The pattern has a name now. It also has an origin, and it did not start with you.
Keshia’s grandmother used to say it at every family gathering: “Don’t get too big for your britches.” It was never said with cruelty. It was said with love, the way people pass down the rules that kept them safe in a smaller, harder world. In Keshia’s hometown, a place where everyone’s business became everyone else’s business by Sunday dinner, staying modest was not a virtue. It was survival. Visibility invited scrutiny, and scrutiny in a small town could cost you more than a promotion.
Keshia carried that rule into a Senior Manager’s office in a Columbia, South Carolina health system thirty years later, and it was still running the show.
The Hidden Expert pattern she named in the Visibility Check did not begin in her career. It began at a dinner table. This is true of nearly every leadership pattern I have encountered in a decade of executive coaching. The pattern has a start date, and the start date is almost never the workplace.
The stories that kept you safe at twelve are rarely the same stories that will get you promoted at forty-six. Most leaders have never stopped to ask which decade they are still operating from.
The Research Behind the Rule
Psychologist Dan McAdams’s research on narrative identity offers language for what Keshia experienced at that dinner table. McAdams’s life story model holds that people construct a sense of identity by internalizing the stories told about them and around them, weaving those stories into a narrative that then governs how they see their own possibilities (McAdams, 2001). A child who hears “don’t get too big” repeated across a decade of holidays does not simply remember the phrase. She builds an identity around it.
This is also the terrain that the original research on the impostor phenomenon mapped nearly fifty years ago. Clance and Imes’s landmark study of high-achieving women found that many capable, credentialed professionals privately attributed their success to luck or overwork rather than ability, and lived with a persistent fear of being exposed as frauds despite consistent external evidence of their competence (Clance & Imes, 1978). The women in that study were not lacking evidence of their own capability. They were carrying an inherited story that no amount of evidence had yet overwritten.
Rather than remain isolated, you can choose to stand alone. In standing alone, you reach out and engage with others.
From Practical Leadership: Lessons Learned from Mickey, by Tracy R. Powell.
Marcus Has One Too
It would be easy to read the last section and conclude that inherited stories are a women’s issue, tied to modesty norms placed on women in particular. They are not. They are a leadership issue, and they show up differently depending on which rules a person was handed.
Marcus, the colleague who was promoted to Vice President over Keshia, grew up with a different inheritance. His father told him, more than once, that a man handles his own problems and does not go around asking other people to solve them for him. It was meant as a lesson in self-reliance. In practice, it became a rule that Marcus has never once asked a mentor for direct, structured feedback on his leadership blind spots, even now, three months into a role that has stretched him further than he expected. He is visible in every meeting. He is also, by his own admission in a recent coaching conversation, quietly terrified of being asked a question he cannot answer, and he has no practiced way of saying so.
Research on masculine socialization backs up what Marcus described. A review of the sociocultural literature on help-seeking found that traditional masculine norms actively suppress emotional expressiveness and discourage men from acknowledging struggle, which in turn makes it harder for men to seek the feedback, mentorship, and support that leadership development depends on (Möller-Leimkühler, 2002). Marcus’s visibility got him the title. The same inherited story that produced his confidence is now the thing standing between him and the kind of leadership growth the role actually requires.
Keshia’s pattern and Marcus’s pattern look nothing alike on the surface. Underneath, they are the same mechanism: a childhood rule, absorbed without ever being chosen, still quietly running a career decades later.
The Leader Who Already Rewrote Hers
Keshia found a useful counterpoint in Dr. Renata Cole, the VP of Clinical Services two floors up, a woman Keshia had always assumed simply arrived confident. Over coffee, Dr. Cole told her a different story. She grew up being told she talked too much, asked too many questions, wanted too much. She did not stop wanting. She spent her thirties, by her own account, deliberately unlearning the idea that wanting more made her ungrateful. The VP title did not erase her inherited story. It sits alongside evidence that the story was never true to begin with.
Dr. Cole’s presence in that building matters for a reason beyond mentorship. She is proof that the ceiling Keshia has been quietly negotiating with is not structural in the way it feels late at night. Someone has already stood where Keshia wants to stand, carrying a similar inheritance, and put it down.
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou, as featured in The Leadership Journal, by Tracy R. Powell.
Naming the Origin, Not Just the Pattern
Identity conflict, the term I use throughout my coaching practice, describes exactly this gap: the distance between the story a leader inherited and the leader she or he has actually become. Closing that gap does not require rejecting where you came from. Keshia does not need to stop loving her grandmother or her hometown to stop operating by a rule that no longer serves her. Marcus does not need to abandon self-reliance to learn how to ask a mentor a direct question.
What both of them need is the same thing: to trace the pattern back far enough to see that it was handed to them, not chosen by them, which means it can also be examined, tested, and in most cases, quietly set down.
That is the work ahead for both of them, and it is the work most leadership development conversations skip entirely in favor of tactics. A workshop can teach someone to speak up in a meeting. It cannot, in an afternoon, undo three decades of dinner-table conditioning that made speaking up feel dangerous in the first place. That deeper work takes longer, and it asks more of a leader than a slide deck of best practices ever will. It asks her to sit with an uncomfortable question: whose voice is actually running my career right now, mine or someone else’s, inherited a long time ago and never once reexamined?
Tactics without origin work tend to fade within a quarter. Origin work, once done honestly, tends to hold. Keshia is only beginning to ask whose voice has been running hers. The answer will determine whether the next chapter of her career looks different from the last four years, or simply repeats them with better vocabulary.
Your Story Has a Start Date
Take the free Visibility Check for Leaders to identify your Identity Conflict Type and begin tracing it to where it began. Then schedule a complimentary strategy call and begin the work of visible leadership.
Keshia, Marcus, and other individuals referenced in this article are composite characters created for illustrative purposes. They do not depict any specific current or former Hidden Brilliance client.
References
Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice, 15(3), 241-247.
McAdams, D. P. (2001). The psychology of life stories. Review of General Psychology, 5(2), 100-122.
Möller-Leimkühler, A. M. (2002). Barriers to help-seeking by men: A review of sociocultural and clinical literature with particular reference to depression. Journal of Affective Disorders, 71(1-3), 1-9.
Powell, T. R. (2016). Practical leadership: Lessons learned from Mickey. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Powell, T. R. (2024). The leadership journal. Hidden Brilliance.