You Were Never Too Much

By Carole Lawson, Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

Before we begin, I’d like to dedicate this to two exceptional women on our executive team who will be celebrating birthdays around the time this post is published. Both have demonstrated what authentic leadership looks like: leading with confidence, integrity, empathy, and a willingness to be fully themselves. Their impact reaches far beyond titles or accomplishments. They make the people around them better. This piece is dedicated to them with gratitude and admiration.

Happy Birthday.

Somewhere along the way, many women begin to believe they are too much. We are told we are too opinionated, too ambitious, too emotional, too intense, too direct, too sensitive, too driven. We hear these messages often enough that they stop sounding like someone else’s opinion and begin sounding like our own.

• We start editing ourselves before we ever speak.

• We soften our opinions or apologize before asking a difficult question.

• We’ll smile when we’d rather disagree.

• We’ll celebrate quietly so we don’t seem too proud.

• We’ll dream privately because our own ambition seems like we are overstepping boundaries.

• We learn to occupy less space, not because anyone explicitly asked us to, but because we’ve practiced becoming smaller for so long that it feels natural.

The most difficult part is that this doesn’t only happen in marriages or romantic relationships. It happens in our friendships and in our families. It happens in workplaces even when we reach the boardrooms. If we are being truthful, sometimes it even happens between women. Any environment that values comfort over authenticity can slowly teach us that belonging requires becoming a smaller version of ourselves.

What we tell ourselves matters

As I have watched this myself, I have come to believe that the greatest loss isn’t when someone else tells us to shrink. The greatest loss is when we begin telling that to ourselves.

No one has to silence us because we have learned to silence ourselves. We become our own editor. Before anyone can question whether we are asking for too much, we quietly decide not to ask. Before anyone can call us difficult, we choose to remain silent. Before anyone can suggest we are intimidating, we diminish our own accomplishments. Over time, the external voice becomes an internal one.

I don’t believe this begins because women are weak. I think it begins because we are human. Every one of us wants to belong. Every one of us wants acceptance. We want to be loved, respected, included, and valued. There is nothing wrong with that desire. The problem comes when acceptance becomes more important than authenticity.

From a young age many girls are taught, sometimes intentionally, often unintentionally to measure themselves against the “-est.” The prettiest. The smartest. The funniest. The nicest. The most accomplished. The most selfless. The comparison changes as we grow older, but the habit remains. We spend our lives trying to determine whether we measure up to an invisible standard that is always moving. The tragedy of comparison is that it never allows us to become ourselves. It only allows us to measure whether we view ourselves as better or worse than someone else.

The truth is there will always be someone who is younger, wealthier, more accomplished, more charismatic, or more beautiful. If our worth depends upon winning those comparisons, then we have chosen a game we can never truly finish. Perhaps that is why so many women spend years trying to smooth away the very qualities that make them distinctive.

The woman who asks deeper questions begins apologizing for being “too intense.”

The woman who sees possibilities others miss starts believing she is unrealistic.

The woman who speaks honestly worries she is intimidating.

The woman who feels deeply wonders if she is too emotional.

For me, it looked a little different. I was always the one who thought around corners. The one who connected dots that other people didn’t see. The one who was told she was overthinking, overanalyzing, or simply out of touch with reality. For a long time, I wondered if they were right. Still, when small anomalies emerge around me, I can’t help myself; I have to know why.

This is who I am

I have become a data scientist and researcher, and as such, my work has never been about accepting what “everyone knows.” In fact, those are often the moments that make me most curious. If everyone knows something to be true, I want to understand why. I want to see the underlying evidence for myself. That often means spending hours or days reading research papers, patents, technical documentation, obscure publications, and executive interviews that most people never see. Sometimes the answers aren’t found in a single source. They emerge only after hundreds of seemingly unrelated pieces begin to form a pattern.

For example, several years ago, I started noticing subtle changes in Google’s products and public messaging. Individually, none of them seemed particularly significant. But taken together, they pointed toward something much larger. Between technical announcements, executive interviews, product releases, and shifts in user behavior, I began to see a company redefining its identity. I was seeing that Google was beginning to identify not as a search engine that sent people to websites, but as a platform increasingly designed to answer questions itself.

At the time, AI-generated answers were just beginning to appear. I remember telling people that what we were witnessing wasn’t simply another feature. It was the beginning of the end of search as we had known it. The click through to a company’s website would become less central because Google itself was becoming the destination.

Most people thought I had lost perspective. I heard things like “Google is and will always be a search engine”, “People will always click through that is why they search”, or “You’re reading too much into it.” There were moments when I questioned myself too. Maybe I was connecting dots that weren’t really there. Maybe I had spent too much time looking for patterns, but here we are. I don’t do this just with technology. I do this all the time whether I want to or not.

Yes, I know this example is specific to me. My guess is that there are things in yourself which are outliers when compared to others around you. These things can make you stand out, sometimes it can feel like in the most awkward way. These are the areas where we are the most judgmental of ourselves. We all want to fit in so much that these differences as something to hide.

What I’ve come to realize is that my greatest contribution has never been seeing what everyone else already sees. It has been noticing patterns while they are still forming. That perspective doesn’t always make sense in the moment. It feels misunderstood at best, most often it feels lonely. I’ve learned that just because other people can’t yet see the picture doesn’t mean the pieces don’t exist.

It is OK to lean into who you are

So, let me ask you this:

• What if those qualities we are so judgmental about in ourselves were never flaws?

• What if they were fingerprints?

• What if the very parts of ourselves we’ve spent years questioning are actually the clearest expression of the gifts we were given to contribute?

Every person possesses characteristics that make them unmistakably themselves. Those outlier qualities, the parts that don’t quite fit neatly into everyone else’s expectations, are often the very things that become our greatest strengths. They are the source of our creativity, our leadership, our compassion, our courage, our insight, and our resilience. Even so, those are often the first things we hide. We spend years shaving off our edges because we mistake uniqueness for deficiency. The question we rarely ask ourselves is “Why is that our goal?”

I’ve come to believe the goal we should reach for isn’t to become easier for everyone else to understand. I believe the goal is to become recognizable to ourselves.

That realization changes the question entirely. Instead of asking, “How do I fit into this room?” Perhaps we should be asking, “How can I be in this room and allow myself to be fully myself?” Those are not the same question. One assumes that we must change to belong. The other asks whether belonging should require changing at all.

Becoming real with yourself

There is a quiet freedom in reaching the point where you no longer need to be the prettiest, the smartest, the funniest, or the most successful. You no longer need to win someone else’s competition because you finally realize it was never your competition to begin with. All you need is to be fully you, and that is enough. Not because you have become perfect, but because perfection was never the assignment.

Some people will still misunderstand you. Some will find your confidence uncomfortable. Others will mistake conviction for arrogance or passion for intensity. Those reactions belong to them. They are not reliable measures of your worth.

My mother-in-law could walk into any room and absolutely own it. She had a sense of self that inspires me to this day. She used to say “What other people think of you is none of your business. What you think of you, that is your business.” She had a freedom to be true to herself I have rarely seen in anyone else.

The real question is not whether other people think you are too much. The real question is whether you have been living as less than yourself in order to make other people comfortable. If the answer is yes, perhaps today is the day you let that go.

I am not talking about becoming louder for the sake of being heard. It is not about proving anything to anyone. It comes by quietly deciding that you will no longer negotiate away pieces of yourself in exchange for acceptance.

The truth is you were never too much. You were never meant to become smaller. The fullest version of you has been there all along, patiently waiting for the day you decide that fitting in is no longer worth the cost of disappearing.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm