Your Display: Signal or Noise?

Map your own professional signals across four axes — then read the pattern honestly.

Your Arena

Name the professional situation where you most need to signal your value — an interview, a pitch, a first client meeting, a promotion conversation. Write one sentence describing it.

Cost vs. Claim

Mark where your strongest professional signal sits on this spectrum. Does it cost you something real to produce (preparation, evidence, specificity), or could almost anyone produce it?

Anyone could claim this

Only I could prove this

Authenticity Check

Mark where your usual self-presentation sits. Think about your last interview or high-stakes meeting — were you displaying what is genuinely true, or reaching slightly beyond it?

Understated — I held back

Overstated — I reached too far

Vividness Gap

The bowerbird does not invent objects — it displays real ones, vividly. Mark whether your real strengths are currently visible to the people evaluating you.

Hidden — they don't see it

Visible — evidence is clear

Audience Reading

How carefully do you think your audience is reading your signals? Mark your honest estimate — then look back at step 2. If your audience is reading carefully, does your answer there still hold?

Surface impression only

Reading every detail closely

Read the Pattern

Look at your four marks together. Write one sentence naming what the pattern reveals: are you the peacock (vivid, genuine, costly), the stickleback (overclaiming), or the unbuilt bower (real capacity, invisible display)?

The One Move

Based on your map, name the single most important change to how you present yourself professionally — not a list, just one word or a short phrase. Below it, write one sentence explaining why that word, and what it would actually look like in your arena from step 1.

Why that word?

Discuss Share your one-word move with a partner — do they recognise it in how you come across, or does it surprise them?

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