By Penny Power – Business Author & Human-Centred Speaker
I read a line in Kate Morton’s The Clockmaker’s Daughter recently that stopped me mid-page.
“It’s amazing how far a little acknowledgement can go when one has become used to being ignored.”
I put the book down and sat with that sentence for a while.
I pondered, ‘have we all become ghosts? Are we all mostly ignored now?’
Because here’s what I think has happened to most of us, slowly, quietly, almost without our noticing.
We’ve replaced acknowledgement with metrics.
We’ve swapped being known for being noticed. And those are not the same thing. Not even close.
A like is not acknowledgement.
A comment, unless it’s real, unless it carries weight, is not acknowledgement either.
A follow is not a relationship.
A view is not a conversation.
And yet many have built their entire professional world around these signals.
Counting them. Measuring them. Feeling a small lift when they arrive and a quiet deflation when they don’t.
But here’s the question I want to sit with you today:
How well are you understood?
Not how many people saw your post. Not how many clicked. But how many people in your professional life could describe, accurately, specifically, what you’re brilliant at?
How many know what lights you up? Know what you have been through to get here?
How well is your unique expertise and attitude understood?
Not your job title. Not your LinkedIn headline. The actual, irreplaceable thing that only you bring into a room. Could the people around you name it? Could you name it?
How seen do you feel?
Not visible. Seen. There’s a world of difference. Visible means people know you exist. Seen means someone has taken the time, real time, not scrolling time, to understand who you are, what you carry, and why it matters.
I’ve spent 27 years watching what technology does to human connection. Many of you know I built the world’s first business social network in 1998 because I believed technology could bring people closer. And in many ways it has. But it has also given us a dangerous substitute, the illusion of being acknowledged, without the substance of being known.
A like takes half a second. A conversation takes courage.
It’s the conversation, the real one, the unhurried one, the one where someone says “tell me more about that”, that makes a person feel significant.
So this week, I’m not going to ask you to post more, engage more, or optimise your content. I’m going to ask you something simpler and harder.
Have a conversation with someone. A real one. Ask them what they’re working on that excites them. Listen to the answer. Then tell them what you see in them that they might have stopped seeing in themselves.
That is acknowledgement. And it will go further than you think.
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