On the work of seeing yourself clearly, and why it’s harder than it sounds.

On a Friday morning in April, I sat down at a table at Junction Bakery, a local coffee shop I love, and did something I’ve never done before. I left my laptop at home. I ordered coffee. And I spent two hours alone with a notebook, trying to answer a question I’d been avoiding for years.

The question was simple: what do I actually do that other people can’t easily replicate?

I’m not naturally given to introspection. I’m an achiever who is more comfortable moving toward the next thing than sitting with what I’ve already done. But I had set aside the time for a solo quarterly retreat, and I’d committed to using it for this specific exercise: excavating the evidence of my own professional value across 30 years of work.

So I started writing. Not accomplishments. That list is easy and ultimately hollow. I wrote about moments. Specific ones. A room full of private airport screeners heckling a client, and a former Marine who found me afterward to say he was impressed how I’d gotten the room under control. A panel of partners and former generals who unanimously selected me during a high-stakes sales exercise, at a time when I thought I’d failed. A consulting partner who told someone else I was one of the best consultants he’d ever seen, not knowing I’d eventually hear it. A solo proposal I won on my 50th birthday that became the biggest contract of my career.

As I filled the pages, something unexpected happened. I started remembering what it felt like to be on top of my game, and how often I had dismissed it when someone tried to tell me so. I started realizing how often I dismiss feedback when I don’t feel I deserve it.

That’s a strange thing to sit with. The evidence was all there. It had always been there. And I had been quietly, consistently declining to accept it.

Here is the story I have told myself, in various forms, for years:

I’m just the stay-at-home mom who started something on the side. It’s not a real job.

I’ve been in business for myself for three years. I don’t have the long, unbroken resume. I moved into a new sector. I feel — and I mean feel, not know — that I have less to draw on than the people I’m competing with.

I know, rationally, that this isn’t true. I have 30 years of consulting and board experience, beginning at Accenture, followed by years of leadership at Eagle Hill and then nonprofit board leadership roles. I’ve worked with federal agencies, nonprofits, boards, and communities. I currently lead a complex, multi-year governance and organizational merger engagement for a large religious  denomination. I did that alone. I sold it alone.

That feeling seems ridiculous when I type those moments out.

But knowing something and feeling it are not the same thing. And for women who’ve taken a different path, who’ve stepped out of the workforce, or stepped sideways, or done the invisible work that doesn’t appear on a LinkedIn profile. For those women, the gap between knowing and feeling can be very wide.

I took a ten-year career break to raise my children. I’ve written about this before in broad strokes, the boards I joined, the skills I built, the return to consulting I eventually made. But there is a version of that story I haven’t told.

During those years, my children received multiple developmental and learning diagnoses. Dyslexia. ADHD. Each one arrived with its own weight, its own stack of appointments, its own insurance fights, its own sleepless nights trying to understand what this meant for my kids and what it would require of me.

I became a researcher. I found experts I could trust. I read books on how different brains work and how to explain a diagnosis to a six-year-old in a way that didn’t break something in him. I advocated, fiercely and constantly, in rooms full of professionals who knew more than me about the clinical details and less than me about my child. I exercised patience I didn’t know I had.

When I struggled with the question in my notebook at Junction Bakery — what did those years do for you as a professional — I teared up. Because the honest answer is: they built the best parts of me.

I have always loved people who are fiercely themselves. Quirky, unconventional, non-mainstream. But those years gave me something deeper than affection: they gave me a practitioner’s understanding of neurodiversity and how it shows up in every facet of human behavior. They taught me to extend the benefit of the doubt when someone shows up in ways that don’t make sense at first. They taught me to read rooms not just for power dynamics and content, but for what people are actually carrying.

I use this every day in my client work. I rarely name it. It has no credential attached to it. But it is real, and it is mine, and it does not appear on any resume I have ever submitted.

There is a particular kind of pain in being in a room full of accomplished people and feeling small, not because you lack capability, but because no one can see you clearly. Not even yourself.

I felt that pain often during the years I was home. I made a hard choice, for hard reasons. I was getting through real things with my kids. I wasn’t looking for reassurance about my future professional prospects. I wanted to be seen for what I was actually doing in the present. And too often, what I got instead was unsolicited advice: don’t stay home too long, or you won’t know what to do when your kids go to college.

The message underneath that advice, though I don’t think most people who said it meant it this way, was that the work I was doing didn’t count. That I was on pause. That the real version of me was somewhere else, waiting.

She wasn’t somewhere else. She was in a specialist’s waiting room. She was on hold with an insurance company. She was sitting next to a six-year-old trying to find the right words. She was becoming, without knowing it, someone who could walk into the most complex organizational moments and hold both the structure and the people at the same time.

By the time I closed my notebook at Junction Bakery, I had something I hadn’t expected: a statement. Not a list of credentials or a summary of services. A real answer to the question of what I actually do.

I help organizations navigate their most complex moments of change: governance transitions, mergers, leadership shifts. I build the structures they need and hold the human side of that change at the same time. I don’t hand off a report. I stay in the room.

I’ve known this about myself, in some form, for a long time. What I hadn’t done was look at the full body of evidence, across 30 years, across the coffee shops and conference rooms and children’s specialists’ offices. And let it land.

That’s the work I’m still doing. Letting it land.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. A lot of women I know, particularly women who’ve taken unconventional paths, who’ve done work that didn’t come with a title or a paycheck, carry the same gap between what they know and what they feel. We have the evidence. We dismiss it. We wait for some external validation that somehow doesn’t count once it arrives.

My retreat didn’t fix that pattern. But it interrupted it. For two hours, I looked at my work through other people’s eyes. The Marine’s, the generals’, the clients who said they wouldn’t be where they are without me. And I let myself see what they saw.

I came to Junction Bakery with a question I’d been avoiding for years. And I left with an answer I’d been carrying the whole time.

With love,

Kelly