Hidden Brilliance

by Katie Rasoul

  At work, I always felt torn between not concerning myself with what others thought and needing approval from someone important to ensure that I was on track. I learned that I am not very good at taking directions from other people, since I like to make the plans and execute them autonomously. Yet, when I couldn’t tell if it was “good enough,” I urgently needed someone’s approval as a boundary test. The Imposter Syndrome ran deep within me, so seeking others’ input was also a way to see if my cover was blown yet.

  As I was selected for more leadership development programs, special groups for high-potentials, and promotions, the stakes got higher. I was excited and challenged by these experiences, yet fully aware that as my stock climbed, there was more at stake if it fell. If I hadn’t been found out yet that I wasn’t the leader everyone thought I was, then my own psyche had to up the ante to keep the ruse going. It felt like a bad Ponzi scheme, a total house of cards. I would start to feel the pressure, then have some success at work and go back to running my own ship until I had to check in at the scene of the crime to see if I’d been caught yet.

  As my career grew, I found myself on the verge of cracking into tears more and more. I avoided the question of “How are you?” with anyone who was actually really listening for the answer, and tried to spit out an “I’m great! How are you?” deflection as quickly as possible to keep my inner monologue from spinning out of control and pushing tears out of my tear ducts without my control. I always chalked it up to being a sensitive person who cried easily at nearly everything, including sappy TV commercials. It seemed normal for me. It had always been this way as long as I could remember, since the first time I burst into tears in front of my choir director. Luckily for me with my inability to hold my shit together, I was the Human Resources person and one ever really asks how we are doing.

  On paper, I had made all of the right moves. I had achieved everything that I set out to do, and I was supported and rewarded appropriately for it. And yet, somehow, it was just not as fulfilling as I knew it could be. I left the office most days feeling misunderstood and drained: misunderstood because I rarely found connection with others who shared my same mindset, work philosophies, and values, and drained because I worked so hard for what felt like small returns on an intrinsic investment. I had crafted the “right” career, so what was my problem? Why couldn’t I feel more grateful for what I had? Why didn’t I feel more deeply proud of the work I was doing? I felt as if I was doing good work but nothing that changed lives or that I could feel the effects of deep in my bones.

  The work evolved, and I found myself further and further away from my center. I began to feel the pit in my stomach grow on Sundays in anticipation of the week ahead that was sure to be filled with big effort and no intrinsic rewards. I needed long stints out running by myself with just my thoughts and my headphones to counteract the stress. What I didn’t realize until later is that these were all symptoms of feeling more and more out of alignment with who I was and the work that I was meant to be doing. It began to affect my health, my relationships, and my previously sunny disposition.

  The problem with achievement is that it always feels as if you will be happy or fulfilled or fill-in-the-blank with whatever you want to feel once you get to that next milestone, if only you could just achieve that next marker. When you get there, you realize that you are excited for a little while, but it fades quickly and you regress to your normal state of fulfillment. You are left wondering why the high didn’t last longer or feel stronger. When you live this way on repeat, you convince yourself that this is simply the amount of joy that you are able to feel. It resembles the experience of Sisyphus, destined to push the stone up the hill only to have it roll back down again once he reached the summit, trapped in a cycle of fruitless labor.

  Every time in my career that I have started to feel out of alignment, I have instinctively relied on my gut to help guide me to the next right move. In those moments when I didn’t know what I was doing, I relied on my intuition in lieu of logical answers. Every time my situation became so dire that I needed to make a turning-point decision, I sat quietly with my thoughts for days, weeks, or even months until I simply knew my next move. I have never regretted an iota of my turning-point decisions. The lesson I learned as the high-achieving introvert: I have the answers that are right for me, no one else.

  Chapter 5: The Board Room (Feeling Small)

  “Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.”

  – Marianne Williamson

  The board room has been training grounds for feeling small in my world, because I’m usually the youngest person, the only woman, and most likely the shortest person in the room. In my very first board room meeting, I sat down in the giant chairs that are inevitably set to the perfect height for a six-foot three-inches businessman, scooted back in the seat, and found my feet dangling off the front of the chair, unable to touch the ground. This made me feel like a child, so I pulled out whatever rocket ship engineering skills I had to casually pull on random levers in an effort to adjust the chair lower, so my feet weren’t dangling. Now, in a classic move of overcompensation, my chair sank quickly to the lowest setting and, voila, my feet could now touch the ground, except now I was sitting with the table up to my chest. I thought to myself, “It would have been better to have left the chair. No one could see my legs, and now I look like a lost child and I feel just as small.” Since I don’t have a PhD in chair science, I didn’t know how to adjust it back up, so I left the chair as it was while the other senior leaders entered the room wondering who brought the child to work today. I did my best to sit up tall and fill the extra space with emphatic hand gestures.

