You Own the Jet, Now Fly It
Embrace your confidence and claim your rightful place at the table, no matter where you stand.
You Own the Jet, Now Fly It
Picture the woman walking through the terminal like she owns a private jet. You know the one. Dressed like a boss, shoulders back, chin level, gliding past the gate chaos while everyone else stampedes like a herd of cattle. She is not flustered. She is not apologizing as she moves through the crowd. The crowd seems to part for her because people can feel her confidence.
That posture is not about the plane. It is about the decision to take up space before anyone hands you permission. And here is what I need you to hear right up front: this is not a message for the woman with the corner office, the assistant, and the title on the door. This is for every woman, at every stage, in every seat.
You might be running a company or running a register. You might be twenty-two and terrified in your first real job, or fifty-two and quietly wondering if it is too late to want more. You might be the boss, the one taking notes for the boss, or the woman who left the workforce for a decade and is walking back in with her heart pounding. It does not matter where you are standing. The jet is yours too. Confidence is not a corner office perk. It is available to all of us, and it looks the same in scrubs, in a suit, in an apron, and in the school pickup line.
I spent fifteen years in clinical dentistry before moving into executive leadership for the last twenty years, which means I have watched this from both sides of the table. What all of it taught me is how quickly a room decides who is in charge and how rarely that decision has anything to do with who is actually most qualified. A boardroom reads the energy in the first ten seconds. So does a leadership team, a negotiation, and the person deciding whether your voice gets weight or gets waited out. The setting changes. The dynamic does not. Women are still, far too often, taught to shrink politely and call it being professional.
I want to talk about the airport walk because it is the best metaphor I have found for the thing we keep getting wrong.
Dress like you own the jet, then act like it
Owning the jet is not a shopping instruction. Nobody is telling you to expense a new wardrobe and call it leadership. The point is congruence. When you show up looking like you belong wherever you are, you are sending your own brain a signal before you send anyone else one. You are telling yourself that you are not here to blend into the carpet.
The women I admire most figured out that presentation and preparation are the same muscle. They walk in ready. They know their stuff. They have done the homework everyone else skimmed. So, when they take up space, it is not a costume. It is earned, and the confidence has somewhere to stand.
That is where a lot of us get stuck. We wait to feel confident before we act confident. The feeling will catch up.
Take up space on purpose
There is a habit women learn early and unlearn late. We make ourselves smaller so the room stays comfortable. We soften a good idea into a question. We add, “I might be wrong, but…” We give away the credit before anyone even reaches for it. And we do it whether the room is a boardroom or a break room.
Stop shrinking to keep other people comfortable. Their comfort is not your job.
Taking up space is not about being the loudest person in the meeting. Taking up space means you finish your sentence. You let the silence sit after you make your point instead of filling it with unnecessary words or an apology. You sit at the actual table, not the row of chairs against the wall. And when someone repeats your idea back as if it was their own eureka moment, you say, warmly and clearly, “Yes, that is exactly what I said. Glad it landed.”
A seat at the table is not a reward for being agreeable. It is a position you take because your judgment belongs in the decision. That is true whether the table seats a board of directors or a family deciding its next move. If you keep waiting to be invited, you are depriving others of your experience, knowledge, and vision.
Lift while you climb
The women who change industries are not the ones who pulled the ladder up behind them. They are the ones who reached back. It costs almost nothing to open a door: a warm introduction, a name dropped in the room where decisions happen when she is not present to drop it herself, or ten honest minutes of “Here is what I wish someone had told me.” It is credit given out loud, in front of the people whose opinions can move her career forward.
I do not care what field you are in; the move is the same. You lift. You make room. You become a positive force for someone else’s growth, and you do it without keeping a scoreboard.
Because the real measure of a career is not the title on your door. It is whether, years from now, someone stands up and says, “It is because of her that I am where I am today.”
That sentence is the whole point. Not the corner office, not the title, and not the parking spot.
The days you aren’t feeling it
I would be lying if I made this sound effortless. Some days, the jet feels more like a Cessna held together with optimism and duct tape. You will get talked over. You will receive feedback that does not feel right and promises that seem designed to keep you at bay. You will have days when the confident walk is entirely a performance.
Walk anyway. Fake the walk until the walk is real. Nobody watching can tell the difference, and eventually, neither can you. Confidence is not the absence of doubt. It is doing the thing when confidence is most absent.
And on the days you cannot find it for yourself, borrow it. Find the woman two steps ahead and study how she moves through the room. Then, when you are the one two steps ahead, let someone borrow it from you. That is how it works. That is how it has always worked.
Now fly it
So here is the whole thing, stripped down. You already own the jet: your skill, your judgment, your years of doing the work. The jet is yours. It is fueled and waiting for you to step aboard and grab the best seat.
It is okay. It was always okay.
Stand up straight. Take the seat. Say the thing. Give the credit. Open the door for the woman behind you and tell her the runway is longer than she thinks.
You own the jet. Now fly it!
