The Smaller Version of You
A few years into her career at IBM and Deloitte, Silke Meixner was the perfect professional: tempered, measured, extra proper. It felt right, up until a teammate pulled her aside after a team dinner and delivered the sentence that put her whole professional identity into question.
"Oh. You were actually really fun."
She meant it kindly. Silke heard it as an autopsy report. Because the compliment wasn't really about the dinner. It was proof that the people she saw five days a week had absolutely no idea she was capable of being fun. She hadn't just been playing it safe at work. She'd built a version of herself so airtight that her personality had quietly suffocated somewhere underneath it.
I see this gap constantly in the executives I coach. The distance between who someone is and who their coworkers are actually allowed to meet. For non-native English speakers, that gap tends to be wider, and it's dug for reasons that make total sense on paper.
The Logic That's Quietly Wrecking You
The global professionals I work with are technically fluent. Often more grammatically precise than the native speakers around them, which is its own quiet tragedy because nobody has ever felt closer to a colleague because of their impeccable subjunctive. Their prep is thorough, and their results speak for themselves. And still, there's a second job happening underneath the real one: overthinking sentence structure, monitoring tone, worrying about pronunciation (you only need to pronounce “focus” as “f*ck-us” in a board meeting once to forever feel anxiety about it).
The logic isn't irrational. If English isn't your first language, precision feels like a life vest. If you've been underestimated before, formality feels like a coat of armor. If you've ever been the only “other” in a meeting, you know that particular vibration of alertness. The sense that everyone else gets a margin of error except you.
Here's the twist, though, and it's the one that took Silke years to actually believe. The armor doesn't protect the credibility. It's actually what's quietly eating it. Over-formalize long enough and you create distance, and people can feel that distance even when they can't name it. The very thing you're trying to protect, how seriously people take you, gets harder to hold onto, because nobody trusts a performance the way they trust a person.
"When I relaxed and shared more about myself," Silke told me, "I was able to connect with people on a deeper level.”
The Three-Legged Stool
Not long before we recorded this conversation, Silke had just come off a global executive call where she was, simultaneously, the only non-native speaker, the only woman, and the only person joining remotely. Three separate reasons for the nervous system to declare a state of emergency, stacked on top of each other.
She calls her way through it a three-legged stool.
Leg one is preparation.
Though not the nervous, over-rehearsed kind. It's doing the work deeply enough that you walk into the room already knowing, in your body, that what you have to say is useful. That sense of this is genuinely worth their time is the foundation. Skip it, and the other two legs don't hold anything up.
Leg two is reading the room before trying to move it.
Before any conversation with real stakes, Silke asks herself what filter the other person is listening through. Anticipation? Dread? Distraction? The words you reach for, the pace, the emphasis, all of it should answer to where the room actually is, not where you assumed it would be one day ago when you were rehearsing in your living room. This isn't a gift some people are born with. It's a skill she built intentionally.
Leg three is leaving space to receive, not just deliver.
She's honest that this one still trips her up. The urge to keep talking, to fill every silence with one more useful point, is strong and constant. But the pause, the moment you stop transmitting long enough to actually let a question land, is usually where the real conversation starts.
Notice what's absent from this whole framework: accent, vocabulary, grammar. The exact things most non-native speakers spend ninety percent of their anxiety budget on don't show up anywhere in it.
Small Talk, and the Death of the Script
Ask almost any executive I work with what terrifies them most and it isn't the boardroom. It's the three minutes before the meeting starts. Small talk doesn't translate the way sincerity does, so people prepare for it like a language exam: weather facts, sports scores, a rotation of pre-approved questions engineered to sound spontaneous.
Silke has run both experiments, the script and the real thing. Her verdict on the script is short, "It doesn't work."
What actually works is simpler, and harder, because it requires you to be paying attention instead of performing it. Someone mentions a trip, a hobby, a kid's soccer tournament, in passing, on the way to the actual agenda. Instead of nodding through it to get to slide one, she stops. Asks one real question. And then (this is the part people skip) offers something small and true about herself in return.
That last step is the most important. In American professional culture especially, it's the reciprocal detail that turns a question from an interrogation into a conversation. Curiosity without any self-disclosure back reads as scrutiny, not warmth, no matter how nicely it's phrased.
Cautious Authenticity
This is where Silke and I pushed back on something I think gets waved through too easily in most leadership advice, "Just be yourself."
It's incomplete advice, bordering on reckless. Full transparency is not always safe, so reading the room isn't a betrayal of authenticity. It's the more advanced version of it. Knowing exactly which parts of yourself to bring forward and when, without collapsing into either full concealment or oversharing.
I call it cautious authenticity. Not hiding. Not performing. Being deliberate about what you offer and when, and building enough safety that other people can do the same around you.
A small talk rule of thumb I always recommend is don't ask about personal details like someone's kids or spouse unless they bring it up first. What sounds like an innocent question might feel painful if it leads to experiences of fertility struggle, a separation or a grief that isn't public yet. The higher up you are in leadership, the worse that misstep lands, because your position changes what people feel safe telling you.
The Hippie in Corporate Clothing
Silke describes herself, only half-joking, as a hippie in corporate clothing. By day she leads digital transformation for organizations. Off the clock, she's involved in benevolent-AI initiatives and folds ancient wisdom traditions into how she approaches daily life.
By embracing her multitude of interests, she’s turned it into one of the sharpest tools in her leadership kit. The executives who stay fully three-dimensional at work, who let their real curiosities and odd passions show up next to their expertise, instead of leaving them at the door, build a kind of trust that an overly-formal professional persona simply can't manufacture. You can be impressive, but you can't be memorable without being, occasionally, a little unexpected.
What I actually work on with the executives who sit across from me has nothing to do with accent reduction or grammatical perfection. It's the gap, the one between who they actually are and who their colleagues have never been allowed to meet. That gap closes not by becoming someone new, but by finally quitting the job of performing a version of yourself that was always smaller than the real one.
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