Turn It All The Way Up

Somebody said it to you once and they probably meant it kindly.

You are a lot. You are very direct. Perhaps soften it a little — for the client, for the room, for the person who finds you difficult.

And because you are a professional, you did. You found the softer sentence. The longer preamble. The way of saying a true thing so that it arrives at half strength and troubles nobody.

Well. Turn it back up.

Who Asked, And What They Were Actually Asking For

It is worth being fair about where that request came from, because it was almost never malice.

Somebody was uncomfortable. A meeting had a shape it was expected to keep and you changed the shape. A senior person was used to being the one who said the decisive sentence and you said it first, and better, and they had no language for that except to call it a lot. The word that came back to you was about how the room felt, and it got handed to you as though it were about who you are.

You took it seriously because you take feedback seriously. That is a strength, and this once it worked against you.

Every One Of Them Reads Differently On A Bad Wednesday

The quality somebody asked you to dial down is almost always the reason you are worth hiring.

Directness reads as difficult right until the week the project is failing and one person has to say so out loud. Impatience reads as abrasive until it is the only reason the work shipped. Refusing to let a bad decision pass reads as inflexible until a year later, when everybody agrees you were right and nobody quite remembers who said it first.

It was you. You remember.

Keep going, because the list is longer than anybody admits. Asking the obvious question reads as slowing us down until it turns out nobody had the answer. Caring visibly about the work reads as taking it personally until the quarter it is the only reason standards held. Saying the number out loud reads as blunt until the day somebody senior realises nobody else in the business knew what the number was.

A business doing beautifully can afford to find you a lot. A business in trouble is desperate for exactly you and has no idea how to ask.

Turned Up Is Not Turned Hard

And this is where somebody usually assumes turning up means turning hard, so let us settle that now. Warmth and directness were never opposites and you have been both at once your entire working life. The women who change rooms are almost always the warmest people in them. That is precisely why the hard sentence lands when they say it.

The hard sentence from somebody who plainly does not care is an attack, and a room closes around it. The same sentence from somebody who has spent a year making sure the junior gets credit and the tired one gets covered is a gift, and the room knows the difference inside a second.

You have always known which one you are. So has every person who has worked beside you.

What Pre-Shrunk Looks Like On A Page

Here is the practical part, because this is the week it actually matters.

A woman writing about herself at half strength produces sentences nobody can disagree with and nobody can feel. Experienced operations professional with a collaborative approach and a proven track record of delivering outcomes. Every word true. No person anywhere inside it. It could be four hundred women and it is none of them.

Turned all the way up, the same woman writes: I am the person a business calls when the work is late, the team is frightened and somebody has to say the true thing before Friday. I have done it eleven times and it has worked ten.

One of those gets a phone call the same afternoon.

And notice what the second one is doing. It is not boasting and it is not selling. It is simply refusing to be vague about a thing she actually did.

So Turn It Up. All Of It.

When you write who you are, write the version somebody once asked you to make smaller. Louder, warmer, faster, funnier, more certain. That is the woman the right business has been waiting for, and she is the reason they will still be glad about it in five years.

And if it feels uncomfortable to put down, that is usually the tell that you have finally written the true one. The comfortable version is the one you have been handing over for years, and you already know what that gets you.

Arriving pre-shrunk has never once got anybody the job they wanted.

One Last Thing, For The Week You Do Not Believe Any Of This

There will be a Tuesday when you read all of that and it does not reach you. A run of interviews that went nowhere. A restructure that took the job you were good at. A year of caring for somebody, and a gap on the page you are already braced to explain.

You are not being asked to feel confident. Nobody here requires that of you. You are being asked to write down what is true, on a day when it happens to be easier to see it than to feel it — and true is true whether or not it lands that morning.

The woman who reads this on her best week and the woman who reads it on her worst are the same woman, with the same thirty years in her, and a business would be lucky to have either of them.