232. Reclaiming Your Voice After Spending Years Minimizing It
- 10 hours ago
- 15 min read
Years of minimizing our voice cost us visibility, credit, and influence we've actually earned. By separating bragging from accurate visibility, replacing permission-seeking with assertion, and trading vague pushback for precise, solution-oriented disagreement, we learn to be heard without becoming someone else. This is a practice, not a single fix, and every time we speak with the size a moment deserves, we close the gap between what we know and what gets seen.
Honest, respectful disagreement, handled well, does something that might seem a little counterintuitive—it builds trust rather than damaging it.
Are you replaying meetings in your head, wishing you'd spoken up when someone else voiced the idea you had ten minutes earlier? Are you more comfortable praising a colleague's work than describing your own accomplishments, even when the facts are the same? Are you tacking words like "just" or "I think" or "does that make sense?" onto the end of clear, well-reasoned points?
You'll learn that visibility isn't bragging—it's giving decision-makers the accurate information they need to advocate for you, and that reframing self-promotion as fact-sharing rather than ego can make it feel less uncomfortable.
WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER
Why speaking with confidence and clarity matters more than waiting for false certainty
3 practical tips to project more authority through your voice
Why avoiding disagreement doesn't preserve harmony
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Stop Sabotaging Your Success podcast, episode two hundred and thirty-two. I'm your host, Cindy Esliger. This is the podcast focusing on what we can do today to take control of our careers and overcome the inevitable barriers to success that we encounter along the way.
Maybe this sounds uncomfortably familiar. It's the middle of the night and you're staring at the ceiling. You're replaying, for the fourth time, a meeting that ended hours ago, not because anything went wrong. It's not like anyone yelled at you. You didn't get a bad performance review. You didn't get fired. They didn't even say anything unkind.
You're replaying it because somewhere about ten minutes into the meeting, you had an idea, and it was a good one. The one that actually would have solved the problem everyone was circling. But you didn't say it to the group. You said half of it quietly to the person next to you. And then someone else—someone who finds it much easier to speak up, who tends to talk a little louder, a little faster, and with a little more certainty—said basically the same thing that you were thinking a few minutes later. In that moment, you told yourself it was fine. It wasn't a big deal. You know you should have said something, but you'll be ready to say something next time.
In this episode, we're going to delve into what happens when you've spent years—maybe your whole career—quietly making yourself smaller, softening your language, waiting to be asked for your thoughts instead of offering your unsolicited opinion. Letting someone else's confident wrong answer stand instead of correcting them because that might make them feel uncomfortable.
I want to be really clear about something before we go any further, because I think this is where a lot of conversations like this go sideways. This is not about blaming anyone. It's not about the workplace culture that allows, if not encourages, people that talk over you. Those types of things are real, and I'm not going to pretend they aren't. But let's not get sidetracked pointing out all the barriers that we seem to face, because I'm sure, if you've listened to my other episodes, you're quite familiar with many of them.
So instead, I want to talk about the part of this that belongs to us, not because it's our fault, but because it's the part that we actually have leverage over. We've learned to minimize ourselves—most of us don't do this intentionally. We learned it early in our careers and have reinforced it for years. You can't change your workplace culture overnight, but you can change how you show up.
As engineers, I think we have to deal with a very specific version of this problem. We were trained to let our work speak for itself. And that training is exactly why so many brilliant women in engineering are sitting in rooms full of people making confident guesses, while we say nothing, even when we're more prepared than anyone there and we're already three steps ahead. The truth is that you can't expect people to read your mind. You have to speak up and let them know what you're thinking.
There's a certain kind of exhaustion that comes from being present in a room but not seen in it. You showed up. You did the work—and if I had to guess, you probably did it more thoroughly than it needed to be done, because that's just what you do. You were instrumental in getting to the successful outcome. And yet, at the end of the project, when someone above you in the hierarchy is going over a list of who had a major role in achieving the results, your name might be somewhere in the middle of that list, if it's mentioned at all.
Being competent and overlooked is a common experience, and it compounds over time because the less visible your contributions are, the less basis anyone has for advocating for you when the promotion list gets made, or the exciting high-profile project gets assigned, or the client wants "your best person" in the room. This is not paranoia. This is not you being "too sensitive" or "reading too much into it". You cannot be chosen for opportunities that people don't know you're qualified for. Visibility isn't vanity—it's simply information. It's how the people who make the decisions that can impact your career long-term actually get the data they need to make good decisions.
