What’s Wrong With Me
Apr 28, 2026“What’s Wrong With Me?”
The question brilliant women ask when the real problem isn’t them.
I sat with two women this week.
Both researchers. Both accomplished beyond what their quiet demeanor would suggest. Both working inside one of the most prestigious technology organizations in the world. Both asking — in different ways, with different words — the same question.
What’s wrong with me?
One of them had watched her manager ignore her contributions in team meetings — not occasionally, but consistently. When she spoke, he pivoted. When she asked questions, he looked elsewhere. When she finally challenged him directly about a paper he had been sitting on for six months — a paper that represented months of her work and directly affected her path to promotion — he didn’t respond. He simply moved on to the next topic.
Until her male colleague asked the same question. Then he answered.
She knew what had happened. Her body knew. Her inner voice knew. But when she came to our coaching session, the question she brought wasn’t why is my manager doing this? The question she brought was what am I doing wrong? Maybe I’m asking the wrong questions. Maybe I’m too soft. Maybe I’m not assertive enough. Maybe I’m too sensitive.
She was looking for what was wrong with her as a way to make meaning of behavior that was simply inexcusable.
The second woman had a different presentation. Confident. A little guarded. Skeptical of coaching — she told me so directly in the first five minutes. She had spent seven years at a data-driven organization where decisions were made on evidence and anyone could ask questions. She had moved to a culture where decisions were relationship-based, where firefighting was rewarded over fire prevention, where the people who got the most visibility were the ones who looked most like the people already in power.
She was a fire preventer in a firefighting culture.
Methodical, thoughtful, built for the long game. And she was surrounded by people who couldn’t see the value of that — because they were too busy running toward the next emergency to notice that she had quietly prevented three.
She wasn’t asking what’s wrong with me in the same raw way. She had armored over that question with a layer of competence and skepticism. But it was there underneath. In the way she had started adapting her behavior to feel safe with her manager. In the way she was considering doing things verbally instead of in writing so she wouldn’t push too hard or offend someone who wasn’t treating her with the same care.
She was shrinking. Just more quietly than she realized.
I want to speak directly to both of these women — and to every woman who recognizes herself in either of them.
You are not too sensitive. They are insensitive and disconnected.
You are not too soft. They are dismissive.
Your voice is not the problem. The room is the problem.
And here is the hardest truth of all — the one that took me years to understand in my own life and work:
When you keep asking what’s wrong with me in a room that is failing you, you are doing to yourself what that room is doing to you. You are dismissing your own knowing. You are overriding your own truth. You are calling your evidence a feeling and your certainty a sensitivity.
Your inner voice knows. It has always known. The question is whether you are willing to trust it.
Both of these women had thrived before. The first had professors who saw her brilliance and supported her growth — and she flourished. She had a manager who asked about her development, advocated for her when she wasn’t in the room, and helped her build a case for her own future — and she flourished again.
The second had spent seven years in a culture that valued what she brought. And she flourished.
The difference wasn’t them. It was never them. It was whether the environment around them had the capacity to see what they actually were.
This is what I know after twenty years of sitting in rooms with leaders, teams, and women navigating exactly this:
You cannot perform your way into being seen by someone who has decided not to see you.
You cannot be strategic enough, assertive enough, visible enough, or loud enough to manufacture the kind of recognition that comes from someone who is genuinely curious about your growth and invested in your future.
What you can do — what I watched both of these women begin to do in the space of a single conversation — is stop looking for what’s wrong with you.
And start listening to what your inner voice has been trying to tell you all along.
That voice is not anxiety. It is not overthinking. It is not sensitivity.
It is your truth. And it is the most reliable information you have.
If you recognize yourself in any of this — if there’s a version of “what’s wrong with me” that you’ve been carrying — that’s where this work begins. Not with a strategy. Not with a plan. With one honest conversation about what you already know.
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