What If Playing Yourself Down Is Actually One Of The Reasons You Became Successful?
There is a contradiction hiding inside the careers of many accomplished women. Some of the behaviours we now describe as “playing small” may once have been precisely the behaviours that allowed them to advance. Keeping your head down, working twice as hard, carefully choosing when to challenge authority and learning how to read a room were not necessarily signs of low confidence. Sometimes they were highly developed strategies for navigating power.
For Black and women of colour, that distinction matters.
Long before terms such as code-switching, emotional labour and stereotype threat entered mainstream leadership conversations, generations of women were teaching their daughters how to survive environments in which intelligence did not necessarily guarantee recognition and visibility did not necessarily guarantee safety. “Don't show off.” “Don't give them ammunition.” “You will have to work twice as hard.” “Remember where you came from.”
These were not simply negative beliefs handed from one generation to another. They often contained the accumulated intelligence of women who understood that the consequences of being considered too ambitious, too outspoken or too confident were not distributed equally.
That changes the question. Instead of asking why an accomplished woman continues to make herself smaller, perhaps we should ask when she first discovered that making herself smaller worked.
When Adaptation Becomes Part Of Your Identity
Professor Cheryl Woods-Giscombé's influential research into the Superwoman Schema offers an important way of understanding this.
Her work with African American women identified cultural expectations around projecting strength, suppressing vulnerability, succeeding despite inadequate resources and assuming responsibility for others. These behaviours can contain considerable resilience, but research has also associated aspects of the schema with stress, poorer sleep, depressive symptoms and other wellbeing consequences.
The paradox is difficult to ignore. The woman everybody describes as extraordinarily strong may be paying a considerable private price for maintaining the very identity everybody admires.
Organisational research takes us further. Professor Courtney McCluney and colleagues have examined racial code-switching among Black professionals and the ways people may adjust speech, appearance and behaviour to increase acceptance within predominantly white environments. Professor Adia Harvey Wingfield's scholarship on racialised emotional labour similarly demonstrates that professional life can require more than simply performing the job. Some employees must simultaneously manage how their authority, emotions and behaviour will be interpreted through race and gender.
Imagine carrying that calculation for twenty or thirty years.
Eventually you may become exceptionally good at it. You know when a recommendation needs softening, when challenging a decision will be interpreted as leadership and when exactly the same challenge could be interpreted as aggression. You recognise when expertise will be welcomed and when displaying too much of it might destabilise an existing hierarchy. None of this necessarily feels like “dumbing yourself down” because it has become part of how you successfully operate.
That is why telling senior women simply to “be more confident” misses the point. The issue may not be confidence at all. It may be that a sophisticated adaptation has become so habitual that the woman no longer distinguishes between strategically reading the room and permanently reducing herself to fit inside it.
The same pattern can travel home with us.
A woman can hold significant authority professionally while becoming more cautious about displaying that authority around family, friends or an intimate partner. Success changes things. Education can change language and expectations; money can increase choice; leadership can strengthen boundaries; exposure to different worlds can alter what someone believes is possible. Yet those changes can also create anxiety about belonging. The question becomes not merely “Who am I becoming?” but “Will the people who knew the earlier version of me still recognise and accept the woman I am becoming?”
This is where something resembling a belonging tax can emerge. Maintaining connection may involve quietly demonstrating that success has not made you think you are better than anyone else. There is nothing inherently wrong with humility, cultural loyalty or sensitivity to other people's circumstances. The difficulty begins when maintaining belonging requires the continual concealment of achievement, intelligence, financial success, ambition or authority.
That is not humility. It is a negotiation and some women have been negotiating for so long that they no longer recognise the price.
What Got You Here May Not Be What Takes You Forward
There is an organisational consequence too. Companies frequently say they want diversity because different experiences produce different perspectives. Yet difference becomes much harder to celebrate when it challenges established thinking. It is relatively easy to welcome diversity when it appears in recruitment figures, photographs and leadership statements. The real test comes when the person recruited because of her different perspective uses that perspective to disagree with the prevailing view.
This creates one of the more uncomfortable contradictions inside modern inclusion. An organisation can become visibly diverse while remaining intellectually homogeneous because the people who are different gradually learn which differences are rewarded and which should be moderated.
In that environment, “bring your whole self to work” becomes an unusually demanding invitation. Before asking someone to bring her whole self into the workplace, perhaps leaders should ask whether their culture has demonstrated that it can tolerate that whole person when she questions the strategy, challenges established authority or refuses to translate her intelligence into something more comfortable.
Seniority does not automatically remove this calculation. In some cases, greater authority may intensify it because greater visibility brings greater scrutiny. A woman who has spent decades learning how institutions respond to race, gender and authority does not suddenly forget those lessons when somebody gives her an executive title. She may simply become considerably more sophisticated at applying them.
This is why the next stage of leadership for accomplished women may have very little to do with finding confidence. It may instead require examining the strategies that produced their success and deciding which ones have reached their expiry date.
Some of the lessons inherited from mothers, grandmothers and communities still contain enormous wisdom. Reading the room matters. Emotional intelligence matters. Knowing when to speak and when to listen matters. Humility matters. Understanding power matters.
But none of those things require a woman to pretend she knows less than she does or to continually make her ambition, authority or intelligence easier for other people to tolerate.
Perhaps the question is not whether you have been playing yourself down it is whether you have become so accomplished at adaptation that you can no longer see where the adaptation ends and you begin. That is a much harder leadership conversation.
Once you recognise the difference, the responsibility does not sit entirely with you. Families may have to become comfortable with the person success has allowed you to become. Partners may have to renegotiate assumptions about power and ambition. Organisations may have to discover whether they genuinely value difference or merely value difference that behaves familiarly.
Many high functioning women may have to decide whether the survival intelligence that helped you reach this stage of your life still deserves to determine what happens next. So rather than asking women in our LeadershipTalk community whether they need to become more confident, I want to leave you with something more difficult.
"What if the behaviour that helped you become successful is now the very behaviour preventing people from experiencing the full extent of your leadership and would you recognise it if it were?"
Share your perspective. This is not simply a conversation about confidence. It is a conversation about culture, belonging, power and the hidden price some women have paid for learning how to succeed.
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