The Dangerous Thing About “It Looks Fine”
You know what makes a visual presence hard to fix?
When nothing screams “it’s way past time for an update, buddy!”
The website works. The photos are professionally captured. Your team tells you everything looks awesome. All your ducks are in a row.
So you look at everything and think, “Yeah, this is fine.”
And that’s exactly where the problem can hide.
You’ve been looking at your own photos, website, speaker materials, social content and all the other places you show up for so long that you get comfortable with them.
You know where that photo was taken. You know what event you were speaking at. You know the story behind the client you were working with. You remember why you chose that outfit. You know what your business was focused on when the visual asset was created.
The person seeing it for the first time has none of this inside information. They only have what’s in front of them.
And that, folks, is a very different evaluation.
When I look at someone’s visual presence, I’m not starting with whether they look good in the image. That’s table stakes.
The photographs need to be technically solid and the person needs to look like themselves, or the photo never sees the light of day.
I’m looking for something else:
Does what they say about themselves TODAY match what they’re showing potential buyers TODAY?
Are the rooms they worked in last week, month and year represented, or am I looking at where they were five years ago? Do the people in the photographs resemble the people they serve now? Does the way they dress in their professional life today resemble what I’m seeing online?
And when I look at their branding photos:
Does the environment in which they’re captured actually feel connected to who they are and how they help people today?
You can have a beautifully lit portrait of yourself in a pristine, all-white studio and still leave someone with very little useful information about you.
Studio portraits and headshots absolutely have value. I use them myself. They’re especially useful when a designer cuts you out and combines the image with graphics, copy or other visual elements.
But when that’s almost all somebody sees of you, things can start to ring hollow.
You’re looking into the camera in one photo. Then you’re looking into the camera in another photo. Then there’s another one where you have your hands in your pockets.
Congratulations. You survived the session.
But where’s the work?
Where are the rooms you operate in? Where are the people you help? Where are the conversations, the process, the interaction, the movement, the moments that give somebody a better sense of what it might actually be like to hire you?
Of course, those images can come from real client work and events. But, what you might not realize is that they can also be thoughtfully recreated during a branding session, too. This is especially important for experts who have clients that won’t allow photos or video in their meetings or events.
The point is that the visuals need to give people more than proof that you clean up good in front of a camera.
This is why the compliments you get from people around you can be misleading.
“Oh, you look great in this one.”
Cool. We know.
That’s not the right answer to the right question.
A photograph doesn’t exist in isolation. It lives next to words, inside a website, underneath a headline, in a speaker kit, beside a social post or somewhere else where you’re trying to communicate something specific.
So the more useful question is: does this photograph give me what I need here?
That requires a different level of discernment than deciding whether you like how your eyes pop in the image.
And when you’ve spent years looking at your own material, that discernment gets muddy. You’re standing inside the forest trying to count the trees. Meanwhile, the person evaluating you has no emotional attachment to any of it.
They’re scanning, making connections and forming conclusions about your credibility, relevance, personality and fit before you have any opportunity to explain what they’re looking at.
And if what they see is just fine? Uh oh…that’s a problem.
Because the person making the decision isn’t necessarily choosing between you and somebody who looks like they slapped a visual presence together the night before. They may be choosing between several credible experts who all appear more than capable of solving their problem.
If you look like the just fine option, there’s nothing particularly compelling about moving you to the top of the pile.
But, if the other person makes them think, “Ohhh. Who is this?”
They click, lean in, keep reading, want to know more, and click on their calendar link first.
That’s the opportunity your visual presence needs to be ready for before you ever get a chance to speak on your own behalf.
It doesn’t need to tell your entire life story. It doesn’t need to prove every claim you’ve ever made. And it certainly doesn’t need to scream at people about how A-MAZE-ING you are.
It needs to give the right person enough useful visual evidence to keep going.
So if you’ve been looking at your website, your photos or the rest of your visual presence and thinking, “It looks fine,” spend another ten seconds with it.
This time, forget what you know about yourself, and look at what you’re actually giving someone else to see. That’s a much more interesting question.
If you want a quick way to start looking at your visual presence through that lens, take the 10-Second Scan Audit: