Why do I downplay my achievements? The discomfort of owning your success

Someone tells you that you did an amazing job. What’s your first move? If you’re anything like me, it isn’t “thank you”. It’s “oh, it was nothing”, or “I had a lot of help”, or “I was just in the right place at the right time”. We take a genuine compliment and immediately explain it away, as if accepting it would be some kind of theft.

I wanted to talk to Felice Ayling about this because she has thought about it more than most. She spent more than 20 years in marketing, rising through the corporate ranks until she realised she was, in her words, a little bit dead inside from having to play the game. Since leaving, she has built Loud Women, helping female founders promote their businesses online with confidence and, as she puts it, just a little touch of audacity.

She also knows what it costs to spend years downplaying what you’re good at. When she finally started showing the corners and edges she’d smoothed down to survive corporate, it was those parts — not her awards or expertise — that connected people to her. Her business only took off once she stopped performing a smaller version of herself.

Why do I downplay my achievements?

In our conversation, Felice describes the reflex perfectly. A woman with a successful business says “I was just kind of lucky, it was just timing”. Someone is told they did an amazing job on a pitch and responds with “yeah, but so-and-so did a lot of that work”. The compliments get deflected before they can even land.

I recognised myself in all of it. I call things “just a little thing I’m doing on the side” until I’ve half forgotten my own career history. And recently someone wrote publicly about work I’d done, said lovely things, and I found myself digging a hole and hiding rather than acknowledging it. Felice says that’s common: when the recognition is public, other people are watching too, and the fear of being seen and found lacking kicks in on top of everything else.

The uncomfortable question she poses in her workshops is this: how would it feel to say “thank you, I agree”? Most women tell her they would never. We can just about manage gratitude; agreeing feels forbidden. The compliment is treated as a gift we didn’t earn, and accepting it as fact would make us, in the phrase we all know, full of ourselves.

Why do I need everyone to like me?

Felice’s answer to where the people pleasing comes from is that it starts before we can speak. Little girls with big ideas get labelled: bossy, pushy, too much, a handful. Boys showing the same behaviour get called leaders. She also points to recent research on girls with ADHD being missed for years, partly because they’re so good at masking — a skill we reward in girls long before anyone names it that way.

Being likable is rated far higher for women than for men, and it carries straight through school, work and adulthood, quietly taxing our confidence and self-worth along the way. The rules are never written down, but every one of us seems to know them: don’t show off, don’t be difficult, don’t make anyone uncomfortable, tick all the boxes before you put your hand up.

The words that keep women small

I told Felice about being told I didn’t have enough gravitas for a role, and letting that one word run my confidence for the next two or three years — even though I didn’t actually want the job, and even though later interviews described me as exactly the kind of charismatic leader the word was supposed to measure. She says the word is doing exactly what vague words do: it means something specific to the person using it, but it’s generic enough that they never have to give you real feedback. The goalposts just keep moving.

There is research behind this. In 2014, the linguist Kieran Snyder collected 248 performance reviews from 180 people across 28 tech companies for Fortune. Critical feedback about personality — words like abrasive, bossy, judgmental and strident — appeared in 76 per cent of the critical reviews given to women, and in 2 per cent of the men’s. As Felice puts it, unless you want to argue that 76 per cent of women behave badly and only 2 per cent of men do, there is bias built into the system.

You can see the double standard anywhere you look: huge companies built by men everyone agrees are difficult, still described as visionaries, while women are expected to be nice, kind and caring and driven and decisive, all at once. It is difficult to win, because the judgment lives in somebody else’s head.

The game is rigged. You can still choose how you play it

This is the part of the conversation that stayed with me. Felice doesn’t sugarcoat it: women at work are often told the reason they’re not progressing is that they don’t know how to ask, or need to stand differently, speak differently, negotiate like a man. She calls that advice what it is — an attempt to turn women into small men — and points out that it ignores the awkward fact that women do ask and don’t get what they ask for as often.

But she is equally clear that a rigged game doesn’t make us victims. Understanding how the game is played is different from deciding there’s something wrong with you. A lot of what gets handed to women as “feedback” has nothing to do with you and nothing you could change — it’s somebody else’s bias looking at you through a lens. You can take useful feedback on board without being an open book for anyone to write on.

Her advice is to know your own talents and skills well enough that outside noise can’t rewrite them, and to do your own reading so the patterns become visible. Once you can see the bias, it acts as a shield. Not every criticism deserves a place in your head.

“She’s so full of herself” — reclaiming it

Who else am I supposed to be full of?

That’s Felice’s answer to the accusation, and it’s the line I keep coming back to. This is what confidence without arrogance actually looks like. Think of yourself as all the space inside you. If you’re not allowed to fill it, other people will fill it with their projection of what they want you to be — often people you don’t even like or respect. Self-abandonment, keeping the peace, not rocking the boat: it squashes out the person underneath, along with the money we could earn and the impact we could have.

And the standard being used to judge us doesn’t exist. As Felice says, there is no agreement on what a good woman is. Trying to get through life without anyone disliking you is a fruitless and thankless task, and it might cost you some people or a promotion at a company that wanted you smaller. What it buys you is being seen, liked and loved for who you actually are — and the people you gain when you stop masking are a different kind of people.

The one bad feedback form

Felice runs a thought experiment in her workshops. You deliver a session to 20 people. Nineteen feedback forms say they loved it. One says they didn’t. Which one are you lying in bed thinking about? And more damagingly, which one are you rewriting the whole session around next time?

One negative comment can be all it takes to change how a woman shows up in her business for years. I told Felice about a comment someone made to me four years ago that stopped me doing something entirely — it has genuinely cost my business money, and I’m only now clawing myself back. Meanwhile the 19 good forms are nowhere in the room.

How to stop downplaying your achievements

• Say thank you. Not “this old thing”, not “it was nothing”. Just thanks, I appreciate that.
• Separate what is objectively true from what is somebody’s opinion of you. Felice’s filter: if someone isn’t feeding you, financing you or in a relationship with you, their opinion of you is none of your business.
• Claim the win out loud. “I’m really good at this and I can help people” — without the “but I’ve got a great team” or “it was just timing” that follows us around.
• Notice when your body says no while your people-pleasing mouth says yes.
• Get comfortable with the first time. It’s always the hardest; everything after it gets a little easier.

Be brave in community

Felice gets less than 5 per cent negative interactions online, and she turns the trolls into content, which feels like a satisfying Uno reverse. The statistical reality is that most people you meet online will either ignore you completely or be nice to you. The catastrophe we imagine rarely shows up.

Her rule on feedback: ask people who are brave and who don’t shrink, because people who shrink will encourage you to shrink too. And don’t follow the old advice to never be the loudest person in the room — find yourself a friend who is louder than you are.

Start by playing

If you don’t know who you are any more after years of adapting, Felice’s starting point is permission to try things and change your mind. Test things out for fit. Build safe spaces with other women, even a few. Go down the rabbit hole of books, podcasts and research, and borrow the language of women who have already described what you’re feeling — that moment when someone finally puts words to the thing that’s been nagging at you is worth more than another round of self-help advice.

She started her own visibility journey on TikTok under an anonymous account, a safe place to play. That led to conversations about the corporate hangover, which led to Michelle, who wrote the book on good girl deprogramming, who is now one of her closest friends. They host a podcast together every Friday and are running a retreat with eleven women. None of it was planned. It fed itself, because she started showing up out loud.

Everything I have loved in my own life has been on the other side of “shit, I’m a bit scared of doing this”. Felice says the women who look like they got lucky mostly say the same thing: they weighed it up, felt as ready as possible, and then it was just a big “fuck it, let’s do it”. Close your eyes, hit publish, and have a safe space to run to when all you want to do is delete everything you just said.

Listen to the conversation with Felice on Why Aren’t We Talking About This? — and if you caught yourself saying “it was nothing” this week, that’s the thing to practise.