A lot of us, especially Gen Xers, were taught a lot of things about how important it is to be modest. Don't brag about yourself. Heck, don't even talk about yourself. We were taught to regard modesty as a great virtue. 

But there's a serious problem with that when we're talking about getting decisionmakers to invest in our work. Because they need to know how great our work is, and how great we are at making a huge impact through that work. They need to know how we're leading the field with our work.

If we struggle to talk about our work as the best, most effective solution to a particular problem, and if we won't own the identity of expert on the work that we do, why would the decisionmaker believe that our work is worthy of high-level investment?

This misplaced modesty is one of the biggest causes of underinvestment by decisionmakers, and it doesn't get talked about enough. 

We have to be able to claim our expertise and we have to be able to claim our best/most status in whatever construct it is true. And we have to be able to do that with confidence and certainty if we want decisionmakers to believe us when we say it. 

But you might have noticed there's often a lot of stuff that gets in the way of our being able to do that. What I've observed is that when these problems are showing up consistently for a leader, there's almost always something else going on beneath the surface. 

Until we get at the stuff under the surface, our default modesty behaviors are likely to persist. And to keep costing us real money, both in lost investments and under-investment.

In this episode, we share:

• The two main ways counterproductive modesty shows up in interactions with decisionmakers
• The most common sources of unhelpful beliefs that drive counterproductive modesty
• The three key ingredients to taking ownership of your greatness
• Essential questions to help you identify areas of counterproductive modesty, and to rewire it
• Why you should beware of focusing on credentials
• How to avoid a common trap that discourages us from owning our greatness

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