The silent trap of the "Humble Professional."

Raise your hand if you were raised to believe that you need to let your work speak for itself, that you need to show, not tell, — that you can't be a show-off, you have to be humble, modest. That's me. If you're similar to me, most likely you were raised in a cultural background that was non-Western. And so what happens is we bring this identity, this belief that we have about not showing off, not talking out of line, to our adult workplace lives. And what ends up happening is we don't speak up. We don't share our opinions. ideas, and we become invisible in the workplace. But here's the truth that you need to understand. If you are not visible at work, if you're not sharing your perspective, your ideas, your insights, people simply will not know the value that you bring. You're doing all this hard work, you're going into the forest, chopping down trees, gathering the logs, and putting them in the fire pit, but never actually building the fire, never lighting it up. People will not be able to feel your warmth, they will not feel your impact, it's just an empty log-filled fire pit. You do not want to be doing this when it comes to your work. You want to make sure that if you are doing something, that you talk about it. You don't want to hide behind your work. People do not know what you're up to unless you talk about it, really.