Stop Shrinking for People Who Should be Growing
How Dimming Your Light at Work Costs You More Than You Realize
When I stepped into a supervisory role at a new company, I hesitated. Not because I didn't know what I was doing. I did. I had already been a supervisor. I had built things. I had systems, resources, and approaches that worked. But I was new to the company, and I wanted to prove myself. So I shared. I brought ideas to peer meetings and showed other supervisors the resources I had created for my team.
Then I got the "feedback."
I was told that what I was sharing was making other supervisors feel as though they had to be doing those things too. So I stopped. I pulled back, kept my head down, and contained what I knew and what I was capable of. I made myself smaller in the name of keeping the peace. Somewhere in that shrinking, I started to feel insecure about my own leadership—even though nothing about my actual ability had changed.
That's the part that still gets me. I knew what I knew. I had the track record to prove it. But because someone else was uncomfortable with my output, I absorbed that discomfort as if it were my problem to fix.
It wasn't the first time. Earlier in my career, I had raised concerns about leaders who weren't performing. The response I got was quiet and direct: "Not everyone is going to perform at your level, Amanda." I was supposed to hear that as a compliment, but I didn't. I heard it as an instruction to stop expecting more—from them, from the environment, and eventually from myself.
This Is What Conditioned Insecurity Looks Like
Not the dramatic kind or the kind that comes from failure. The quiet kind. The kind that gets handed to you by people who need you to be less so that their average feels like enough—or by people who are passing down their own conditioned insecurities.
So I did the work to unlearn it. I went to therapy, kept educating myself, and at some point, I got brave enough to ask my team for direct feedback—the kind that actually gives you tangible information. What they reflected back to me aligned with everything I was learning in the classroom and in therapy. The pieces were confirming each other. And that convergence was clarifying in a way I didn't expect.
It wasn't just validation; it was evidence. Evidence that the version of myself I had become while shrinking wasn't the truth of who I was as a leader. It was the residue of years of being told to be less.
That's what unlearning looks like in practice. It's not a single moment but a slow, often uncomfortable process of holding up what you were conditioned to believe against what you're actually experiencing—and choosing, again and again, to trust the latter.
Relearning Followed
Not learning something new, exactly, but returning to what I already knew before the noise got loud: that I lead well and that what I bring matters. That sharing it is not a threat to anyone. And even if it feels that way to someone else, that is not mine to manage. That is a systemic problem, not a personal one.
When organizations tolerate a culture where high performance creates social friction, they are not protecting team morale; they are protecting mediocrity. When a high performer is asked—directly or indirectly—to dim what they bring so others feel more comfortable, the message being sent is that comfort matters more than growth.
That has nothing to do with who you are and everything to do with the system you're operating within. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to understand that I was not the problem. I was experiencing a pattern that shows up in workplaces across industries, levels, and years. The leader who outpaces the norm gets quietly managed down—not through formal feedback, but through social pressure, the raised eyebrow, and the comment disguised as concern.
Once I stopped holding back, something shifted. My team was highly engaged. They told me they showed up and gave their best because of how I was leading them and that they had never experienced a leader like me before. More than half of them went on to receive promotions of their own.
That's what becomes possible when you stop managing yourself down—not just for you, but for everyone around you.
What I do now is continue anyway. I keep building resources. I keep sharing what works. I keep expecting more of myself—not because I'm trying to make anyone uncomfortable, but because I've never stopped believing that growth is the point.
If you've been told—in words or in silence—that you're too much, I want you to consider the source with clarity.
Have you ever pulled back to make someone else more comfortable? What did that cost you—and what did it take to come back to yourself?
