the skill that was never taught
how long have you been pretending the answer isn't the answer?
It’s halftime. Our final game of the season. Our coach is yelling at us, telling us to pull it together and play better. I sit there confused — we’ve dominated the entire first half and the score is still 0-0. In soccer this means we’re one good moment away from exactly where we want to be. But our coach isn’t responding to how we’re actually playing. His head has been elsewhere since the moment he showed up for warmup. Convinced we were going to lose. Now we sit here listening to him angrily narrate a game that doesn’t exist. And I look over and the sophomores — the girls for whom this is literally their last game ever, as they won’t move onto Varsity — are crying. Tears streaming down their faces. I’m confused. Everyone else seems to believe what he’s saying, taking it to heart, letting him beat us down before the second half even starts.
Am I the only one living a different reality here?
I’ve extensively studied every chart there is about myself. Human Design, Astrology, Gene Keys. Values assessments. Career assessments. Akashic record readings. I’ve re-listened to my recordings. I’ve combed through my notes over and over again. Maybe this time I’ll see something different?
I tell myself each time that I’m learning more about myself — and I am — but honestly there isn’t much new. Some part of me keeps hoping one of them will point somewhere different. Will give me permission to be a different kind of person than the one I already know I am.
They never do. Every single one comes back to the same thing. There’s no escaping it.
I just keep avoiding naming it boldly.
I even find myself hesitating to type it. I am an intuitive business strategist at heart. At my core. Always. Strategist, consultant, advisor, mentor, problem solver, leader. I have a particular ability to see what’s actually happening underneath — the roots that connect it all, the currents running beneath every meeting and decision that may not be visible above ground yet.
For years, I would see something and assume it was obvious to everyone else, that people knew but weren’t willing to say it. I would wait until it was ripping at the seams, desperate to be named. Then I’d finally find the confidence to say it. And I’d say it to the person who actually had the authority to address it.
It often doesn’t land well. It lands like a mirror. A confrontation with the hard thing they deep down know is true but aren’t yet ready to face. They may dismiss it, tell me to think smaller, push back with false hope. I leave it be.
And then it happens exactly the way I said it would. And then they thank me.
I was 14, a freshman. I stood up, walked across that field, and pulled my coach aside. I told him he’d had an attitude since warm-ups. That his energy was ruining the last game for the seniors. That we needed him as our coach. To encourage us, pump us up, send us into the second half ready to win.
He did not receive it well. He walked to the parking lot pouting, refusing to coach us. He sulked while we played without him.
We won. I assisted the game-winning goal. A few weeks later he found me in the hallway: I’m sorry. Thank you for saying what I needed to hear. He even brought it up again at my senior graduation banquet.
That story has repeated itself more times than I can count.
The manager who flatly disagreed when I said we were about to have a full multi-department reorganization — we reorganized within two weeks and he came back asking who on the exec team had tipped me off. No one. The walk down a SF alley where I told my manager he needed to stop running small markets on Zoom calls and actually show up for the one he kept calling the highest priority. He defended his focus and shut me down. He pulled me aside a few days later: you were right, we’re handing off the smaller markets, I’ll be here with you. The strategic questions leadership kept dismissing, each one pointing at the same thing — what is product actually doing? I finally wrote it in an email. Asked plainly whether our new COO was ready to take a stand against product leadership. In less than five days, the co-founder heading product stepped down.
Every time. I see it. I say it. It lands wrong. Then it happens. Then someone thanks me.
For a long time I let this be a hidden feature. I’d take an ops role, a product role, an associate director title, whatever — and the real work, the real impact, would show up sideways. I’d be in the middle of building something, planning a launch, discussing strategy, mapping timelines, and suddenly I’m the person in the room naming the thing that’s been blocking everything. The thing no one wanted to say. The thing people weren’t sure they could agree with — because agreeing with it means there’s more work than anyone wanted to admit. A bigger overhaul than feels safe. A challenge to the story the business has been telling itself.
Sometimes we prefer to ignore the thing, hoping it isn’t true.
But here’s what I’ve learned: the read that feels so obvious to me is often genuinely hard for others to connect. The dots aren’t visible to them the way they are to me. And yet — once named, it changes everything. The direction. The momentum. The tension in the room.
So I kept doing more assessments. More chart re-reads. Hoping for a different answer. (I spent 2+ years testing that question across six companies.) Because some part of me thought the real answer was too much. Too direct. Too hard to package. Too risky to lead with. So I’d tuck it underneath something more legible — operations consultant, fractional operator, product systems person, I used to thrive in chaos — and let the real skill reveal itself once I’d earned enough trust to say it out loud.
But if we’ve learned anything from this particular skill, it’s that when you know something to be true and avoid saying it, the tension only builds. It festers. It waits.
So today we name it, and we own it.
The skill was never going to change. It has always been me. It is not taught. It is innately, entirely me. The charts were never going to point somewhere new — they were just giving me different languages for the same truth. And the life I’m supposed to be building is the one where I stop hiding the most useful thing I do inside something more comfortable to explain.
Something I’ve been building is almost ready. It has a name now. I’ll tell you Friday.
The readings were right. They were just waiting for me to agree.
What’s the thing every assessment, every mentor, every person who knows you well keeps pointing back to — and how long have you been pretending it’s not the answer?