So, if you've ever wondered what you're exhausting yourself for—the kind of tiredness that isn't from working too hard, it's about doing the hard work and still being invisible, I want you to hear this clearly: that's not a personal failing. That's a strategy problem. And the good news is, strategy problems can be solved.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of us absorbed the idea that if you have to tell people what you did well, you've already lost points for saying it. It's like we believe that the truly impressive people just get recognized effortlessly, without ever opening their mouths about their own accomplishments. I want to gently push back on that because it's mostly a myth. And it's a myth that disproportionately costs women, and especially women in technical fields where a large portion of the work is genuinely hard to see from the outside.
Here's a reframe that might help: bragging and making your work visible are not the same thing. Bragging is exaggerating or putting the spotlight on yourself for the sake of ego. Visibility is giving people accurate information they need to do their jobs, whether that's allocating resources, making promotion decisions, or staffing the next project.
One practical shift that can make this easier on yourself is to talk about your work the way you'd talk about a colleague's work. Most of us have no problem saying, "So-and-so did an incredible job uncovering and documenting the project requirements that the client couldn't seem to articulate". We can easily say it plainly, factually, with zero guilt. The discomfort only shows up when the subject is us. So, try narrating your own contributions in the same factual way. Not by saying, "I guess I sort of helped with gathering the requirements", but rather, "I led the effort to document the project requirements. It was a mess going in and now everyone is clear about what needs to be done on this project." Same facts. Completely different signal to the powers that be.
And notice—that sentence didn't need an exclamation point or a humble-brag disclaimer. It was just accurate. That's the goal. Accuracy, not exaggeration.
This also means learning to position your expertise strategically instead of defensively, because justifying yourself in the workplace depends heavily on when and how you establish your authority.
Defensive positioning means you're scrambling to prove your worth in a high-pressure moment, forcing you to reactively scramble to find useful data and past wins to justify your choices while under direct scrutiny.
Strategic positioning means building deep credibility long before the pressure ever hits, ensuring your authority is already so well-established that your decisions are trusted, without question, when a crisis arrives.
It's the difference between having to prove yourself under pressure, and already having been established as credible before things get testy.
By the way, I don't think the discomfort of self-promotion ever fully goes away. I want to be honest about that instead of promising you a trick that dissolves it. What changes is your relationship to that discomfort. You stop treating it as a sign that you're doing something wrong and start treating it as the price you pay for a professional reputation that actually reflects your ability. The discomfort isn't evidence you shouldn't do it; it's just proof that you're not used to doing it, yet.
Many of us were conditioned, from very early on in our careers, to speak in a particular way that's tentative and slightly apologetic, using phrases like, "This might be a dumb question..." or "I could be wrong..." or "Sorry, just to jump in quickly...". Notice the architecture of those preambles. Before you've said the important part, you've already pre-apologized for taking up their time to say it.
Here's the exercise I want to offer you: review your last week of meetings in your mind and count how many times you asked permission to speak versus how many times you simply spoke. This might have come out as something like, "Can I add something?" versus "One thing to add." Or "Is it okay if I push back on that?" versus "I want to push back on that for a second." These sound like small differences, but they're not. Asking permission puts the decision about whether your voice belongs in the room in someone else's hands, every single time, before you've even made your point. Asserting yourself keeps that decision about whether you belong in your court, where it needs to stay.
This is not about becoming someone who interrupts or dominates every discussion. It's about recognizing that you were, in fact, invited to that meeting. Somebody decided your expertise was needed there. So, take that as your permission to share it.
I'm very familiar with the fear underneath all of this—the fear that you haven't fully earned your seat at the table, yet. That you're one wrong answer away from being found out. Here's the truth, as plainly as I can say it: the people who asked for you to be in that room already did the math. They already decided you were qualified. You shouldn't feel you have to keep proving yourself for a role they are already paying you to do. Taking up space isn't about deciding you're better than everyone else in the room; it's more about deciding that you're not somehow less than them, either.
Many of us suffer from the fear of being called "too much". Whether it's too direct, too ambitious, too confident, too intense, too sensitive...I could go on and on.
