She set out to fix how her team saw her. The real work was elsewhere.
Nadia — Senior Manager
“I basically feel like no one on my team respects me right now.” Nadia said it plainly, a few months into a role surrounded by the most senior, hardest-charging engineers in her org—people who moved fast, spoke bluntly, and treated a dropped ball as entirely yours to own. She had a new baby, a nagging sense that she was bluffing her way through competence, and a plan to fix how the whole team felt about her.
Nadia’s background wasn’t engineering. It was education, nonprofit work, writing—she led people and built the conditions for teams to do their best work. Which is exactly why the reframe mattered. What she read as not belonging was the difference between belonging and fitting in; you don’t earn belonging by betraying your own values. The exhaustion she took as proof of incompetence was one battery drained by crisis and self-judgment. And the traits she’d filed under “weakness”—over-attending to everyone’s feelings, trying to fix the whole system—were real strengths she was simply overusing in the wrong moments.
The work was concrete. We excavated her actual values, the ones already visible in her past, so she could aim her life at those and feel the friction drop. We built regulation she could reach for in the moment—a breath, a pause—because the feeling always fired first, and only then could the rational part of her mind reframe it. We flipped her stance on proving herself: instead of performing competence, let it show itself by sinking into the work she was genuinely good at. We dropped the project of managing how her team felt about her, and picked the one thing that actually mattered each day. And when she caught herself measuring up against a colleague she found dazzling, we practiced doing it honestly in both directions—no gaslighting, but no forgetting her own strengths either.
What changed: she moved to a new team energized instead of defeated. She rewrote a piece of self-disclosure she’d dreaded as “branding” into something that was really about owning her worth. In her own words, she was still climbing the rock face—but for the first time she could see the top, and that vision was what let her keep going.
This is the work. If it’s yours too: