You’re sitting in a meeting with other senior leaders when the conversation turns to university. Someone mentions their MBA, someone else recalls their graduate training programme, and you quietly hope nobody asks about your route into the room.
You didn’t go to university. You worked your way up, learned as you went and gradually took on more responsibility. You have years of experience to draw on, but somehow, in this conversation, all you can think about is the qualification you haven’t got.
Or perhaps you did go to university, but never had a grand plan to become a leader. Someone spotted your potential, encouraged you to apply and gave you an opportunity. When people ask about your career, you say you “just fell into it”, as though the years of work since then were also some sort of administrative accident.
If either sounds familiar, you’re not alone. I’ve coached senior leaders who feel quietly embarrassed about precisely these things. They’re doing demanding jobs, making difficult decisions and supporting other people’s development, while worrying that their own route into leadership doesn’t quite count.
Yet the parts they keep quiet about could be the very things an aspiring leader needs to hear. Someone who hasn’t been to university might see a future they’d ruled out. Someone without a carefully mapped-out career plan might realise they don’t need to have every step worked out before taking the next one.
Sometimes we’re so focused on the part of our story we think weakens our credibility that we overlook what it demonstrates, or what it could offer someone else.
I recently realised I’d been doing something similar, although my version involves a book with rather more sauce in it than you would normally find on a corporate reading list.
The book I tended to keep quiet about
Before I wrote The Confidence Breakthrough, I wrote Blokes, Beers & Burritos, a funny self-help novel drawing on my backpacking experiences and the lessons I learned along the way.
I wanted to reach twenty-something women, and at that time, with Fifty Shades of Grey apparently taking over the nation’s bedside tables, I thought a bit of smut might encourage them to pick up what was ultimately a self-help book. Come for the shenanigans, stay for the self-discovery.
It isn’t something I’ve generally shouted about to my corporate clients. There’s a certain hesitation involved in telling a roomful of professionals that, alongside the workshop materials, you can offer them a book called Blokes, Beers & Burritos.
But recently, I was re-reading a guest article I’d written for Portobello Book Blog about how my backpacking experiences helped shape The Confidence Breakthrough.
It struck me that I was comfortable sharing that connection with strangers online, yet felt embarrassed mentioning it to professionals in a workshop.
What gets lost in the editing?
I assumed business people wouldn’t want to hear about my inappropriate liaisons with men or my overindulgence in alcohol and junk food. Probably fair to say those aren’t usually the first things people ask about when commissioning an assertiveness workshop or a leadership programme.
And there are perfectly sensible reasons to keep some details to yourself. Nobody needs a complete account of your life – raunchy or otherwise – before you’ve reached the second slide.
But I’d allowed my embarrassment about the surface stories to obscure the value of what I learned through them.
I went travelling to escape my problems, only to discover that the one person I couldn’t get away from was me. Learning to recognise and change the patterns driving my behaviour set me on the path to overcoming my fear of public speaking and, eventually, helping other people make changes of their own.
That’s the connection between Blokes, Beers & Burritos and the work I do today. I don’t need to share the intimate details to explain it, but keeping quiet about the book meant leaving out the learning as well as the liaisons.
It made me wonder how often we overlook the value of our experience because we’re embarrassed about some part of it.
- “That’s not something I want my colleagues knowing about me.”
- “They won’t take me seriously if they know how I got here.”
- “I’d rather keep that bit to myself.”
Those thoughts can feel like sensible protection for our professional image, but they can also stop us recognising – and sharing – the learning, skills and perspective those experiences have given us.
When we edit out relevant parts of our story, other people are left with an incomplete picture of what we bring and we can end up waiting for people to recognise value we haven’t actually shown them.
A useful way to spot the pattern
One way I explore patterns in my work is through The Success Cycle: Think → Feel → Do → Get.
Consider a leader who describes their career as “just falling into it”:
- Think: “I didn’t deliberately work towards this, so my success doesn’t count in quite the same way.”
- Feel: Uncomfortable taking credit or talking about their achievements.
- Do: Emphasise the opportunities they were given while brushing past what they did with them.
- Get: Other people hear about the lucky breaks, but very little about the skill, judgement and persistence involved.
If someone then attributes their progress to luck, it can reinforce the original assumption: “They don’t think I’ve earned my place here.”
Of course, people can explain their experience clearly and still have it dismissed. Workplace culture and other people’s assumptions matter too, but it’s worth noticing where our own interpretation might also be limiting the picture.
Being given an opportunity and earning your place aren’t mutually exclusive. Someone may have opened a door, but that doesn’t account for everything you did after walking through it.
A useful question is:
“Am I responding to something someone has actually said, or am I imagining their reaction based on my own judgement of myself?”
The part you’re judging yourself for could be the very thing that helps someone else on their way up. You don’t have to turn your career into an inspirational speech, but being open about an unconventional route may help someone else take their own potential seriously.
One thing to try this week
Notice one thing you routinely play down or leave out when describing your experience, then ask yourself:
“Is this irrelevant, or am I uncomfortable with how it might be received?”
You don’t owe anyone personal information you’d prefer to keep private. But if there’s relevant experience or learning you want others to understand, practise explaining that connection in one straightforward sentence.
Instead of “I just fell into leadership”, you might say:
“I hadn’t planned to become a leader, but someone recognised my potential, and I’ve since built my experience through leading teams, handling difficult situations and learning along the way.”
For me, it might be:
“The experiences behind my first book helped me understand the patterns driving my own behaviour, and that learning set me on the path to the work I do today.”
I can say that without giving anyone a dramatic blow-by-blow account of the sauciness within the pages.
And since I started heeding my own advice and mentioning Blokes, Beers & Burritos alongside The Confidence Breakthrough in my workshops, the interest in the former has been considerably more enthusiastic than I expected. 😂
It turns out I may have misjudged my audience.
You can find both books here: