I Stopped Trying to Sound Like Them
How I learned to stop performing competence and started building real authority.
For most of my career, I was the only woman in the room.
Not always the only one in the building. But in the meetings where decisions actually got made — the rooms with the operating partners, board members, and senior leadership team — I was usually the only woman at the table. Sometimes, I was the only woman invited at all.
I learned the rules of those rooms quickly because no one was going to teach them to me. Speak with certainty, even when you have doubt. Take up space, but not too much. Disagree, but make it sound like agreement until the right moment. Match the cadence of the men around you. Match the volume. Match the posture. Match the easy, slightly arrogant confidence that seems to come standard issue with the suits.
I was good at it. I had to be. The women who came before me in business and security leadership had paid the price for being themselves in those rooms, and I absorbed every cautionary tale. So I performed. For years.
And it worked, in the way performance works. I got promoted. I got hired into bigger jobs. I built programs, led teams, earned credentials, and held my own in meetings where holding your own was the entire point.
What I did not realize until much later was how much of myself I had quietly traded for that competence.
The cost of the act
Performance is exhausting in a way that real work is not. Real work tires you. Performance hollows you out. There is a particular kind of fatigue that comes from spending eight hours a day being a slightly more confident, slightly more aggressive, slightly less curious version of yourself, then driving home and trying to remember who you actually were before the meeting started.
The performance cost me in obvious ways. I made decisions I would not have made if I had been listening to my own instincts instead of mirroring the room. I stayed quiet about things I should have spoken up on. I laughed at jokes I did not find funny. I let small slights pass that, looking back, were not small at all.
It cost me in less obvious ways too. The clients and colleagues I connected with most deeply were never the ones who met the polished version of me. They were the ones who caught me in an unguarded moment, when the act slipped and the actual person showed up. Those relationships — the real ones — were always built in spite of the performance, never because of it.
And it cost me opportunities I will never know about. The boards I was not invited onto because I came across as too much like every other security executive in the deck. The conversations that never happened because the version of me in the room felt impressive but not particularly memorable. The trust that never deepened because I had never offered anyone the actual person to trust.
The moment it broke
I cannot point to a single day when the performance ended. It was more like a slow erosion of my willingness to keep up the act.
Part of it was age. The older I got, the less interesting it became to perform competence I had long since earned. Part of it was watching other women — the few I admired most — refuse to play the game and somehow command more respect than the women who played it perfectly. Part of it was sheer fatigue.
But the real shift came when I started my own practice and realized that every prospective client conversation was either going to deepen the act or finally end it. The performance had been built for someone else’s room. There was no one left to perform for anymore. The room was mine to define.
I remember the first prospect call where I simply sounded like myself. Slower than I would have spoken in a corporate meeting. More questions, fewer declarations. A little softer when I was uncertain, a little firmer when I was not. I did not posture. I did not match. I just talked the way I talk when I am sitting with a friend trying to think through a hard problem.
The prospect signed within the week. Not because I had performed authority, but because I had offered something more useful: actual presence. They could feel the difference. They told me so.
What changed when I stopped
The work got better immediately and obviously. When I stopped spending energy on performance, all of that energy became available for the actual problem in front of me. I noticed more. I asked sharper questions. I caught nuances I would have flattened in my old executive register. Clients started telling me they felt heard in our conversations in a way they had not with previous advisors. I knew exactly why.
The relationships got better too. The peers I attract now, the colleagues I trust most, and the clients I keep all came to me through the unfiltered version of myself. The polished version had attracted polished interactions. The authentic version attracts depth.
And, to my surprise, my authority grew stronger, not weaker. I had spent years believing that softening my register would cost me credibility. The opposite turned out to be true. When you sound like a real person, people trust you like a real person. When you sound like a corporate construct, they engage with you accordingly.
What I would tell the woman I used to be
If I could go back and talk to the version of me sitting in those rooms in her early thirties, knuckles white under the table, mirroring the men around her, I would tell her three things.
The first is that the act is not protecting you the way you think it is. It is protecting the room from having to deal with you. There is a difference, and the cost of the first is much higher than you realize.
The second is that the women you admire most are not admired because they outperformed the men. They are admired because they refused to. Their power comes from the fact that they did not hand it over.
The third is that authenticity is not a posture either. You cannot perform authenticity any more than you can perform certainty. You can only stop performing the other thing and then slowly, awkwardly, learn to be present without an act in place.
It takes longer than you would like. The act has muscle memory. The rooms still have their gravity. There are still days when I catch myself reaching for the old register and have to consciously set it down.
But the days when I am fully present, fully myself, fully here in the conversation without trying to sound like anyone else are the days the work is best. They are also the days I come home with energy left for the people who matter most.
I traded years of myself for a version of competence that was never going to make me whole. I am not making that trade anymore. And the women coming up behind me — in cybersecurity and every other male-coded field where the cost of the act is still being quietly paid — deserve to know they do not have to make it either.
You do not have to sound like them.
You never did.
