I can find the confidence for everyone but myself.
That is a strange thing to admit as a woman who has spent most of her career walking into rooms and solving problems.
I can see the hole in a business almost immediately. I can tell you where the opportunity is, what isn’t working, who needs to be in the room, what needs to happen next. And then I execute. I have advocated fiercely for women in my community. I mentor. I make introductions. I tell women to charge more, ask for the title, take the meeting, leave the thing that has gotten too small for them. I can see someone’s value before she can see it herself, and I will practically drag her toward it if I have to.
But ask me to do the same thing for myself?
I get quieter.
It has been more than a year since I have had to sit across from someone and simply name my own number. And I know myself well enough now to know what happens when I do. I want to explain it. Justify it. Soften it. Make sure everyone is comfortable with what I am asking before they have even had the opportunity to be uncomfortable.
Which is fascinating, because I was not raised to believe women were less capable.
Quite the opposite.
I was taught very early that “there was nothing a man could do that a woman couldn’t do, except pee standing up.” Thanks Dad.
I believed it. I still believe it.
But somewhere along the way, I learned there was a difference between being capable and being comfortable letting other people witness your capability.
Early in my career, I went through a major professional transition with another woman. I remember learning to suffocate some of myself during that period. Not because anyone sat me down and told me to become smaller. Those lessons are rarely that explicit. You learn to read the room. You learn which parts of you create friction. You learn when confidence is interpreted differently coming from you. You learn that being useful is welcomed more easily than being powerful.
So I became exceptionally useful.
I want to be honest about what that was, because it is more precise than it looks. I had not been taught I was incapable. I had learned that capability aimed at other people was safer than power claimed for myself.
I became the person who could solve it. The person who could see around corners. The person who would jump in when something was broken. The person who would advocate for the employee, the client, the friend, the woman sitting across from me who had somehow forgotten how fucking good she was.
And there is something beautiful about being of service. I mean that sincerely.
I love helping people.
I love watching someone see an opportunity she couldn’t see five minutes earlier. I love opening a door. I love taking a complicated problem and making it executable. I love telling another woman, with complete conviction, “No. You’re worth more than that.”
But I have started asking myself a much more uncomfortable question. Why is that conviction so easy to access when the worth belongs to someone else?
Because maybe confidence was never actually my problem. Maybe I have confidence in abundance. I have just spent most of it on other people, and there is a cost to that.
There is the obvious financial cost. The fee I discounted, the amount I left on the table, or the percentage I cut before anyone asked me to.
But money is only the easiest part to calculate.
There is also the cost of being underestimated because you participated in the underestimating. The rooms you helped other people enter while never asking whether you belonged there too. The introductions you made without asking for one in return. The opportunities you could see clearly for everyone except yourself. The years of confusing humility with invisibility.
I don’t think I am alone in this.
Women are taught a very specific version of goodness. Be ambitious, but not self-important. Be successful, but stay relatable. Advocate, but don’t make everything about you. Help other women. Lift as you climb. Be generous. Be of service.
I believe in all of that.
What I no longer believe is that I have to disappear from the equation in order for it to count. Because naming my own worth does not diminish yours. Charging what my experience is worth does not make me less generous. Wanting something for myself does not mean I have stopped being of service.
Maybe naming it is part of the service?
I think about the women watching us do this. I think about the younger women I mentor. I think about my kids. I think about the woman who will eventually sit in a chair I once occupied.
What exactly am I teaching her if I tell her to ask for more while she watches me ask for less?
What am I teaching my boys if they grow up watching their mother advocate ferociously for everyone in the room except herself?
That is the part I hadn’t considered.
Our children aren’t only listening to what we tell them they deserve. They are watching what we believe we deserve.
So I am practicing something new. When it is my turn, I say the number. And then I stop talking.
No immediate explanation. No discount before anyone has asked for one. No “but I totally understand if.” No performing the other person’s objection for them. No negotiating against myself while they are still processing the sentence.
Just the number. And the silence.
That sounds absurdly small for a woman who has negotiated deals and led companies. But maybe that is the point.
Sometimes the hardest negotiations aren’t the biggest ones. They’re the ones where you have to believe your own side of the argument.
So if it is your turn to ask this week, I want you to try something with me.
Say the number. Ask for the title. Send the proposal. Name the boundary. Tell them what you want.
And then, for the love of God, stop talking.
Let the sentence exist without rescuing anyone from it. You do not have to make your worth easier for someone else to swallow.
I can find the confidence for everyone but myself. I’m working on changing that sentence.
Because I am of service. And I am allowed to be one of the people I serve.
Maybe you are too.
MOMumentally,
Erika
Erika Hanafin Austria Founder, MOMumental Moments® · Publisher, MOMumental Reinvention Co-Founder, NeonID · Partner / COO SignlLabs · Former CEO, HeyMama · 2x Top 50 Women Leaders, Virginia
🛒 Shop The Stack · The habits, supplements, tools, and essentials behind the reinvention. Curated by and used by me daily.