasn’t gonna stay.
If you have a business, you have the option to not have to do this. You don’t have to play by these rules. You are the boss. You have a business. You’re a creator. You get to be the one that doesn’t have to play nice. You don’t have to blend in. You can rock the boat. And so when I think back to those days, know, I, if I behaved in a way like he did to one of my employees,
And they sat me down and said, hey, this bothered me. I would never ever dismiss it like that. And so that’s how you know, you know, when you reframe yourself in a situation and say, I just can’t imagine reacting this way. And if we look at it, because it’s so hard, I mean, I’m still to this day, I’m in situations socially where someone says something to me and I want to say something back to voice, you know, my discontent. And I just am in such shock that it was even said in the first place.
And where this comes from is it’s another deeper reaction. We hear about fight or flight, right? You fight or you go and you flee. If you’re in a high stress situation to really rebalance the nervous system. But we also have one called Fawn, which you’ve probably heard from trauma theory. And it’s the idea that you will overly accommodate, appease, and people please to stay safe or to avoid conflict.
It’s something we learn really early as kids and it is 100 % reinforced in professional and social settings, especially for women. We are taught so much to do this. And to give you an example, I even had with a social situation that happened, I was playing a team sport and I was setting up part of it, the equipment, which I had done many times before.
And one of the people who was brand new to the team came up and was trying to explain to me how to do it. And I was saying, you know, I’ve done this before. And they kept doing it. There were three of them, three guys saying this to me. And I told them, I said, stop mansplaining to me. Because it got so obnoxious to have three people telling you what to do when you clearly know. Imagine that happening in another situation.
And I was thinking about it too, where that response, I’m proud of saying that because I think 10 years ago I wouldn’t have even said that much. But where the part really got me then after this was that there was one of the three who was dead serious, not joking, and said to me that it’s not that we’re mansplaining, it’s that your tiny women brain can’t handle logic.
And I bring this up in this context because I had this freeze response of not knowing what to do and what to say. And we do this all the time in our business. Like we just, we don’t know what to do, what to say, how to respond. We don’t want to really say the thing that will rock the boat. And it’s hard to undo decades of experience like this. So even as I’m telling you.
how to get over this, I’m giving you this situation to share that it’s still something I struggle with. It’s not something that has totally gone away. This idea of the five-star girl, of being agreeable and polished and helpful, never disruptive, never too much, never controversial. It’s, of course, the good girl syndrome that we have. it’s amazing to me how much this intertwines with business and how much we don’t talk about it.
Because of course, what MBA program talks about, know, falling into the good girl syndrome, what education or coaching talks about this? Really does. Because it’s something that we uniquely fall into. Now, on the other side of this is looking at how that intertwines with our fear of visibility. And I think a lot of times we confuse this and we think, well, I don’t want to be visible because I’m afraid of a
But really it’s not that, it’s fear of punishment. Punishment being judgment, you know, they don’t like you, they say something you’re not good enough, rejection, you’re not invited, cancellation also, especially now, saying something off color in the wrong way is a very big thing.
We have to let that go. But not just letting the good girl drop, but also the stereotype of the bitch, right? The idea that, the bitch speaks her mind. We have to let both of those go as these archetypes that rule how a woman reacts, because it is a spectrum and you respond in different ways.
And it’s something that is really hard to do. I can’t even tell you, you in my business life, I haven’t heard this a lot, but in my personal life, I’ve been called a bitch more times than I can count. The first time I was 11 years old by boys who didn’t like that I said what I was thinking.
So we have to let both go. We have to let them both go and really tune into our voice. It’s not about being extra over. It’s not about also throwing out all sense of balance and also trying to not necessarily show up polished, but in a version that’s representative of us. It’s not about that. We’re trying to find the deeper us. So if you look at even from a
deeper business perspective. If we look at the brands that do really well, the brands that stick out, they are not the ones that are trying to be liked by everyone. In fact, I’m sure you can think of one brand, be it clothing, a game, something that is so quirky and odd and you don’t get it. It doesn’t make sense to you and there’s a line out the door or it’s on backorder.
because it’s not trying to be liked by everyone. Really brands that position well and businesses that do exceptionally well are leaning into what is truly theirs. And that will naturally repel some people, but you can only magnetize people if you also repel. Like it’s the two sides of these things. You can’t just hope to get people’s deeper connection and attention and get them into your community without alienating some other people.
It’s how the world works. You also find your best friends, your partners by finding the people that don’t work. And arguably you want to show who you really are in those interactions so you find the right people. Same goes for your clients. So here’s a little prompt for you. What’s one belief or fear that’s kept you from being… ⁓ What’s one belief or fear…
that’s kept you trying to be everyone’s favorite.
It makes you still want to be the favorite. Who are you afraid of disappointing? Really?
If I think about for me, the big fear was that I was so different, especially growing up, that I wouldn’t be accepted by anyone if I couldn’t start to emulate and copy some traits of people who seem to be the most popular, mainstream, et cetera. And really, that just doesn’t work in business. It doesn’t work. So I want you to write your anti-
five-star affirmation, your anti five-star girl, five-star woman affirmation, thinking like this, you can come back to this later in this episode if you want. You say, am not for everyone. I am for the ones who get it and the ones I want to build with. This is basically a visibility rebellion statement. It’s saying, I release the need to be X. I’m allowed to be Y.
and still be loved, seen, and respected. This is your statement. You can have a think about what that will actually look like, but put it in your mind now, because we want to get you on this road to being the amazing magnetic person you are. And I often think about it like this before we move on to our next concept here, is if you’re trying to get five stars from everyone, it is like,
trying to play classical music for an audience that wants techno. You are never gonna hit the right note. You might get a few people there, but it’s not the same as playing for people who already know they’re going for the classical music and having that be what you love.
Here’s why being liked by everyone keeps you average and invisible. In the beginning of my business, I really tried to be liked by everyone. If someone didn’t love my business or my classes that I gave when I was a fitness instructor, I felt really personally offended. It was very hard for me. And the more I started leaning into though, okay, this is my philosophy. This is who I am. This is what I’m showing up as.
The better it was because I found that the right people came in the door from the beginning versus the wrong people realizing it wasn’t for them. So I’ve had and it’s always like this. I’ve had people unfollow. I’ve had people unsubscribe. I mean, it’s just going to be the way that it is because if you talk about anything meaningful, if you really talk about who you are, that’s going to happen. And I think the first time that I can really remember this.
when I’m thinking back was I used to write newsletters for my Feel Good Naked podcast and I had a weekly one, Feel Good Naked Wednesdays, and I always tried to keep it clean, quote unquote. You know, very clean and the language that I used, et cetera, family friendly. And one time I had a bad day, had a bad travel experience, and I wrote about it in this newsletter. And I think I used one or two curse words.
In real life, when I’m angry, I do that too, okay? But clearly, I had done a bad job online of showing up as who I am that people didn’t expect it. And so I had quite a few people unsubscribe. One person said she was disappointed. And it felt hard initially to have that happen. But then I realized like, okay, I’m not gonna be cursing every single newsletter that I do, but it is sometimes I’m angry and I’m gonna express it. And if someone…
doesn’t feel like that’s their space, it’s okay for them to go and to find someone else. So it’s gonna happen. Now I know that that’s hard because what this comes back to, every person you lose on your email list, every person who unsubscribes, every person who unfollows, the reason why it hurts so much is because it feels personal and we also evaluate ourselves
based on how we stack up against other people, especially online. So if you have someone who unfollows and you’re comparing yourself to someone else in your space, you feel like you’re losing. You just lost a community member. And so it feels safer to be likable. It feels safer to be neutral, even though the reality is, is you’re still gonna lose people and you’re not going to attract new ones.
I’ll be honest, online it’s very hard because we are fueled even deeper with this fear of judgment, of trolls, we get obsessed with engagement metrics, and there is this internal pressure to curate the perfect image instead of to connect. When you are visible, and I think this is something that goes deeper, deeper, deeper than just marketing, when you are truly visible online or anywhere, it’s not about
performance, it really is about alignment. And the more you show who you are, the deeper trust you can build with people who actually would be part of your community. It’s not just surface level stuff. We need to feel like we can express ourselves again. I’m not saying to just go off on a rant or anything like that, but just really touching to your deeper voice, to whatever you are holding there.
And so would ask you this, what message would you share if you weren’t trying to stay safe or polite? What would you share? The big one I always say is how I shifted in the wellness world to talking about how dieting is not going to get you what you want and how I didn’t believe in it for real fitness and wellness. Not everybody loved that.
