Somewhere along the way, you learned to make yourself smaller. Maybe it was the meeting where your idea got credited to someone else. Maybe it was the family dinner where your opinion sparked conflict, so you stopped sharing it. Maybe it was years of being told you were "too much" until you became not enough—at least, not enough of yourself.
Group settings have a way of triggering that shrinking reflex. The room fills with voices, and yours retreats. You have something to say, but you wait. You edit. You soften. You add qualifiers like "I might be wrong, but..." or "This is probably a dumb question..."
That stops now.
When you dim yourself in groups, you're not responding to the actual people in front of you. You're responding to every person who ever made you feel like your presence was a problem. Your nervous system learned that visibility equals danger, so it protects you by making you invisible.
Here's what's wild: the threat usually isn't real anymore. You're not that little girl at the dinner table. You're not the new employee afraid of losing her job. You're a grown woman with experience, perspective, and something worth contributing.
But your body doesn't know that yet. It's still running the old playbook.
Recognizing this changes everything. When you feel yourself shrinking—shoulders curling in, voice getting quieter, words dying in your throat—you can pause and ask: Am I actually unsafe here, or am I just remembering what unsafe used to feel like?
Most of the time, the answer is the second one.
Playing small doesn't keep you safe. It keeps you stuck.
Every time you swallow your words, you reinforce the belief that your voice doesn't matter. Every time you let someone else take credit, you train yourself to expect invisibility. Every time you laugh off your own idea before anyone else can, you beat them to the punch of dismissing you.
And the people around you? They believe what you show them. If you treat yourself like you don't belong at the table, they'll agree with you.
The cost isn't just professional—though yes, women who advocate for themselves get promoted more, get paid more, and get taken more seriously. The cost is personal. It's the slow erosion of knowing who you are and what you think. It's the exhaustion of performing a smaller version of yourself for decades.
You weren't built for that. Nobody was.
This isn't about becoming someone you're not. It's about peeling back the layers of who you pretended to be and letting the real you breathe.
Speak in the first five minutes. The longer you stay silent in a group, the harder it becomes to break that silence. Say something—anything—early. Ask a question. Agree with someone. Make a small observation. Your voice in the room normalizes your voice in the room.
Drop the qualifiers. "I think maybe we should consider possibly..." No. Try: "We should..." or "Here's what I'm noticing..." or even just "I disagree." Your ideas don't need a disclaimer. State them like they matter, because they do.
Take up physical space. Uncross your arms. Put your hands on the table. Don't perch on the edge of your chair like you're ready to flee. Your body language tells everyone—including yourself—whether you belong there.
Let there be silence after you speak. Shrinking looks like filling the awkward pause with nervous laughter or immediately backpedaling. Expanding looks like saying your piece and letting it land. Silence isn't rejection. It's processing.
Stop managing other people's comfort. Women especially learn to smooth things over, soften edges, make sure nobody feels threatened by their competence. That's not your job. Your job is to be honest, be kind, and be yourself. If someone feels uncomfortable because you have opinions, that's their work to do.
Some women avoid taking up space because they're afraid of being seen as arrogant or aggressive. There's a simple distinction that might help:
Arrogance says: "I'm better than everyone here." Confidence says: "I belong here as much as anyone else."
You're not trying to dominate the room. You're just refusing to disappear from it. There's nothing aggressive about having thoughts and sharing them. There's nothing arrogant about believing your perspective has value.
The discomfort you feel about being seen? That's the old programming talking. The people who told you to be smaller were wrong. They were protecting their own comfort, not looking out for yours.
The first few times you speak up without apologizing, it will feel strange. Your heart might race. You might want to immediately undo it, add a "just kidding" or a self-deprecating joke.
Don't.
Sit in the discomfort of being visible. Let people see you. Let them respond to the actual you instead of the carefully edited version you've been presenting.
Some people won't like it. Those aren't your people.
But others will lean in. They'll respect you more. They'll remember what you said. They'll ask for your opinion next time. And slowly, you'll start to trust that your voice has weight—not because everyone agrees with you, but because you stopped waiting for permission to use it.
You spent years learning how to shrink. Unlearning it won't happen overnight. But every time you choose to stay full-sized in a room that expects you to be small, you're rewriting the story.
The women who change things aren't the ones who wait to be asked. They're the ones who show up and speak like they have every right to be there.
Because they do. And so do you.
Wear Your Power.
OK Tease Co. is a modern women’s apparel brand rooted in purpose, confidence, and intentional storytelling.
Stillwater, Oklahoma
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