Your Silence Isn't Protecting You

I spent three years thinking about writing a book about professional women and the challenges we face.

I ended up writing a book about startups.

And honestly – it was harder. Not because I didn’t have the content. But because I didn’t feel comfortable writing about it publicly.

So I stayed silent. For years longer than I should have.

I shared this story this week at a fireside chat with the Alteryx Women & Allies ERG — a thoughtful, energizing conversation that reminded me how universal my experience really is.

Nearly every woman I talk with starts off believing that she doesn't have anything interesting enough to write about. This isn't an individual failing. It's practically pandemic. And like any affliction, it is something we need to work on recovering from.

If you have this affliction, you may be experiencing these three symptoms — each one a different version of the same silence.

1. You don’t realize what you know.

When you’re driving at 100 miles an hour focused on getting as much as you can done, time just slips by.

We've all looked up after weeks or quarters have gone by – and then looked back and struggled to articulate the impact we've had.

We develop our ability to do something and eventually become unaware of how we are doing it.

We start pattern matching. We call it instinct. And our skills stop feeling like skills and start feeling like common sense.

Psychologists call this tacit knowledge. From the inside, it feels obvious. What we're actually doing is confusing fluency with triviality. The fact that something comes naturally after doing it for a decade doesn't make it ordinary. It makes it earned.‍ ‍

The problem is that the “how” is stuck in your subconscious. It’s not that you don’t have something to write about. It’s just that you haven’t surfaced it yet.

The fact that something comes naturally after doing it for a decade doesn't make it ordinary. It makes it earned.

2. You’re focusing on the wrong audience.

When I started writing Sail to Scale, I imagined my most experienced peers reading it — and thinking, "this is so obvious, why did she bother?" Like a Jedi master, my publisher had to redirect me: those aren't the readers you’re looking for!

Just like a startup defining its ideal customer profile, I and my co-authors had to define our ideal reader. And they were founders and operators who hadn’t lived through the experience of scaling a startup over and over again like we had. They were still struggling with what we had figured out through trial and error.

For every latent writer, there are cities worth of people quietly searching for exactly what's in your head. To them, your expertise is not obvious; your silence is a loss they'll never know they had.

2. You’re afraid of being judged.

This one is real, and I won't minimize it. Putting your thoughts and opinions out there in the world opens you up to the best and worst of us in society.

Silence doesn't opt you out of being evaluated. Judgment is already happening. Silence just means you've handed that narrative entirely to someone else. Given the choice, I’d rather be judged by what I actually say rather than what people imagine about me.

Writing publicly is an inherently vulnerable activity. It requires us to reveal our experiences, and exposes where our ideas still have edges. But leaning into vulnerability is what forms our best leaders. It may drive judgment from some, but it forges trust from those that matter.

Silence isn't protecting you from judgment. It's protecting your expertise from the people who need it most.

Silence just means you've handed that narrative entirely to someone else.

Embracing Putting It Out There.

Not realizing what you know. Writing for the wrong audience. Fear of judgment. Three different symptoms, but one shared diagnosis: silence that feels like protection, but isn't.

According to The OpEd Project, women write fewer than 30% of op-eds, and men are quoted nearly 3X as often as women in major news outlets. That gap isn't a reflection of who has the expertise. It's a reflection of who's staying silent.

The expert stories we tell — or don't tell — shape the world's perception of who holds power, who has the expertise, and who gets to be seen as credible. Every time one of us stays quiet, that perception calcifies a little further.

So the next time you catch yourself thinking I don't have anything worth saying, stop that thought! It’s not that you don’t have something to write about. It’s just that you haven’t surfaced it yet. The act of trying to put your experience into words that others will read forces that retrieval.

That translation is hard. But what I've seen — in the women I've worked with through HiPower and beyond — is that the act of writing doesn't just communicate your expertise to others. It clarifies it for yourself.