When marketing the self, be wary of the humblebrag

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/05/marketing-humblebrag-bigging-up

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Do you feel innovative? Creative? Are you ready to self-start your way through 2013 to achieve your career goals? Perhaps you should be. That is the way a lot of professional people are describing themselves online these days. Analysis carried out recently by a networking website reveals more than the familiar lonely hearts talk of those who claim to have "a good sense of humour". This is marketing of the self in a noisy and insecure world.

When the management guru Tom Peters started talking about "the brand called you" in the 1990s, some demurred. The concept was surely too vulgar to contemplate. Today we can see that Peters was ahead of the game. Once reticence and restraint may have won you admirers at work. Now anyone with any sense is practising a new skill: "bigging yourself up". It is as if people feel the need to make a sales pitch at every turn, but in this case the product being touted is the individual. We have a "personal brand" that needs to be handled with care.

"Social" media have provided the ideal home for this activity. Facebook and Twitter reveal the varied brilliance of their owners. It can all get a bit tiring, like receiving excerpts from a Christmas round robin letter every day. The worst examples – falsely modest declarations that in fact betray the self-satisfaction and boastfulness of the speaker – have been awarded their own special category by the always watchful online audience: the "humblebrag". If you are going to big yourself up, at least do it properly.

How far up the social ladder does this need reach? Almost, it seems, to the very top. In his new year message the prime minister was at pains to establish what a good job he is doing. "I want to reassure you of this: we are on the right track," David Cameron said. "On all the big issues that matter to Britain, we are heading in the right direction and I have the evidence to prove it." This was a striking claim. But in case we were in any doubt about his role, the PM reminded us on his recent trip to Afghanistan that he thought very hard about the country's security "when I sit in No 10 Downing Street". Humblebrag.

Cameron is not the only coalition leader to big himself up. Nick Clegg wrote in the Times this week that criticism would not blow ministers off course. They would hold their nerve and, of course, show leadership. He made this bold assertion: "The biggest divide in politics today – here and around the world – is between those who offer leadership and those who only offer dissent." I think we know on which side of this divide Clegg believes he stands.

Accentuate the positive, we are told. It is not bad advice. But it is better if the nice things we say about ourselves have solid foundations. There is more than a hint of desperation in some of the bigging up we see around us today. Perhaps this is an understandable response to stressful times. But some people are clearly feeling so vulnerable that they are making grand and exaggerated claims. We can't all be quite as creative and innovative as that.

Self-esteem is one thing, and perma-hype is another. Even Martin Seligman, sometimes described as the father of the "positive psychology" movement, is opposed to the idea that, from childhood onwards, we need to be encouraged to hold a high opinion of ourselves. "Children need to fail," he has written. "When they encounter obstacles, if we leap in to bolster self-esteem ... to soften the blows and to distract them with congratulatory ebullience, we make it harder for them ... Failure and feeling bad are necessary building-blocks for ultimate success and feeling good."

Fortunately for me I have no ego problems at all, and will therefore be tweeting links to this article only a few dozen times over the next couple of days.