The Hidden Cost of Playing Small Right Now

I’ve been speaking at a lot of events lately, from women-in-business events at universities to non-profits to STEM organizations. While each speaking engagement has a diverse audience and age range, each with unique skill sets, I see a common thread, most often among women in the workplace. 

Many women are not trusting their leadership capabilities. 

What’s alarming to me is that, not only do I see this in existing leaders, who have been in the workforce for decades, but I’m also witnessing this in our young emerging leaders, the ones who are ready to step into their careers.  

Here’s a recent example: one of my clients, let's call her Marla. She had been sitting in a meeting for forty minutes, watching her team circle a problem she'd already solved. She'd figured it out twenty minutes in, turned it over in her mind, and felt confident in her solution. But she said nothing. "Just in case I was wrong," she told me later.

After the meeting, she pulled her supervisor aside and walked him through it. He said it was good thinking, and two days later, he presented the idea himself. And got the credit for bringing the idea forward. 

That's her Inner Critic at work, telling her to stay quiet and let someone else take the risk and carry the idea forward.

She already had the competence; the skills weren't the issue. So we used her next session to explore that internal voice instead. We didn't judge it. We got curious about the default thoughts holding Marla back, and we explored whether reclaiming credit for her own idea was even worth it to her.

I don't want to sugarcoat this. Playing small comes with costs at any point in your career, and those costs are adding up quickly right now

The confidence gap is widening

75% of female executives report imposter syndrome, compared to 33% of men. Lean In's 2024 research found that 60% of women stay silent in meetings specifically to avoid being perceived as aggressive. 

There is a pattern behind all of this, and I call this the Confidence vs Competence Gap.

Women downplay their abilities; men amplify theirs. And nowhere is this clearer than in hiring. Harvard Business Review found that men apply for a role when they meet around 60% of the listed qualifications. Women wait until they meet 100%. Highly competent women are routinely absent from candidate pools because they've already ruled themselves out. 

When things feel uncertain, this gap widens. Because women are more likely to feel the effects of imposter syndrome, they’re more likely to hear their inner critic yelling, ‘You’re safe where you are! Work harder, ask for less, make yourself useful!’ 

And so women do exactly that, and burn themselves out in the process, which makes it even harder to access the resilience needed to get through chapters like this one.

The voice that's keeping you stuck

The Inner Critic isn't there to purposely hurt you. It was built to protect you, scanning for risk and urging caution. The problem is that it can't tell the difference between actual danger and a meeting where you have something to say.

The American Psychological Association found that women's inner critics activate at twice the rate of men's under leadership stress. York University research shows that Canadian women score 25% higher on perfectionism scales than men, a finding directly linked to burnout.

The Inner Critic is telling us that now is not the time. That we should wait until we’re more ready. Or more established. 

It feels like we’re protecting ourselves when we listen to that voice in our head because, at one time long ago, we were doing just that. 

But every meeting where you let your idea pass, every role you didn't put your name forward for, every conversation where you softened your position to avoid friction: those moments accumulate. 

The instinct to shrink ourselves small feels like self-preservation. Often, it's accelerating the exact outcome you're trying to avoid.

What you can actually do about it

The confidence gap is not entirely your problem to solve. The system does penalize women for behaviours it rewards in men, and no amount of inner work changes that architecture. 

If you've ever been told to just believe in yourself more, I understand why that felt like hollow advice.

But if we focus on what we CAN do, we can stop the system from getting a head start before you even walk into the room.

The research on imposter syndrome points to one consistent finding. The voice loses power when you name it. You don’t need to fight with it, you certainly shouldn’t ignore it. You just need to call it what it is. 

• When you’re holding yourself back from putting forth an idea: "That's my imposter syndrome."

• When you’re not applying for a job because it feels unsafe at this moment: "That's my imposter syndrome."

• When you wonder why you should be considered for a promotion: "That's my imposter syndrome."

Make it something separate from you, because it is. The voice of your Inner Critic is a passenger, and you don’t need to listen to what it has to say. 

Sarah still works with that supervisor. She spent several months after that meeting wrestling with whether speaking up was worth the risk, whether the culture would actually receive her differently, and whether she was the problem or the place was. 

She concluded it was mostly the place, and she started looking for a different one while continuing to show up fully in the one she had. She brings her ideas to the table now, out loud, in the room where decisions get made. 

The imposter syndrome didn't disappear, but she stopped letting it be the loudest voice in the room.

Taking a step forward 

That's exactly what Champion Women is designed to do. It's a program built for women who are done losing ground to a voice in their heads that never tells them the truth. 

Over the course of the program, you'll develop practical tools to silence the inner critic when it matters most, rebuild the confidence that economic uncertainty has been eroding, and position yourself for the advancement opportunities you've been talking yourself out of.

If you are ready to do that work, you can learn more and enroll at changechamp.ca/champion-womens-program.