Why Your Answers Make You Sound Smaller
When your leadership is strong but your language still sounds like support.
At a certain level, you start anticipating how they’ll misread you before you even open your mouth.
So you adjust. You stay close to the facts. You center the data. You lead with results.
Not because you lack range, but because you’ve learned that being too expansive makes people uncomfortable.
When asked to describe your role, you default to what’s safe.
So when someone says,
“Walk me through your role”
or “What have you been leading lately?”
You shrink it down.
You give them what’s clean. What’s digestible. What’s defensible.
You name what shipped. You list the deliverables. You point to what got done.
But in the process, the scale of your leadership disappears.
Because they’re not hearing the tradeoffs you navigated to stabilize what looks simple.
The tradeoffs you navigated. The chaos you stabilized.
The cross-functional mess you absorbed so the team didn’t fracture.
It’s not just about how you communicate.
It’s about how you’ve been conditioned to make your impact palatable.
You’ve learned to describe your work in ways that don’t trigger questions about whether you’re “too much.”
So when you talk about the work, it sounds neat.
But not strategic.
It sounds effective.
But not expansive.
It sounds exact.
But not like something that drives the business forward.
And that’s the disconnect.
Because at the executive level, scope isn’t what you do.
It’s what you hold.
The weight. The risk. The range of what wouldn’t move without you.
When you only speak to what got done, you erase what made it possible.
The pattern I see most often in women who unintentionally shrink their scope….
You narrate outputs, not orchestration.
You list what shipped, but not the thinking that shaped it.
So your role gets bucketed as implementation, not direction.
You describe activity, not complexity.
You talk about what you managed, but not how the pieces intersect.
So the work reads as volume, not value.
You frame your leadership as helping, not holding.
Even when you were carrying risk across multiple teams, it sounds like you stepped in not that you set the conditions.
And the longer you let that pattern run, the more it starts to shrink the way you see your leadership too.
Not because you doubt your value
But because the people who control comp, scope, and succession haven’t been handed the right version of the story.
You don’t need to say more.
You need to say it differently.
Not louder.
Smarter.
That’s what Positioned for Impact™ is for.
It’s a self-paced executive messaging system for high-performing women doing high-level work but still being read like middle-management support.
Inside, you’ll learn how to:
Reframe the language of your leadership
Articulate scope and strategic weight without over-explaining
Shift how you’re being read without changing how you lead
If your answers are technically correct but still sound too small for the level you operate...
Start here.
Explore Positioned for Impact™
From the positioning room,
Alicia