We’ve spent our lives managing everyone else’s experience. Then someone says “good job” and we crumble.
A woman can run a company, manage a household, raise children, survive a divorce, care for aging parents, and still respond to a compliment like she’s just realized there’s a chia seed stuck between her front teeth.
“You look amazing.”
“This presentation was brilliant.”
“You handled that so well.”
And out it comes:
“I’ve had this for years.”
“My team really did all the work.”
“I just got lucky.”
These aren’t untalented women with low self-esteem. These are some of the most competent women you might meet. We’re talking about the women who keep entire companies and families running—often at the same time.
So, what gives?
I see this in my practice every week. Every day, I see women who know exactly what they did well, and still can’t sit inside the spotlight long enough to be seen. They can handle the pressure and the responsibility. It’s the spotlight that makes them squirm.
We’re taught that achievement is acceptable, but not if it gets in the way of taking care of others or keeping the peace. I learned this at a pretty young age. I got good grades.
Adults called me mature and they liked that I was reliable. I quickly figured out what to do when they praised me. Smile. Say thank you. Change the topic. Don’t just sit there soaking it up looking too pleased with yourself. Be modest and move on.
It doesn’t stop there. Adult life keeps reinforcing these same lessons. In marriages, a woman’s ambition can still be treated as something to manage. In friend groups, confidence can quickly be treated as comparison or seen as a threat. In workplaces, women are celebrated right up until their accomplishments begin to change the power dynamic. And in the media, women still get sorted into familiar categories: humble and admirable, or confident and bitchy.
A while back, I gave a talk at a conference. A few audience members came up to tell me how much they liked it. It felt good to hear that they enjoyed it and yet, their praise made my stomach tighten, just a little. The knot that I felt in my stomach was familiar. I started to explain why it wasn’t a big deal. Then I stopped myself, feeling frustrated. What was I doing? They had just spent the last hour and 15 minutes listening to me and asking questions. Brushing off their comments would’ve made this moment about my discomfort.
What still floors me about this is how fast the reflex can kick in. Someone says that you’ve done a good job and before you even realize it, you’re feeling the impulse to make it go away. You hand out credit to someone else. Maybe you try to make a joke of it or act like it’s not a big deal. Do this long enough and it starts to feel normal—like you’re trying to project modesty. That’s a trap.
This is why the discomfort makes sense. We’ve spent our lives managing everyone else’s experience. We don’t know what to do when the experience is ours.
The usual language for this is “imposter syndrome,” but that term can let culture off the hook. Research by Franciska Krings and colleagues, who study behavior in organizations, shows that women face more social pushback when they violate modesty expectations. This means that what we call self-doubt might be something bigger—a woman accurately reading the room and trying to protect herself from social consequences.
This is more than avoiding an awkward moment at brunch or in the boardroom. Over time, it puts distance between women and their accomplishments. I have a client in a C-suite role who lowers her voice when explaining what she does for work. Another, a surgeon, fights hard for everyone else and can barely find her voice when the conversation turns to herself. Do that often enough and you start to feel unseen.
Changing this is going to be harder than learning to simply say thank you when you get a compliment. It starts with catching yourself in the act. Notice that urge to wave it away and stop the joke before you make it. Younger women are learning from us and from what we do with praise. And many of us are looking to them, hoping for signs that things might be changing.
We can look at Gen Z and feel optimistic. Younger women are posting about the promotion, announcing the launch, and sharing the byline. They’re being clear about what they’re doing, and I love that. It’s tempting to think we’ve helped them become bolder. But I’m not fully convinced the generational story is quite that tidy.
Not yet.
Yes, younger women may be better at talking about success without the familiar whisper. And maybe that’s progress. But it’s also brought a new kind of pressure. The old rule was “stay small.” The new rule is “look publicly confident, and make it look easy.” The modesty code didn’t disappear; instead it’s showing up differently.
The question isn’t whether younger women need us to teach them how to own their accomplishments. It’s whether those pressures have really changed. For one generation, the pressure was to stay under the radar. For the next, it was to speak up, post it, and make it look easy. Two different demands. Both still ask women to perform.
The legacy I want for younger women isn’t just another script to follow. It’s the chance to do something well and own it.