  At five feet three inches, I have often had people comment about my short stature or ask to speak to the “real” manager, inevitably because I looked too small, too young, or too female to be running the place. My tall friends find my shoulder to be the perfect resting height for their elbow, which I don’t mind because I know it can be just as hard to be tall as it is small.

  But how big we are on the outside does not necessarily correlate with how big we feel on the inside. Although people’s explicit comments bring the idea of size to the forefront sometimes, “feeling” small is a different thing entirely. It is as if you realize that you are too exposed for your liking and you want to retreat back to where it is safe. You feel the need to fold inward, to take up less space, or to be less conspicuous. You want to ignore your needs, to allow someone else’s to grow (as if they couldn’t both grow together). Feeling small is a byproduct of shame, the feeling that you don’t deserve something or aren’t good enough to experience something as grand as what you had imagined.

  The board room is not the only place I have felt as small as Alice after drinking the shrinking potion, or made myself smaller for the comfort of other people. I remember a time when I had a big speaking engagement coming up and a prominent community member asked, “How did you get THAT gig?” Part of me said in my head, “By being my awesome goddam self,” but the rest of me shut down, lamenting that I was so easily found out as a fraud. There was also a time when a no-bullshit advisor of mine told me two meetings in a row what I was clearly doing wrong. I was mortified that I didn’t get the lesson and sufficiently act on her advice the first time. Can I crawl into my shell now, please?

  And there in that collection of moments, I find a theme: people who seem larger than me make me feel small. And of course, these are all stories I tell myself about other people to deem them as “larger” than me in the first place. Perhaps they are older, more experienced, taller, or more famous than I am. They may hold positions of authority, have accomplished something on my goal list, or are just plain inspiring in their grace and approach to life. So often the people who made me feel small were the people I revered enough to allow them the space to do so.

  There are definitely those people out there who have a knack for
saying things with the purpose of belittling others. This is not what I am describing. Rather, people who are perfectly well-meaning humans who have no idea they just pushed a giant button are the ones who have this effect on me. And it is my button, not theirs. I am the one choosing to have a triggered reaction to feel small in that moment.

  Being an introvert, sometimes it is simply in my nature to sit back and take in the conversation in meetings rather than be the dominant speaker. I had to learn to be okay with that and not allow that to contribute to feeling small in a meeting when I wasn’t “holding my own” in the conversation. If I viewed participation only as speaking, then yes, I was behind. But if I viewed participation as active listening, then I won a gold medal. And in reality, if quality participation has both speaking and active listening, I could strike that balance appropriately. It was in meetings where clearly too much value was placed on speaking over listening that my bullshit meter would go berserk and I couldn’t wait to leave. I hated just trying to get a word in edgewise in order to get a talking point up on the board.

  Whenever I felt small, my demeanor and behavior would totally change. I would become stiff, physically clench up, and retreat into myself. I would speak less and speak only when it was painfully calculated. I felt uncomfortably exposed, as if I was on display. I noticed a difference, and I’m sure that perceptive people around me noticed, too. I didn’t like who I became when I allowed myself to be small. Realizing that acting small was not true to myself, and living larger was actually more in my comfort zone, was a revelation. This meant two things: that I needed to allow myself the permission to be a listener instead of a talker without judging myself, and that I did not need to assume that I was the younger, smaller, or lesser of the parties in the room. I was an equal player.

  So, what would it take to stop myself from shrinking around larger people? It meant being aware of what I was doing in the moment and making a conscious choice to not make myself smaller. It felt odd at first and a little unnatural to be taking up more space than my normal tendency. Over time, with practice, I recognized the root of my reaction in that moment. Sometimes it meant that the other person just needed to feel big, so I released the burden on myself to think that it was me who needed to change. Sometimes, when well-meaning advice or feedback came from someone I really admired, I reframed the situation to see it from a peer-to-peer relationship instead of a bigger-smaller relationship.

  I still feel a little small in any board room, with the big chairs and the coasters that are begging me not to leave a water stain from my juice box on the table. And that is okay. At least I walk in, laugh a little, tell everyone out loud that the coasters make me feel regal, and sit comfortably at the head. I adjust my chair to wherever I damn well please and spread my shit out. Really, I am only out to convince myself.

  Chapter 6: The Business

  “Goodness consists not in the outward things we do, but in the inward thing we are.” – E.H. Chapin

  The time finally came for me to start my own business. Had you asked me even three years earlier if I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I would have just laughed thinking, “yeah, right!” I should have been able to see the signs, though, that it was a good career match for me. I am very independent and autonomous, don’t really like to take direction from other people, and tend to take on extreme ownership for my responsibilities. I like to be a creator, not a doer of others’ ideas.

  I knew starting a business would be “hard” because everyone says it is, but I had a misunderstanding that it would be this hard. I (mistakenly) thought I was better equipped than most. I had run business units before, I had a Master’s Degree in Business Administration, and I was responsible for much larger budgets and Profit and Loss statements in my past experiences. This should be no problem, right? It turns out that despite knowing how to run a business, I was totally unprepared for my inner gremlins to find the air they needed to unravel me.

