A nickname I did not give myself.

Last year I was a co-host in Sandra Bothe's LinkedIn audio room. The topic that night was a long one: Journey of Corporate Professional Immigrants: Speak For Yourself, Overcoming the Fear of Being Seen. Sandra runs these rooms as part of her own work around her book Unmuting Myself, and she invites me in as a regular co-host.

Partway through, she was making a point about LinkedIn, about how when you let people know who you are, they start to amplify the message for you. Then, without warning me, she said something like this.

"Like many people have done here in LinkedIn with me, with Eny. He's been seen in these audio rooms a lot. He's got a nickname. The godfather. And everybody speaks about your rooms and what you do."

I was not expecting it. I was on mic but quiet, listening to her frame the topic. And then, casually, in front of the room, she gave me a nickname I had never given myself.

I want to say something honest about that moment.

You cannot give yourself this kind of nickname

A lot of the positioning advice on LinkedIn right now is about what you put in your own headline. Your title. Your tagline. Your hook.

That is the cheap version. The expensive version, and the one that actually compounds, is the nickname you get given by someone else, in a room you do not control, when you are not the one speaking.

Sandra did not ask me if I wanted to be called the godfather. She did not clear it with me. She said it because, in her honest experience of LinkedIn audio rooms over the last year or so, that is what I had become, to her and to the people she talks to. She was not flattering me. She was describing a fact that had formed in the room without either of us deciding.

When that kind of thing happens, the positioning is real. I did not write it into my profile. I did not earn it by saying it. I earned it by being in enough rooms, for long enough, that other people started to tell the story for me.

Seen and not heard

What makes Sandra's room land for me is that the topic hits home in a very particular way. She was talking that evening about the way many of us in diaspora and immigrant families were raised. Seen and not heard. Kids are to be seen, not heard. That was the rule.

I said in the room that I did not know whether it was a generational thing or a childhood thing, but it described my growing up. The lesson of adulthood is that you have to be heard. And you have to live with the fact that if it goes wrong, then so be it, and you can always learn and do better.

That is a long distance to cover. From a kid raised to be quiet, to an adult standing on a live audio stage on a global professional network, day after day, hosting rooms and being invited to co-host other people's rooms. That distance does not close in a seminar. It closes in small daily increments, in uncomfortable moments, in rooms where sometimes you are the only one speaking and sometimes nobody shows up at all.

The mirror

One of the practices I talked about in Sandra's room is the mirror. I told the room that I remember looking into a mirror and saying to myself, "Eny, you're great." And the back of my mind was immediately saying, "Am I sure? Am I sure?"

That is the honest version of self-belief. It is not a confident declaration. It is a sentence you say out loud while the back of your mind questions you, and you keep saying it anyway, and with time the questioning gets a little quieter and the sentence gets a little more solid. You fall off the horse, you get back on. You fall off again, you get back on. Nothing cinematic.

That mirror practice is the private version of what an audio room is. A room is the mirror, scaled up to five or fifty or two hundred people. Every time you stand in it, you are saying your own name in public, at a slightly louder volume, and trusting that the world is big enough to hold your voice.

How a nickname gets made

If I trace the nickname Sandra gave me backwards, it was made of a very uncomplicated set of ingredients. Years of showing up in rooms I did not host. Years of hosting my own rooms with nobody watching. Years of amplifying other people's work in public. Years of not asking for anything back.

At some point, enough people were in enough rooms where I was quietly adding, helping, co-hosting, introducing, that the story about me in those circles shifted from "a publisher who also uses LinkedIn" to "the guy who runs these rooms". That shift was not mine. It belonged to the audience, and to co-hosts like Sandra, who started to refer to me that way in rooms I was not even hosting that week.

That is the only kind of authority I trust now. Not the kind I claim. The kind I overhear.

What I tell clients

When authors come to me hoping to "build a brand" or "be seen as an expert", I try to steer them away from the version where they write their own title over and over. I steer them toward the version where they show up in other people's rooms, for months, adding without asking. The title they end up with, if one emerges, is given to them by the room. And the one the room gives you always beats the one you assign yourself.

If you are at the start of that journey, and you are still practising the mirror, I would say only this. Keep going. Keep adding. Keep turning up in rooms you did not build. Somewhere, quietly, someone is already forming a sentence about you that you will overhear one day, in a room you did not plan, that will name the work you have been doing the whole time.

That is the moment you will know you were already famous in the circle that mattered.

---

Watch the original room below, or on the Global.Media YouTube channel. For Sandra's case study and the arc from "muted" to author-on-stage, read her case study on Global.Media. For the how-to on running these rooms yourself, see LinkedIn audio rooms for authors.