Are you tired of being 'the nice one'?
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Click here to get your free AI Hacks For Academics Guide 〰️
So many women—especially high-achieving women in academia—have been taught, explicitly or not, that it’s our job to make things easier for others. To be helpful and nice.
So we soften our feedback. We anticipate needs before they’re spoken. We say yes when our whole body is saying no. We rewrite the same email a dozen times, just to make sure no one misunderstands.
It makes sense because we care deeply. We want to help. And we’ve learnt that being thoughtful and attentive earns us safety, acceptance, and at some point, success.
But sometimes, it comes at a cost.
Not because we’re doing it wrong, but because we’re human. Because our emotional bandwidth is not infinite, and it gets spent quickly when we're running mental scripts about everyone else’s feelings and reactions.
This is over-functioning. It’s what happens when we take on the unspoken job of managing others’ emotional states, just to avoid discomfort, rejection, or being seen the wrong way.
But what if it’s not your job to make sure everyone else is comfortable?
What if it’s okay to be misunderstood sometimes?
What if your value isn’t in your ability to smooth everything over, but in your ability to stand grounded in your own truth?
Managing others’ experience can look like:
💬 Pre-loading our conversations with disclaimers
🙋♀️ Saying yes to yet another request, even when we don’t have the time
✂️ Editing ourselves so much, we forget what we were trying to say
🛡️ Trying to shield our students from disappointment because we care so much about their growth.
These habits often come from love, from care and from a desire to do things well.
But they can also keep us small. They can cost us time, energy, and the clarity we need to move powerfully in our work and lives.
So here's a gentle invitation:
What might it feel like to let someone else sit with discomfort, and trust that they can handle it?
What might open up if we allowed ourselves to be seen fully, even imperfectly?
What would we have space for, if we stopped trying to carry everyone else’s reactions?
This is the work of growing capacity. Not by pushing harder, but by untangling ourselves from roles we were never meant to hold.
