Self Praise is No Praise

Nobody teaches you that formally. You just absorb it. The way you absorb most things that arrive early enough and from people you trust. It travelled to me through my older sister. She probably heard it from someone before her. It passed between us without ceremony, the way these things do. And then it became part of the furniture.

You notice it when someone asks what you're proud of and you pivot to the team. When you land the promotion and the first words out of your mouth are about who helped you get there. When your CV lists achievements you led as things "we" delivered. When you're asked in an interview to describe your biggest win and you spend forty seconds on context and ten on what you actually did.

You hear it in the networking conversation where someone asks what you do and you make your role sound smaller, less significant, more ordinary than it is. In the performance review where you talk about results as if they appeared on their own. In the moment after the difficult conversation, the one you prepared for and delivered with clarity, when you say "it went fine" instead of "I handled that well."

Not a tactic you chose. Just the reflex you built after years of hearing that taking credit makes you difficult, that confidence looks like arrogance, that the safest place to be is slightly smaller than you are. These beliefs don't announce themselves. They just shape the words before they leave your mouth. And most people carry them for years, sometimes decades, before they realise something inherited is making decisions on their behalf.

What were you taught to stay quiet about?