Too much backbone
On saying a true thing about yourself, and not apologizing for it.
My seven-year-old quoted a book to me recently.
I’ve been pushing “Top 10 differences between winners and whiners” on him for a while now, because the boy can whine, and I am not raising a whiner. (He knows this about himself. We’ve discussed it.)
He came to me very seriously and said:
“Mommy. At 20, you worry about what others think about you. At 40, you don’t care what others think about you. At 60, you realize that all along, nobody was thinking about you.”
He’s seven. He delivered this like he was reading me my rights.
I’ve been sitting with that line for weeks. Not because it was new — I’d forgotten it was even in the book — but because of the timing. Because of what had just happened at work.
I joined this organization almost two years ago. I stepped out of my comfort zone deliberately — into an ecosystem where I knew nobody, where I had no existing relationships to lean on, no network to soften the landing. I made that choice because I trusted my skills. Not a godfather. Not a favor. My skills.
My skip-level manager interviewed me first. My hiring manager wasn’t available that day, despite nine or ten rounds prior.
I found out later — at a team dinner, over drinks — what he’d told her afterward.
She has too much backbone. But she’s trainable. Coachable. We can work with her.
They were drinking. I don’t drink.
I filed it away. Said nothing. And I spent the next two years deciding, quietly, that I would work with full integrity inside that assessment — and let the assessment become someone else’s problem.
Three months in, my responsibilities were quietly narrowed. No formal conversation. Priorities shift, and no leader wants to acknowledge that what they planned didn’t quite materialize. I understood the subtext. I didn’t fight it.
What I did instead was bring ideas.
Twenty years of consulting across enterprise platforms builds something in you — an inability to sit quietly in front of a problem you can see clearly. I kept bringing things into rooms that leadership wasn’t bringing. Ideas that challenged direction. Not to be difficult. Because that’s what the work demands, if you’re actually doing it.
Every one of them was received politely.
Every one of them was set aside.
The restructuring happening in my organization right now is pointed in the direction of several of those ideas.
I’m not saying that to take credit. I’m saying it because the pattern matters.
So. Nearly two years in. A large restructuring announced. People being sorted into new pods based on skill sets.
I said, very casually, very organically — the way you speak to someone after two years of working together — that I could see myself fitting across any of these pods. That I had the skills to lead in any of them.
One sentence.
I watched my manager’s expression shift on camera.
What followed was a pivot to other people. My peers — who are good at what they do, and this has never been about them — were suddenly in the conversation. Their names, their qualities. And then the word humility. Reminders of humility. Reminders of what it means to be humble in a team.
I’ve spent twenty years in this industry. I know what humility looks like as a virtue and what it looks like as a management tool.
What I heard in that conversation was not the first thing.
I want to say something plainly, not as a brag but as a fact: I have more credentials on paper and more years of direct, cross-platform enterprise experience than most people in the room. That isn’t arrogance. It’s a resume. And for two years, I deliberately held that back — brought ideas through the right channels, stayed collaborative, never positioned myself over anyone.
What I said in that meeting wasn’t new information. It was just the first time I said it out loud.
And that — apparently — was the problem.
Here’s what I’ve come to understand: humility is not the opposite of knowing what you’re capable of.
Staying in your lane is.
They are not the same thing. And the people who use one word to mean the other are usually doing so because your lane is more convenient for them than it is for you.
There’s one more thing worth naming.
I build independently now. AI tools, published frameworks, a Substack, content under my own name. It’s separate from my job — different context entirely, clear boundaries. But it’s visible. And the visibility itself is a signal — to me, and to anyone paying attention — about what I’m actually capable of when I’m not waiting for permission to execute.
I’m not 60 yet. I don’t have the full view.
But I’m firmly in the decade where I’ve stopped auditing myself for other people’s comfort.
The sentence I said was true.
I knew it was true when I said it.
I don’t regret true sentences.
Enterprise AI strategist, working mom, East Coast US. I write about AI strategy, building in public, and what it actually looks like to grow a career at the intersection of consulting and technology — and sometimes what that costs.