  In general, I have always felt comfortable in my own skin, with a relatively solid feeling of confidence and contentment about myself and what I bring to the table. I haven’t spent much time worrying about what other people think or adjusting my position when they don’t agree. I have always been extremely aware of my effect on others but have never felt the need to change who I am for anyone else. I have always been a bit of a quirk, someone who likes to hide rubber chickens in peoples’ bags or who has to shop for clothes all over because no one place could supply my eclectic interests.

  Running a business is hard – not because of the business acumen required to run sound operations, but because of the inner critics, the self-doubt, and the fear that come with the territory of being vulnerable and seeing if other people place value on what you are selling. It is challenging because of the double-guessing that comes with being the sole decision maker on choices that actually affect whether or not you are going to make any money at all, some money, or live up to your potential. And here I was, being crushed by the rising expectations of greatness because I didn’t have anyone holding me back anymore. The weight of my own high expectations had never felt so heavy.

  When I had leaders to report to, I began to unknowingly rely on their feedback, not for the feeling of pride or direction on what to do, but as an indicator of whether my work was good enough (i.e., outstanding enough that no additional work should be put into it). My 80% effort would have been more than enough in almost every instance, but I could only go “all in.” My brain would have continued to expend energy to think about ways to improve something until my boss said, “Wow, this is amazing! Nice work!” That feedback signaled to my brain that it was good enough for the audience, so I could be okay with it too. When I started my business as a solo-preneur, there was suddenly a huge void in my feedback loop that I hadn’t even known was there. I needed other people’s approval so that I could tell myself I had done enough, and when that source of external feedback was gone, I had no one there to stop me when it was time.

  The standard of excellence that I held had always pointed me in the right direction (well, in a direction, right or not). Now, I felt like the compass I had relied on for my whole life was broken, and I was floating out into the abyss like a ship lost at sea. Once I realized that perhaps my expectations of what I “should” be doing were out of line, I really struggled to know what was true, which way was up, and what new boundaries I should draw. I had always found solace in the idea that my intuition knew what to do and the answer would come to me. I am rarely indecisive, and all of the sudden I was unable to see what was true and what my obvious next step should be. It felt like losing one of my most important senses.

  The fire and brimstone of starting a business for me was not anything to do with business. It was entirely internal and emotional. Much like people would tell me that parenting is “hard” (it is really flippin’ hard), most of us don’t understand what exactly makes it hard until we experience it. It is hard because all of the rules by which you had lived your life are suddenly thrown out the window. It is disorienting, shakes your confidence, and stunts your ability to self-assess. Somehow, this tiny baby of a business (much like an actual baby) found its way to the deepest dark spots in my brain to give me the crucible moment I needed to flourish.

  Opening a business for myself was one of the first moments that really forced a change in my thinking and my behavior. In my childhood, there wasn’t much to speak of as far as landmark moments that changed my life. And without those, my perspective on life didn’t change. It really snuck up on me, too, maybe because the business logistics were so easy to set up or perhaps because it felt like the right thing. In my first few months of business, I felt great and confident that I was going to ride the wave as far as it took me. I assumed things wouldn’t always be that easy, so I was on the lookout for some sort of business snafu like an IRS audit or a website debacle. Then, BAM! I was blindsided by the sneak attack that my head and my heart were plotting against me.

  In true high-achiever fashion and
staying in line with the unrealistic expectations I tend to place on myself, I had it figured out that I would have my business comfortably on track in about three months. Maybe six. Definitely by the end of the first year. At the end of the first year, I would measure my “success” and then figure out next steps. This is where the rest of the reasonable people in the world say, “That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works!” There are two problems with this assumption. First, the timeframe. Three months is definitely an outrageous expectation to build a business, and a year is barely reasonable to assume traction. Second, how you actually define success drastically adjusts whether or not you can call yourself successful at the end of any time period. As we will discuss later, my definition of success was way out of line with what I really wanted it to be. This is a place where “shoulds” and unrealistic expectations ran wild. What I SHOULD have done is checked my attitude and recognized that I was going after the completely wrong definition of success.

  My business model is based on a combination of professional coaching, consulting, public speaking, and facilitating workshops. I had never been in a “sales” position before, so this was the first time that I had to figure out how to sell my business, which, as a startup, was basically selling me. I priced too low, because I was in a place of desperation and knew that the stakes were high. It started to mess with my head that now my business was deeply personal and not enough people saw the value to buy in. It became a direct reflection of my own value and the value of my work. I doubted all that I had done to get to where I was. Did I make the wrong career moves? Was it that I had fewer years of experience than most other consultants? Or was it just me? I settled on the idea that I just wasn’t enough. My inner critics came for a visit, or rather, a lengthy camping trip with an overstayed welcome.