Not everybody agreed. That conversation got me my real community though. And it felt so much better to be saying that instead of all the garbage that I had fallen into that was the mainstream stuff. Stop doling your edges. So this week, pick one place, Instagram, LinkedIn, newsletter, podcast, and commit to sharing something a little bolder.
can be a story, a belief, an opinion, something that really shows your real point of view.
The clearer you are, more magnetic you become. And if you’re feeling like I don’t actually know what to share here and I don’t actually know what my inner voice is, I know that I’m not doing it, but I don’t know how, this is where I’m going to say, listen to that private podcast, Secrets to Standing Out Online, because in those 10 mini episodes, each of them less than 10 minutes, so you can literally drink a coffee or tea, you can walk, you can do whatever.
Each of those episodes takes you on a ladder through this process so that by the end of it, you know your message and you know how you’re supposed to show up. You can find that private podcast on the Her First Three Years website, in the bio in my Instagram, and also in the show notes. Let’s move on.
When we think about how we’ve been conditioned to have this response, this fun response, and we think about also how we’re moving into likeability online, especially because it allows us to not feel like we’re less than someone else. The way that you fight this is not just on your own. It really does take a brave circle of people to bounce back from judgment.
When I look at, I’ve interviewed quite a few high profile influencers now and I have asked them about the trolls and the judgment they get when they express certain things. They’re under a lot of, you know, a magnifying glass, basically everything they say. And I’ve asked how they deal with it and most of them will say because they have a community. They know other people in that space. They have their family, their partner.
They have a backup system so that when they experience this stuff, someone can help them move through it. Each time it gets a little easier, but it’s important to have someone. And this is the idea of co-regulation. If you think about it, when you’re a little girl, a little kid, and you are stressed, you don’t have the emotional coping tools to down-regulate from that situation. Let’s say you fall and you cut your knee. You’re screaming.
So you run to a parent or to someone else who’s comforting for you. Co-regulation. That’s how you get a signal of safety and it allows you to calm down. Now we’re older, we have tools, we can do better than when we were five. It still doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. And so when you have someone else to help you calm, express, then it becomes easier. And you can start to see that you’re not alone.
and you can start to stop feeling like it’s the end of the world if there’s a troll or a comment or whatever it is. What I’ve found especially as an entrepreneur is you need other entrepreneurs. If you are in any space, if you’re a creator, you need other creators. If you’re a podcaster, you need other podcasters. This is how you get through because not everyone in your immediate family or friend group will understand otherwise.
Think of this as your brave circle, let’s say. So it’s not just clients, but it’s peers, it’s collaborators, it’s business friends who help you. They’re like your emotional hygiene. Help you deal with all this to have the thicker skin. Because while in real life, you might not be bothered so much by other people’s opinions, I know that I wasn’t. Online, every disagreement can feel like a betrayal.
You know, if someone says anything that is disagreeable and even when it is actually, it feels really difficult. So having this circle of people can help give you a little bit of extra muscle when you’re dealing with these hard situations. And all of this is kind of a phenomenon of community-led growth, which is the idea that
you don’t need to just grow on your own. In fact, you will grow faster in your business personally when you have a community of people where you have connection and trust and you are all together. It basically allows you to find your people. And I will always say too, if you have an option in terms of how you bring people into your community through a partnership, through someone you respect is always better.
So who helps you stay brave? Who are the people that remind you your voice matters? And if you don’t have them yet, what would they look like?
So if you don’t have them yet, this is what I’m gonna suggest. DM or voice note someone whose boldness inspires you. Let them know. Start the beginning of this relationship or just, even if it’s the one-off and you just let them know. Just having that interaction. And also think about within your circle, is there someone, one person where you can have a slightly deeper connection with to help you?
Because if you have support, your bold voice can be even bolder.
All of this is breaking that good girl paradigm. It is saying what you need to say because you didn’t come here to be a five-star girl, five-star woman. You came here into the business world to actually do something that moves people. Not everyone’s gonna like it, but those who will, they’re gonna stick around. They are going to share, build, grow with you. So I would love to hear what is your not a five-star girl.
when you decided not doing the people pleasing. know, screenshot this episode, tag me, tell me what is it. I’m ChardayRael on Instagram. What is the thing that feels bold and scary to do but true and you’re gonna do it? And if you need help, listen to that private podcast series, Secrets of Standing Out. If you’ve already listened to it and you signed up, listen again. There are so many little actions in there that can help you.
Thank you so much for being here. can’t wait to hear your deep inner voice and I will see you in the next one.
