Polite will not get you paid

I'll bark for my kids in any room. So why do I go quiet the moment I have to describe my own work?

You leave the interview sure it landed.

The conversation was sharp. They laughed in the right places. You walked to the car already half-rehearsing the resignation letter for your current role. You're already planning how to announce your promotion.

And then nothing. Just the kind of silence that makes you question your own memory of the room.

Recently it happend to me twice. Two conversations I was sure were strong. Both went quiet. I did what I always do — I reran the tape at midnight, hunting for the line I shouldn't have said, half-convinced I'd imagined the whole thing.

Here's what I couldn't sit with. I am a mother. I have a loud bark for my children. I'll walk into an exam room and push back on a rushed diagnosis without blinking. I'll sit in the principal's office and hold the line all day. I have never once described what my child deserves in a small voice.

But put me at a conference table describing my own work, and sometimes I can barely make a sound.

I had a conversation with a recruiter recently who described the bar out loud. She said they want someone who can say, plainly, that they led the relationship. Not supported it. Not helped manage it. Led it.

I heard myself in the gap.

I went back to the sentences I'd been saying in those rooms. I supported. I assisted. I helped manage. I worked with the team that… I had been telling room after room that I was someone who was in the room when good work happened. Not someone good work happened because of.

What I know now

Most of us were taught that the polite way to describe what we did is to make it sound smaller than it was. By "us," I mean women — especially women trained to be useful. And especially Black women trained to be useful and unthreatening.

No one told us the polite version is also the disqualifying version.

It's the same muscle I use for my kids. The same bark. I've just never aimed it at my own corner. We call it advocacy when it's for someone else. Doing it for yourself is allowed too.

You're allowed to speak up for the person you've been all along. You.

I'm telling you this as someone still in the middle of it. Some days the loud voice still won't come for me the way it comes for them. But I'm learning to make the sound anyway.

The reframe isn't bragging. It's accuracy.

If you ran the relationship, say so. If you owned the outcome, say so. Not in a louder voice. In a more accurate one.

For me it came down to one sentence:

I am more than just a contributor to the team. I led the team.

Same role. Same work. But now I am confidently telling the truth.

If you're sitting in a silence right now, ask yourself one thing: when I described what I did, did I describe it the way I'd describe my own child? Or did I shrink it?

It's time to do more than bark. It's time to be honest about your own size.

Before you go

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