Here's what's worth understanding about that—it's completely subjective rather than a truly objective measurement. It's simply someone's opinion. Research on gender and leadership has shown, again and again, the same behavior gets coded completely differently depending on who's doing it. A man who states his opinion plainly is "decisive". A woman doing the exact same thing, with the exact same tone, is deemed "aggressive" or "difficult". A man who advocates for his own promotion is "driven". A woman doing the same is perceived as "self-serving". This isn't about the action taken. It's more a reflection of a stereotype that deems powerful, direct women as threatening—not because of the content of what they're saying, but because it violates an old, unspoken expectation about how women are supposed to sound.
I'm not telling you this so you'll feel hopeless about it. I'm telling you because once you can see the pattern clearly, it stops being a personal affront and starts being what it actually is: a bias with a body of research behind it. And once we see the pattern, we can better navigate it instead of using it to think that there's something wrong with us.
So, the goal isn't to become more palatable to those around you so you never trigger that bias. You'll never fully outrun it by playing small. The goal is boldness over burnout. Speaking with the confidence and clarity the moment actually calls for, and letting the discomfort of occasionally being misread be a smaller price to pay than the exhaustion of constant self-editing. One of those costs is temporary and situational, while the other one can become chronic.
Now, let's talk about the loop we tend to get into, because I think you will probably recognize this or something similar. It starts with you having a thought in a meeting, but you start questioning whether you should share it, checking it for flaws, wondering if it's fully formed, wondering if someone smarter already thought of it and rejected it for a reason you're not seeing. By the time you've finished vetting it internally, the conversation has moved on. You say nothing. And then, on the walk back to your desk, or in the car on the way home, or in the middle of the night while you're staring at the ceiling—there it is again. And along with it, that feeling of regret.
Overthinking feels like diligence. It feels like you're just being responsible. But in the moment, it functions as paralysis, and that paralysis comes with a cost. And the price you pay is just as real as what you think it might have been for saying the wrong thing out loud—it's just a quieter, less visible cost, so it's easier to discount.
In moments like these, you don't need to be completely certain of an idea for it to be worth sharing. You do need to be prepared. But in my mind, those are different thresholds, and I think a lot of us have been operating as though they're the same. Certainty about the final answer is rarely available to anyone in real time—not even to the most confident person in the room, who is very often just as unsure as you are and simply better at not letting it show. What you can trust is your preparation, your years of experience, and your track record of being right often enough that you can follow your instincts in the moment.
Sometimes, it's appropriate to be honest about your uncertainty, which can protect your credibility, while it still puts the idea on the table instead of keeping it only in your head. Compare that to saying nothing at all, which might feel safer in the moment, but guarantees the idea never gets tested by anyone, including you.
Speaking with conviction doesn't mean protecting false certainty. It means trusting that your preparation earns you the right to be in the conversation, even on the days you're not sure you're on the right track.
Now, what happens when what you have to say means you will be disagreeing with someone? Because eventually, if you're doing any of what we just talked about, you will end up in a room where you see a flaw in someone else's plan, a risk everyone seems to be overlooking, or a decision you think is the wrong approach to be taking, and you'll have to decide what to do with that.
A lot of us learned early on that the safe move is to let it go and avoid causing any friction. Preserve harmony at all costs. I want to challenge that idea directly because I think it's one of the most damaging beliefs a lot of us carry. Because, simply put, avoiding conflict does not preserve harmony. It erodes it slowly, in a way that's much harder to trace back to a single moment.
Every time you silence a legitimate disagreement, you're not actually keeping the peace—you're just moving the cost of that disagreement somewhere less visible. Perhaps it will mean a worse decision gets made, your own resentment builds underneath your pleasant exterior, or a slow erosion of how much you think your opinion actually seems to matter.
Honest, respectful disagreement, handled well, does something that might seem a little counterintuitive—it builds trust rather than damaging it. People learn that when you do speak up, it's because it matters. And that makes your silence on the things you let go, meaningful, too. It's actually one of the fastest ways to build professional influence. You become known as someone whose disagreement is worth listening to because it's rare, considered, and delivered respectfully.
The goal is not aggression. Aggression makes your point about you and your frustration, your need for certainty, or your need to be right, no matter what. That makes it easier for people to simply dismiss you, by giving them an excuse to focus on your tone instead of your content, which, especially for women, is a trap that's laid for us disproportionately often.
Make your point about the work and make it specific. Ensure that the way it's framed is about the decision rather than the person who made it. You don't want to communicate it as a vague feeling, but instead focus on the facts, with a consequence attached, if you feel that's appropriate as part of the discussion.
