Making Yourself Small: 5 Hidden Habits That Quietly Hurt You

Making yourself small rarely looks dramatic. She’s prepared. She knows her subject better than most people at the table. And when the moment comes, she softens her point, waits too long, or hands her idea to someone else before she’s finished saying it.

If that sounds familiar, this post is for you. It’s also the clearest way I can explain what I’m focusing on from now on.

The pattern I kept seeing

I’ve spent over 20 years in leadership development, first in corporate L&D and then as a coach and coach trainer. Across all of it, one pattern kept showing up in the women I worked with.

They weren’t short of skill or experience. They were making themselves small:

  • Editing themselves before they spoke
  • Preparing twice as hard and still feeling they didn’t belong
  • Apologising before making a point
  • Saying “we” when they meant “I”
  • Becoming who everyone else needed them to be, and losing track of what they actually wanted

It happens in the meeting room. It happens in pay conversations. And it happens at home, where ambition can come out sounding like an apology.

Making yourself small also hides in the everyday. It’s spending an evening over-preparing for a meeting you could walk into. It’s ending a clear point with “does that make sense?” It’s the “just” in your emails, the three paragraphs of justification behind a simple no, the idea you let someone else repeat and take. None of these feel like a big deal in the moment. That’s what makes them a habit. You stop noticing them, and the people around you stop noticing you. The good news is that anything you’ve learned to do can be noticed, and done differently.

None of this is new. Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first described the impostor phenomenon in 1978, after working with high-achieving women who doubted their competence despite their success. And research by Karina Schumann and Michael Ross found women apologise more than men, largely because they see more moments as needing an apology in the first place.

Why this is personal

I didn’t arrive here through theory. I moved from Turkey to the UK. I left a stable corporate career to retrain as a coach. For years I led and presented in a second language, in rooms where I wasn’t sure I’d be taken seriously. I built Biran Consulting from nothing, as a mother and a wife.

For a long time I treated my story and my work as two separate things. Then I asked the people around me what they’d want to hear me talk about, and almost all of them pointed at the same thing: how I rebuilt myself. My story isn’t separate from what I teach. It’s where it comes from.

What I believe

Confidence is learnable. Making yourself small is a habit you picked up for good reasons, usually to keep the peace, fit in, or be taken seriously. Habits can be noticed, understood and put down.

That doesn’t mean becoming louder or someone you’re not. It means taking up the space that’s already yours.

The new YouTube series

From today, I’m publishing short, practical videos for women who recognise themselves here. Each one is five to seven minutes and covers one thing: a pattern to spot, why it happens, a real example, and what to try tomorrow.

Live now:

  1. I left a stable career, moved countries, and couldn’t speak the language well enough to be taken seriously
  2. Signs you’re making yourself smaller than you actually are
  3. What to do in the 5 seconds after someone questions you
  4. How to find what you want to do in life (The Values Exercise that changed mine)

Coming 19 October: Why Women Say “We” Instead of “I” (And What It’s Costing Them)

After that, there’s a new video every fortnight.

Stay close

If you’d like each new video and a short note from me in your inbox, join my newsletter, Confidence Is a Habit. Sign up here.

If you’d like to work with me one to one, get in touch.

And if you know a woman who keeps making herself small, send her this. Sometimes it’s easier to recognise it in a friend first.