My father gave me two things the day I got into Brown.
A piece of advice. And a cell phone.
(It was 1999. You know what's not a cool way to make a first impression in college? Disrupting the orientation seminar with random beeping because your parents are calling.)
The advice: "Don't become pretentious."
As a leader educated in the East, he had spent his career in proximity to Ivy-educated peers. He had watched pretension and status get in the way of good work. His edict was simple: you earned your place — get a good education, but don't let that be permission to be elitist.
I carried that as a value for decades. Nothing I hate more than pretension. Still true.
But somewhere along the way, anti-pretension and not-claiming-achievements became indistinguishable. I stopped being able to tell them apart.
The thing about a value that becomes a habit is that you stop checking whether they're still the same thing.
Humility is a value. Not claiming your work is a habit.
I didn't notice when one became the other.
I've been watching this same pattern in the leaders I work with for years. High-achieving people who can narrate their accomplishments but don't really feel or register them. Who can list what they've done but say it "never feels like enough." The list grows. The feeling doesn't change.
The humility that served you socially — the instinct to not overclaim, to not stand out, to not take up more space than feels safe — is confiscating something professionally: the ability to name what you bring, claim your pattern, tell the room what it's looking at.
You can hold humility as a value and still articulate your leverage. Those are not the same move.
The research confirms the cost. A University of Notre Dame study found that leaders who display humility are perceived as less competent, independent, and influential — even as their warmth and care for others increases. The researchers called it a double-edged sword.
What the study doesn't capture — but what I keep watching play out — is the quieter version. Not leaders who actively display humility, but leaders who have internalized it so deeply they never learned to claim what they've built. They show up in rooms having done the work. They don't show up with language to make it legible.
One client — an award-winning, board-certified physician and national medical director — was serving as the clinical anchor for a digital health product. Her name, her judgment, her stamp of credibility. The company had been treating her feedback like a formality. When I asked her what she was actually bringing to the table, she paused, then said: "I'm the one putting my stamp on what you're trying to build here."
She was. She just hadn't been taught to claim her full value, in words, before.
What have you been calling humility that might actually be something else?