Being precise and factual like that doesn't usually backfire because there's nothing in it to defend against except the substance—and the substance is exactly what you want people to engage with, because that's the conversation that will hopefully lead somewhere.
Related to this is potentially developing the reputational risk of being that person who's always identifying what's wrong. You've probably worked with someone like this, or maybe you're worried about becoming someone like this: sharp, capable, but always the one flagging the risk, the flaw, or the reason something won't work.
But remember, being right about the problem is not the same as being valuable for finding the solution. If all you ever highlight is the fault in the plan, you start to be perceived as the person who slows things down, whether that seems fair or not. Even when you are completely correct.
The shift here isn't to stop pointing at the problems—someone has to, and your technical judgment is exactly why you're in the room. The shift is to never present a problem without at least the beginnings of a path forward to finding a solution. Maybe you present some options and make a recommendation along with your reasoning. That changes your professional identity in that room. It's the difference between simply saying, "That won't work" and presenting a potential solution such as, "That won't work as it stands, but here's a version that would". If you notice the second sentence contains the first one completely, and while you haven't softened the problem or hidden it, you've continued on just a little bit further with potentially making it far more useful.
Everything we've talked about so far has been about what you say, so I want to spend a minute on how you say it, because this is a big part of your professional presence, whether you've ever thought about it that way or not.
Tone, pace, pitch, and a handful of small verbal habits shape how competent and confident you're perceived to be, often faster and more powerfully than the actual content of your idea. So, it's worth a few minutes of honest self-audit, because making some small adjustments here can make a big difference in how you're perceived.
Here are three specifics worth listening for:
Uptalk. This shows up as ending statements with a rising pitch, so they sound like questions even when they're not. This can quietly undercut a correct, well-reasoned point by making it sound like you're uncertain or somehow asking for permission to believe it. Try recording yourself in a low-stakes meeting and listening back sometime later. You might be surprised by what you hear.
Pace. Speaking quickly when you're nervous is extremely common, and it often reads as uncertainty—because a rushed sentence sounds like someone trying to get through it as fast as they can to avoid being challenged. Slowing down even by ten or fifteen percent, and allowing an actual pause after you make your point, reads as authority. The pause isn't empty air. It's a signal that you're finished and that the point is complete on its own, and that you're comfortable letting it sit there without rushing to fill the void.
Qualifiers. These are the small words that sneak into sentences almost automatically, like "just" or "I think" or "does that make sense?". We tend to tack them onto the end of a perfectly clear explanation. Used occasionally, they're nothing to worry about. But when they become a constant verbal habit, they function as a running disclaimer under everything you say. And over time, people start hearing the disclaimer more than the content.
The goal isn't to try to sound like someone else or pretend you're more confident than you feel. It's more about having some vocal awareness—noticing the habits that undercut your level of expertise or authority that you're trying to project versus the ones that are simply part of your communication style. Your voice, used well, is a tool. And like any tool, it's worth knowing exactly how to make it work to your benefit.
All of this is about closing the gap between how capable you actually are and how visible you're allowing that capability to be. You've already done the hard part. You already have the expertise, you've done the preparation, and you've established the track record. Now, it's time to give yourself the permission to let that expertise be seen and heard at the right time, by the people who need to know about it.
As with most things, this takes practice. You will still have meetings where you catch yourself hedging, where the old pattern shows up out of pure habit, because habits built over years don't tend to go away overnight, even if you want them to. And that's okay. That's to be expected. The goal isn't perfection. The goal is that the gap gets a little bit smaller, allowing you to fall back into old patterns a little less often, until one day you notice that you said exactly what you meant, in front of the right people, at the moment it mattered. And you didn't spend the night staring at the ceiling beating yourself up for what you wish you had said instead.
And that's it for this episode of Stop Sabotaging Your Success. Remember to download your Guide to Reclaiming Your Voice At Work at cindyesliger.com/podcast, episode two hundred and thirty-two.
Thank you to our producer, Alex Hochhausen and everyone at Astronomic Audio. Get in touch, I'm on Instagram @cindyesliger. My email address is info@cindyesliger.com.
If you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out The Confidence Collective. It's my monthly coaching program where we dig a little deeper into what's holding you back in your career and we find the workarounds. We help you overcome the barriers and create the career you want. Join me over at cindyesliger.com/join. I'd love to have you join me in The Confidence Collective.
Until next week, I'm Cindy Esliger. Thanks for listening.
