It Started with Dolly Parton
Fifth grade.
A classroom assignment.
A teacher I really liked.
Pick a famous person you admire and tell the class why.
Simple enough — unless you’re a quiet, reserved kid who wasn’t particularly star-struck, didn’t follow music, and couldn’t think of a single person to choose. I sat there turning the question over and over in my head and coming up empty. Time was running out.
So I did what any kid in a pinch might do.
I leaned over and asked the kid next to me.
He said Dolly Parton. Her songs are about real life, he told me. It sounded reasonable. I didn’t know much about Dolly — I’d heard the name — but the explanation made sense.
I went with it.
When my turn came, I stood up, took a breath, and said:
“My favorite famous person is Dolly Parton.”
I didn’t get to the why.
The room erupted.
The entire class.
The teacher too — probably laughing more at the laughter than at me, but still. I stood there, confused, humiliated, and for a few long seconds I didn’t even know what was funny. It wasn’t until several kids made a very unmistakable gesture that I understood I’d been set up.
I got over the joke eventually.
The feeling of standing in a room, unprepared, exposed, and wrong — that took considerably longer.
What That Classroom Did to My Voice
Here’s what I carried out of that room and into almost every room after it:
If you don’t have a perfectly formed thought, keep your mouth shut.
Not as a conscious rule.
More like a reflex.
A low hum in the background of every meeting, every class, every moment where I might be called on to say something before I was absolutely certain it was right.
The fear wasn’t really about being wrong.
It was about being caught mid-thought. About saying something unpolished and watching the room react — even in my imagination — the way that fifth grade classroom did.
So I stayed quiet.
And here’s the painful irony: I often wasn’t quiet because I had nothing to say. I was quiet because I had too much at stake in how it came out.
That’s perfectionism’s sneakiest disguise.
It doesn’t always look like redoing something seventeen times or refusing to submit until every detail is flawless.
Sometimes it looks like a hand that never quite makes it into the air.
A thought that waits so long to be spoken that someone else says it first.
A voice that goes underground not because it has nothing valuable to offer, but because it isn’t willing to risk being imperfect out loud.
The Meetings Where I Went Silent
For years, this played out in meeting rooms.
I would sit with an insight — sometimes because I knew more than others in the room, sometimes simply because I was closer to the situation and had connected the dots faster — and I would hold it. I’d turn it into a private question in my head, test it, refine it, make sure it was airtight before I considered saying it out loud.
By the time I felt ready, the moment had often passed.
Or worse — someone else would say it, less precisely, and the room would move on, and I’d sit there knowing I’d had the same thought twenty minutes earlier and swallowed it.
The Dolly Parton reflex, showing up in a boardroom decades later.
What I’ve come to understand — and what I see constantly in the women I work with — is that this isn’t really about perfectionism in the traditional sense.
It’s about what we believe will happen if we’re caught being human in a professional space.
If we stumble.
If we’re wrong.
If our thought is half-formed and someone notices.
We treat the possibility of imperfection as a reason to disappear rather than a normal part of thinking out loud.
The Shift: From Self-Protection to Responsibility
The thing that finally started to loosen the grip wasn’t a confidence seminar or a mindset shift or someone telling me to believe in myself.
It was other people.
When I moved into management and started leading a team, something changed.
I began speaking up in rooms not because I had suddenly conquered my anxiety, but because I felt responsible for the people who weren’t in the room.
My voice stopped being about me — about whether I’d sound smart enough or say it perfectly — and started being about representation.
About making sure a perspective that mattered was heard.
That reframe changed everything.
And then something else happened — what I can only describe as slow exposure therapy.
The more I spoke, the more I saw that my voice wasn’t just tolerated.
It was useful.
Sometimes it was the most useful thing in the room, precisely because I had information or context that others didn’t.
Not because I was more clever.
Because I was closer.
The fifth grade fear didn’t disappear.
It just stopped running the show.
I still feel it sometimes — a flicker of that old pull, the voice that says wait until it’s perfect.
But now I recognize it for what it is:
An old reflex trying to protect me from a classroom I left a long time ago.
Your One Question
Think about the last time you had something to say and didn’t say it.
Not because you had nothing to contribute.
But because it didn’t feel ready enough, certain enough, polished enough yet.
Now ask yourself this:
Was I protecting myself — or was I protecting my idea from being human?
Because here’s what perfectionism actually costs us in those moments.
It’s not the embarrassment of saying something imperfect.
It’s the cumulative silence of a voice that had something real to offer and kept waiting for the perfect moment that never quite arrived.
Your half-formed thought is often more valuable than you think.
And the room — the right room — can handle it.
I found How Women Rise early in my coaching career and recognized myself on too many pages. I’ve pressed it into the hands of more women than I can count since then. Now, with some real miles behind me, I’m revisiting a few of those habits — this time with receipts.