Midlife MavericksI’m getting dressed for drinks tonight. A hedge fund crowd, the kind of event I’ve spent the better part of a decade dreading. Big banks with big logos on small white cards.
But I’ve just caught myself doing something new. I’m not rehearsing my answer.
For years I had it ready. The careful sentence I’d say when someone asked, “So who are you with?” The little flinch I’d brace for when I told them, and watched them quietly recalculate how much of their evening I was worth.
Tonight I’m going to walk in and say my name, and that will be the whole answer. And for the first time, that feels like enough.
It took me nine years to get here. I want to tell you the truth about those nine years, because I think you might be somewhere in the middle of your own.
The flinch I used to brace for
When I started out on my own, I was embarrassed. Properly embarrassed.
The work was good. I’d spent twenty-odd years in capital markets and I knew exactly what I was doing. What got to me was the absence of things. No big brand on the door and no team behind me. A business card with my own name on it and nothing else doing the heavy lifting.
You know the moment I mean. Someone from a big fund asks you to tell them about your firm, and there’s a half-second where you can see them building a picture of something bigger than what it is. And then you say those words: “It’s just me.” And you feel yourself shrink in real time.
I carried that for years. A massive chip on my shoulder. I’d walk into rooms already explaining myself, already reaching for the qualifier before anyone had asked for one.
I felt I didn’t belong.
Quote of the Week
True belonging doesn’t require us to change who we are. It requires us to be who we are.
Brené Brown
Nine years to feel like I belong
I expected the change to come from outside. A bigger client, or some external stamp that said I was allowed in the room.
None of that did it.
What changed is duller and harder. I stopped handing my sense of worth to a logo and waiting for it to hand some back. The brand was never doing the work I thought it was doing. It opened a few doors faster, yes. But the credibility I thought it gave me, I’d been earning the whole time, in every meeting, with every manager I helped raise their first capital. I just refused to take it with me when I left.
Nobody at that event tonight cares whether I have a team. They care whether I can help them. The “just me” was always my problem, never theirs. I built it, fed it, and it took me the best part of nine years to put it down.
I tell you to be bold. I’m not.
I feel like a hypocrite. Every week I sit down and write to you. I tell you to back yourself, to walk into any room like you have a right to be there. And I mean every single word.
But I want you to know who’s writing them. It’s Claudia here and I’m not bold. I have weeks where I feel very, very small. I have moments, more than I’d like to admit, where the old flinch comes straight back and I’m right back at the start, apologising for myself at a drinks reception. The chip doesn’t vanish because you’ve decided it should. Some days you forget it’s there. Some days it’s the heaviest thing you’re carrying. Both are normal. I write to you from inside that, not from some clean place on the other side of it.
Tomorrow I get on a plane to Lisbon. Justin Welsh, someone I’ve followed and learned from for years, is hosting a small dinner. A table of people who build things on their own. People who know what it is to work for yourself, to carry the doubt and do the work anyway.
I’m not nervous about that table, that’s the interesting bit. The room I used to dread was full of people with big brands behind them. The room I can’t wait for is full of people with nothing behind them but the thing they’ve built. Turns out belonging was always going to come from finding my own people, not from the biggest logos.
The chip is yours to put down
So let me turn this back to you, because I didn’t write it to talk about my evening.
If you’ve left corporate, or you’re about to, you will feel some form of this. You’ll hear yourself say “it’s just me” and feel yourself get smaller as you say it. You’ll lead with where you used to work because the new thing doesn’t feel big enough yet. You haven’t made a mistake. That flinch is corporate still living in your head, doing what it was designed to do.
The chip on your shoulder is real. The part that took me nine years to see is harder. You put it there. Your worth was always yours. You walked out the door with every bit of it, then packed it somewhere you couldn’t reach. The brand never had it to give back.
You could print a bigger card tomorrow. It wouldn’t touch this. Stop waiting for anyone to tell you you’re allowed in, and go find the table where everyone already knows.
Your move this week
Find the room where nobody has a logo. The peer group, the one founder friend who gets it. If you don’t have one, that’s this week’s job: find one person who’s building the way you’re building, and reach out. Belonging is built by you, not granted by someone else.
And the next time you catch yourself saying “it’s just me,” stop on the word “just.” Then carry on without it.
Where do you still feel small?
Hit reply and tell me. Skip the room you’ve conquered. Tell me about the one where you still shrink, still brace for the flinch, even with all your receipts. I read every reply, and I’m in it with you, same as you, flinch and all.
See you next Wednesday,
C
P.S. The reason this newsletter is called what it is, and why I think the smallest player in the room is rarely the weakest one: the lion and the mouse.
