We walk into rooms bracing for judgment that isn’t really there
Most people are not hoping to see you fail. Contrary to what your brain thinks: almost everyone sitting across from you is quietly rooting for you, not against you.
Your interviewer hopes you do well. If you’re good, they get to stop interviewing and get their headcount filled.
Your first date hopes it goes well too, because they’re looking for their person just as much as you are.
The VC across the table hopes your numbers work, because that’s their return. They’re hoping their bet pays off.
Stop diluting yourself
But because we think people are judging us, we often dilute our own words before they even leave our mouths. We soften things that didn’t need softening, and hedge things we were actually sure about. We add qualifiers to a sentence that would have landed fine on its own.
Somewhere along the way, a lot of us decided our truth was too much for other people to hold, so we shrunk it down to something more palatable before even saying it out loud.
Dilution feels like kindness, but it really is just fear.
I used to think softening things was a form of consideration, protecting the other person from a version of me that might be too much, too direct or clear.
But most of the time it wasn’t about them at all. It was about me not wanting to sit in the discomfort of being fully seen and possibly rejected for it.
Hedging is a way of leaving yourself an exit. If you say the diluted version and it goes badly, you can tell yourself they didn’t really see the real you anyway.
Over time, I learned that clarity is a filter, and there is strength in vulnerability. The ones who could meet you at your level were never going to be drawn to the diluted one in the first place.
You can’t be found by the right people while you’re busy hiding from the wrong ones.
So stop diluting yourself, we’re all here to see you win :)