Ever caught yourself saying, “Oh, it’s nothing, I just stay home with the kids”?
Or brushed off a big work win with, “It was mostly luck, honestly”?
Maybe you’ve looked at another woman juggling it all and thought, “I could never do that—I’m just not that kind of woman.”
We say these things lightly, almost automatically. But beneath the self-deprecating humor and modesty, there’s often something deeper at play: a quiet, inherited belief that taking up space—as a woman, a mother, a leader—is somehow too much.
It’s not that someone explicitly told us to downplay ourselves. It’s that the world has been gently (and sometimes not so gently) nudging us in that direction since before we could name it. We were taught to be agreeable, humble, likable. Not bossy, not proud, not “too full of ourselves.”
And so we learned to shrink. think about how we talk about ourselves at dinner parties, parent-teacher meetings, even in our own heads at 2 a.m.
This isn’t about guilt. It’s about awareness. Because once we name this pattern for what it is—internalized conditioned misogyny—we can begin to undo it. We can start talking to ourselves the way we’d talk to a friend: with credit, kindness, and no apologies for being ourselves
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