They said I was too much.

Early in my career I sat through a performance review and heard that I came across as overbearing and intimidating in meetings. Those were the exact words. I still remember exactly where I was sitting because of the mistake I made afterward. I spent the next several years working on it.

I am a 5’ 9” female who doesn’t try to blend in. I enter a room and people know I’ve arrived. I have opinions and I’m not afraid to share them. And when something doesn’t add up I ask the question. That’s why I’m engaged on projects, to turn things around. None of that was news to me. What was new was seeing it written as a problem. As an issue that needed to be resolved.

I did not push back. I took it the way I had been trained to take feedback my whole career. As information. As something to work on.

So I adjusted, and I was thorough about it.

I started floating things privately before meetings instead of raising them live. I let other people carry my point and take the credit for it.  I got careful about ideas that were not fully formed, which in practice meant a lot of them never got said. At the time I called it playing the corporate game.

It worked, and that is the part I have to be honest about. People were more comfortable with me. I got stellar reviews the following years. Nobody ever described me that way again.

What nobody wrote down is the rest of it.

For years after that review I ran everything through a filter before I said it. I would have a read on something in a meeting, and instead of just saying it I would sit there weighing whether it was going to come across too strong, or whether the point might go down easier coming from somebody else. The whole calculation took a few seconds but it was exhausting.  I ran it every single time. Often by the time I was done the conversation had already moved on to the next thing. I would tell myself I had decided to let that one go.

There were calls I watched get made that I knew were wrong but I sat there. Months later when it fell apart the way I thought it would I had nothing to point to. I had not been overruled. I never put it on the table. That is the kind of cost that never lands in a rating. I paid it for years without ever tracing it back to one line in a review I had agreed with.

It took me a long time to understand what that feedback actually described.

Overbearing and intimidating are not measurements of a person. They describe how somebody felt around me. That is genuinely useful information about that person and what that company culture tolerates. It was not information about me.

Feedback about your style is almost always feedback about somebody’s comfort. Worth knowing. It just answers a different question than the one you think you are being asked.

There’s a quote from Caroline Wanga I’ve kept for years.

I did it backwards for a long time. I changed who I was to fit in where I was.

That review is a long way behind me now. The person who wrote it has almost certainly forgotten the sentence and would be surprised to hear it stuck to anything. The company reorganized twice and the document is long gone. The note stayed open anyway. I kept working on it for years after everybody who assigned it had moved on with their lives.

You are just right for the people and places that actually suit you. You will not find that out while you are still filing down the part somebody flagged.

Go find your sentence. Somebody told you something about who you are and you took it as fact. Some version of you has been quietly working on it ever since.

Ask yourself who was actually uncomfortable that day. Then decide how much longer you are willing to work on it for them.

That note was never yours. Close it.

Until next Tuesday.
Ceaneh