Playing My Position

Some stages find you before you find yourself

KP Bizdom: You don’t have to have arrived to have something worth saying. Showing up is its own kind of proof.

A client stopped me mid-conversation last week with something I wasn’t expecting.

“I’m afraid if they don’t need me, I don’t matter.”

I didn’t respond right away. Not because I didn’t know what to say- I’ve seen this pattern enough times to recognize it immediately- but because I’ve said that sentence to myself, in different words, for most of my career. Sitting across from someone who articulated it so plainly made me realize how long I’d been carrying it quietly.

Here’s what that fear actually does: it turns you into a utility- something people depend on so completely that you can never leave, never grow past your current function, never become anything other than what you currently provide. I’ve written about this before- the difference between being a utility and being a brilliant light.

A utility is valuable because everything stops without it. A brilliant light is valuable because it helps people see what they couldn’t see before, and the impact continues even after the light leaves the room. The VP at an aerospace company I worked with who hoarded expertise, never documented anything, and made himself the answer to every question- he stayed stuck at the same level for years. The one who transferred knowledge relentlessly, made herself increasingly unnecessary for day-to-day operations- she was promoted, was able to add 5 humans to her team, and thrived. Companies that I work with eventually figure out who’s building versus protecting; but sometimes it takes longer than it should.

What I didn’t share the first time I wrote about this issue, what I’m still in the middle of figuring out is this: understanding the framework doesn’t mean you escape the fear.

I have been surrounded- genuinely surrounded- by some of the most extraordinary people I have ever encountered. For much of that time, proximity to their brilliance felt like evidence that mine was ordinary. My tribe is STACKED, and I used to have a ready-made answer whenever anyone asked how we all found each other; something self-deprecating that kept me small in the telling because I genuinely couldn't claim the real answer yet.

So I did what a lot of us do- those of us who learned to earn the room before we took up space in it- I hid my wins while keeping my failures in full view.

I stayed quiet. I played my position. I helped everyone around me see their genius- clients, students, founders three years into building something real- and I was genuinely outstanding at it. What I was not good at was doing it for myself.

That habit didn’t come from nowhere. James Baldwin understood what a lot of us feel but can’t always name: that certain people are taught to doubt themselves not by accident, but by design. Societal systems have been built to manage who gets to be seen as capable, as credible, as worth listening to…the hiding habit feels personal, but it isn’t only personal.

That’s worth sitting with for a moment…

The self-doubt that looks like humility, the shrinking that looks like deference, the compulsive need to be needed that looks like dedication- these aren’t individual character flaws. They’re logical responses to environments that spent a long time making certain people feel like guests in rooms they actually built. AND…if you’ve spent your whole career as the first, the only, or the exception, you know exactly what I mean, no notes.

The shift for me started about eight to ten years ago…and it happened slowly, the way real change usually happens- not from a single revelation, but from a quiet accumulation of evidence that the story I was telling myself wasn’t quite true. My therapist had something to do with it (and how many times I tell her I wish we met sooner would fill a football/futbol stadium). Several people in my life who refused to let me brush off my own brilliance had a lot to do with it.

Toni Morrison wrote that the function of freedom is to free someone else- and I’ve come to understand that you can’t free anyone from a doubt you’re still living inside yourself.

I’m preparing for my first professional speaking engagement outside of academia; a fireside chat on March 5th hosted by MM LaFleur, on the topic of “Owning What You’ve Already Built.” No classroom credential, no institutional affiliation holding the door open; just me, saying something I think matters, to a room of people who chose to show up for it. The list is nearly full (it’s free, but space is limited- if you want to join us, now is the time).

Preparing for it has forced me to reckon, more honestly than usual, with how long it took to get here- not because of skill, but because of the lies I believed about myself. By the way, outside encouragement cannot create the architecture for you to hold the truths once the internal lie has been rooted.

Here’s the irony that is almost too accurate: this is happening at a moment when everyone, it seems, has something important to say. Low barriers to entry into expertise have created something genuinely complicated; more access for people who were always brilliant but never credentialed, which is real and necessary, and also an avalanche of noise that makes it harder to trust your own signal.

When someone with eighteen months of experience and a large following occupies the same category as someone with 10+ years of results, the metric shifts from what you’ve done to how well you can perform having done it. That’s disorienting if you were raised to let the work speak for itself. The ones who built the most are often the quietest. That’s a problem worth returning to (and I will, in a future article).

What I keep noticing in the students I’ve worked with for over a decade is that newer generations don’t seem to have this problem in the same way. I find that they:

• Ask for what they want without building a lengthy justification for why they deserve it first

• Hold limits with a matter-of-factness that took most of us decades to find

• Don’t shrink to make others comfortable

I don’t think this makes them difficult or entitled (at all). I think they looked at the rules we played by, saw how well those rules worked for us, and decided not to bother. The generations coming up behind us are doing it with more self-possession- like the permission we spent decades waiting for was never required in the first place- and I find that genuinely moving. My goal, working alongside, teaching and mentoring them, is to make sure they see themselves life-size sooner than I ever did- before the world has a chance to talk them out of it.

The unlearning is slow, and unfortunately, it doesn’t dissolve because you understand it intellectually. It dissolves with practice, with people around you who refuse to let you get away with the self-diminishment, with saying “Yes” to the fireside chat even when part of you is still building the case for why you’re not quite ready.

I’m still in that process- not done, not arrived- but I will walk into that room on March 5th, and continue to try new things that terrify me.

Here’s to freedom in a framework.

Kristin-Marie

I’m honored to be speaking at an event on March 5th on the topic of “Owning What You’ve Already Built,” gracious hosted by M.M. LaFleur. Space is very limited so make sure you register (free) before they close the guest list.