I personally prefer to give myself an ‘undervalued’ reputation compared to my actual capability of facing challenges. There is no necessary need to boost up the value right away especially when you still have a few more miles to go to have a full access to your surroundings. Those surroundings that I mentioned here could be a competitive advantage of an expertise, network or support that you can leverage through.
It is mainly because as long as you keep staying on a great development/learning-curve (without any self-promotion), such obstacles created by yourself against the rewards (that should have given to you if your intention was lowering down the obstacles) finally cannot resist enough to maintain its status. It will reward you soon if you just do not mind to wait until the moment with a little more patience. There are several benefits of spending this extra efforts.
1. It seems you are making the job harder, but actually you are getting more opportunities to have more mistakes/experience or ‘cumulative data on your expertise storage’ than anybody else on the same line of the competition.
2. It also challenges you further with the imbalance between reputation and capability which makes you stay competitive with quite efficient know-how that you might have developed for yourself.
3. You can, in most cases, easily choose to untie the sandbags around your ankles anytime you want. If you have been working with more ‘attempted’ disadvantages, whenever you decided to unlock the retrained capability, you never run slower than the others who run on the competition without them.
This leverage may not be as helpful as you expected if you preferred radical effects on personal branding. However, my suggestion here is to train yourself harder by not giving you a fully satisfied status on purpose.
