Naming your wins straightforwardly
I will die on this hill times infinity plus one
Yesterday’s post might have misfired for some of you because I was a dingus about setting the correct time. Find it here if you missed it. Onward.
Today, write about how you communicate your wins to others.
In the U.S., we seem to love to abuse modesty in either direction—either we over-inflate our wins or we downplay them—and we seem to equally love fretting about this as if our only options were these extremes. This is so much of a thing that when we hear a person simply straightforwardly saying the truth of an accomplishment, people often don’t know what to do with it. In fact, I have a hunch sometimes naming the simple fact of a win doesn’t even occur to some, so the fact gets a joke or omitted or highlighted far too heavily.
I could list example after example, because I spent a large swath of time literally training people how to not abuse modesty in either direction but to help them speak to the neutral facts of their lives in order to build public impact strategies. And, perhaps that is for a future post, but for today, consider how you explain the wins in your life. Do you tend to exaggerate them, downplay them or name them straightforwardly? Why? Do you have feelings about it? Would you prefer to do it another way?
And, lest you feel shame around the answer I offer this: not only is there a great deal of socialization around this, but that socialization gets more layered the less represented we tend to feel in a given situation. There are valid psychosocial reasons why we might opt to not name our credentials straightforwardly: we might want to avoid the pain of being challenged so we say we went to school “on the east coast” or “in Boston,” or we might not want to be criticized by our community of origin as a first-generation student, etc.
All of those reasons are valid, but the important thing is to be aware of why we position ourselves the way we do in a given situation (because it will and should shift for many different types of situations) and that we are not simply unquestioningly obedient to how we think we should operate. Because given that credentials are keys to opening doors and hardly the random facts to which we often reduce them, the key thing is to be completely clear about why we present them as we do in each scenario
Let’s get into that.
