When did you last downplay something you were genuinely proud of, the second someone noticed it?
You called it luck. You mentioned the referral instead of the result. You said “it’s not that big a deal” before anyone even asked you to explain.
I’ve caught myself doing the exact same thing more times than I can count. And I can tell you the year it started.
The exam I still remember
I was in fourth grade. I got a 96 on a test I had studied hard for, and I was proud of it in the uncomplicated way kids are proud of things, before they’ve learned to hide it.
A friend asked how I did. I told her.
Then I heard her, a few feet away, telling someone else I was a snob for bragging.
That was the whole lesson, delivered in one sentence from a nine year old. Being good at something was fine. Being seen owning it was not.
A pattern with two rules
I didn’t have language for this until much later, but the rule I absorbed that day has run underneath almost every business decision I’ve made since. It has two parts, and they work against each other.
The first rule: don’t stop until you’re further along, because you’re never quite finished enough to rest.
The second rule: don’t own what you’ve already done too loudly, because that makes other people feel small, and small people don’t stay close to you.
Never enough. Also too much. At the same time. I call this performative humbleness, and once you can name it, you start seeing it everywhere, including in your own sentences.
I disqualified my own first six figures
I hit six figures in my business years ago. I remember the exact conversation with a mentor where it came up, and I remember exactly how I said it.
“Yeah, but I didn’t really do that. The client who put me over the line came from a referral, not from my own marketing. So it doesn’t really count.”
I had built the offer. I had done the work with every client before that one. I had earned that referral by being good at what I do. None of that mattered to me in the moment, because the win had a small asterisk I could point to, and the asterisk was the only part I would let myself talk about.
A number I have never said out loud until now
Here’s a more recent version of the same pattern. I was preparing for an introduction to a potential client a few weeks ago, and I did something I had never done. I actually counted.
I have personally been behind the success of more than five hundred businesses.
I have been coaching women to millions in revenue for years. I have never told that story publicly, and I have never shown up online the way that number deserves, for the same reason I disqualified my six figure month. Saying it out loud felt like too much.
This is not only my pattern
I see this constantly in the women I work with. A friend of mine, also an entrepreneur, grew up in a family where the men ran the businesses and the women kept the house. She learned early that her opinions were something to soften, not state. She’s done real work to find her voice again, because you cannot run a business without one.
A client of mine has never raised her rates in four years, for reasons that have nothing to do with the market and everything to do with not wanting to seem like she thinks too highly of what she offers.
Different origins. Same rule underneath. Never enough. Also too much.
What performative humbleness actually costs you
Here’s the strange part. Nobody wants to hire an expert who can’t state plainly what she does and why it matters. Confidence is not the opposite of humility. It’s often the thing that lets a client trust you enough to say yes.
So the pattern that was supposed to protect you from being seen as too much quietly costs you the sale that never closes, because you left the offer to a follow up email instead of saying it out loud on the call. It costs you the stage moment you let slide instead of naming exactly who you help. It costs you the higher caliber client you never attracted, because you were never visibly claiming what you’re actually worth.
You can’t point to a line on a spreadsheet for what a disqualified win costs you over ten years. But you can probably feel it.
The rebellion is celebrating on purpose
I think we break this pattern by doing the exact thing I was told not to do in fourth grade. We own it. Out loud. On purpose. While we’re still moving forward, not after we’ve arrived somewhere final, because nobody ever fully arrives.
Make it physical. A jar, a sticky note, a running list in a notebook you actually reread. It doesn’t matter which one. What matters is that the win leaves your head and becomes something you can hold, because if it only lives in your head, it’s too easy to quietly take back.
Read it back to yourself later. Let the evidence build. You’re allowed to be proud of what’s already true, even while you keep building the next thing.
This is exactly the kind of thing I built the Design Room to hold. Not just the strategy and the systems, but the parts of running a business nobody says out loud in a normal room. A place to say the number you’ve been sitting on, and have it land as fact, not as bragging.
If that’s the room you’ve been missing, book in a chat to see if there’s a seat waiting for you.
Katrina Cobb is a Business Architect for women founders generating $300K to $1M+. She helps leaders redesign the architecture of their business, lifestyle, leadership, and identity so growth feels spacious, sustainable, and deeply aligned with the life they actually want. Explore her work at katrinacobb.com.