She was a VP of product at one of the world's leading e-commerce platforms. She was so good that she accomplished her way into running a $850 million P&L.
When I asked her what she did, she said: "I'm the product person."
She was confident - this wasn’t false modesty. But she said it the way you'd describe the color of your kitchen, i.e. something so familiar it stopped registering as interesting a long time ago.
Like a scratchy record, her brain literally skipped the part that made her a GM-style product lead, or in the tech world, the metaphorical equivalent of a unicorn.
There's a phrase I keep coming back to: you swim in the sea of yourself.
The water you've been moving through for decades doesn't feel like anything to you. It's just there. But to someone standing on the shore, watching you move through it effortlessly — it's remarkable.
The thing you bring that AI can't replicate is usually the thing you've stopped being able to see. Not because it's gone. Because you've had it so long it stopped announcing itself.
This is not a confidence problem. It's a proximity problem. The closer you are to something, the harder it is to name it. My client wasn't underselling herself. She was doing something more common — and more costly: she was describing the water.
Senior leaders are extraordinarily bad at naming their own leverage. The research is striking: 43% of senior executives report struggling with impostor syndrome, according to Korn Ferry's 2025 Global Workforce Survey. Nearly half. At the highest levels of organizations.
But that statistic is usually framed as a confidence issue — something to address with the right mindset or the right coach.
What I see is something different.
It's not that leaders don't believe in themselves. It's that they've never had to develop language for what they bring — because for most of their career, the institution did that work for them. The title said what they were worth. The scope said where their judgment was needed. The org chart made the case so they didn't have to.
That structure is shifting. And in the gap, a lot of leaders are discovering they don't have words — their own words — for the thing they've been doing all along.
The archaeology metaphor is useful here: what you're looking for isn't something new to build.
It's something already there, waiting to be named.
The question isn't what do you want to be known for.
It's: what have you always been, that you've never been asked to put into words?