When my kids were little and someone asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, they said things like astronaut. President. Movie star. And we clapped. We told them yes, absolutely, you could be anything. Then they got older, and somewhere between elementary school and eleventh grade, most of us learn to stop playing small in our imaginations and start playing it safe in real life instead.
Then they got older. High school came, and it was time to get practical. Somewhere between elementary school and eleventh grade, we stopped asking our kids what they dreamed of and started asking what they were realistically going to do. We told ourselves we were protecting them. We were really just teaching them to think smaller.
I did this too. With my two oldest daughters, I steered them toward practical majors, toward careers where I knew people could actually make a living. By the time my youngest was getting ready for college, I was a different mother. I had learned things in the years between. I told her to follow the scary dream, the opera degree, even knowing how hard it is to make a living as a singer. I regret that I didn’t do that for her sisters. I was doing the best I knew how at the time, but I know now that I was the one who taught them to bring it in.
The Guidance Counselor
I have a story I haven’t told in a long time.
In tenth or eleventh grade, I sat across from my school guidance counselor and told him I wanted to be a chiropractor. I wanted my own practice one day.
He looked at me and said absolutely not. That wasn’t going to work. I was too small.
I never went and asked a real chiropractor if that was true. I never questioned it. I just believed him, put the dream in a box, and closed the lid.
I think about that girl sometimes. I think I could have been a good chiropractor.
How I Stopped Playing Small
I didn’t open that box again for almost forty years.
When I started working with coaches in my late fifties, they would ask me what I wanted, and I would answer with goals. Numbers I thought were achievable. Things I was fairly sure I was allowed to want. I never said the big number out loud. It felt terrifying even to think it.
Then one day a coach looked at my list and said no. What do you actually want. Not what’s safe. What scares you to say.
And for the first time in decades, I said the real thing.
It didn’t feel comfortable. It felt like handing someone the guidance counselor’s voice and asking them to prove him wrong. But I kept saying it, out loud, over and over, and I wrote it down somewhere I would see it every day. And slowly it got easier. The dream stopped feeling like a stone I was turning over in secret and started feeling like something I was allowed to want.
Two Questions Worth Asking Yourself
If you are ready to stop playing small, here is what I want you to sit with.
Was there someone in your life who told you that you were too small for something? A guidance counselor, a parent, a teacher, someone whose opinion carried weight at exactly the moment you were deciding what was possible for you. Did you ever go back and check if they were right? Or did you just believe them, the way I believed mine, and quietly put the dream away?
And the harder question. Are you still doing it to yourself? Is there something you have never said out loud, not to a friend, not to a coach, not even to yourself in the mirror, because saying it would make it real, and real means it could be tested?
You do not have to announce it to the world today. Just say it to yourself. Write it down somewhere you will see it every morning.
It Changes What You Wear
Something else happens when you stop shrinking your dreams.
It changes what you put on in the morning.
When you are hiding, even the goals, even the big audacious ones, you dress like you are hiding too. The same black. The same gray. The same safe outfit that blends into a room instead of announcing you are in it. You do not have to buy a single new thing to start changing that. You just have to start noticing what you already own differently.
Pull the piece with color to the front of the closet instead of the back. Wear the blazer that makes you stand a little straighter. Put together the outfit that makes someone look twice, using clothes you already have, worn with the decision that you are done blending in. There is actual research behind why this works, something called enclothed cognition, the idea that what you wear does not just change how people see you. It changes how you think and how you carry yourself. Your clothes are not decoration. They are a daily practice of the size you have decided to be.
When you start saying the real dream out loud, you will find yourself looking at your closet differently too. Not because the clothes changed. Because you decided to stop playing small, and your closet finally caught up.
There Is Joy in the Journey
I am sixty-one now, and I will be honest, I feel like I am in a hurry. I spent so many years not chasing these dreams that some days I want all of it right now.
But I am learning something else too. There is joy in the work itself. There is joy in taking the next step, even the small ones, even before you know if you will ever reach the giant, audacious, terrifying goal at the end. It is thrilling just to feel yourself becoming the woman you always imagined. Whether or not you ever arrive completely, the becoming is not nothing. The becoming is the whole point.
Bring the thing out of the box. Say it out loud. Stop playing small and start finding out what happens when you don’t. You get to decide, right now, whether you believe the guidance counselor or whether you believe yourself.
If this resonates, I made something for you. It is called Stop Making Yourself Smaller: A Guide for Women Who Are Ready. You can get it here.
— Beth