By: Quyen Tran, Founder & Product Strategist (she/her)
“Who we are is how we lead.” – Brené Brown, Dare to Lead
I had pored over every document, every email, every workflow to prepare for this meeting. I was the youngest person in the room, leading one of the biggest projects at a Fortune 100 company. Millions of dollars were riding on it. And everyone at that table outranked me, VP of Sales, Directors of Marketing, CTOs, Creative Directors. My job was to tell them what we were going to build, what we were going to cut, and someone was going to be unhappy.
For a long time, I believed authority came with age, experience, or title. The loudest person in the room could make me doubt what I knew. I didn’t trust my own insight until it was earned, validated by someone with more years or a bigger title.
After the meeting, a VP I reported to sent me a message: “Quyen, there were a lot of personalities in that room, but you held your ground with patience and curiosity. Great job.”
Hearing those words made me realize that being the loudest person in the room didn’t quite matter. Authority came with having the willingness to listen, learn, and stand behind decisions.
It took me years to get there. Years of staying quiet and saying yes.
Prove you belong
Women in tech have long been handed an unspoken rule: prove you belong. We’re often the minority in a board room, a product team, a tech event. We prove we belong by taking on more to validate our worth. We disregard our needs as women, mothers and caretakers. We pretend our bodies run on the same cycles as men, when our hormones are literally screaming at us to stop. By performing belonging so we don’t appear different, we hide the most human part of us, that we have limitations, that we make mistakes, that we don’t always have the answer.
In a role where your authority depends on having the answer, the pressure to stay in control can be crippling. A missed detail, an uncertain moment, a question you didn’t anticipate becomes something to hide rather than something to work through. We sacrifice connection through our performance, which impacts the work we deliver and how our team operates.
When you hear the word “leadership”, you don’t often think about traits like belonging or vulnerability. Decisiveness and certainty are valued strengths. But the complexity of leadership is that we’re guiding people, and people are wired for connection. Researchers call it impression management: the instinct to control how others perceive us. When we show up as a carefully managed version of ourselves, we don’t build confidence in the room, we build armor. It looks like saying yes to everything so no one can question your commitment, and no to nothing so no one can question your ability. And that armor has a price. When people don’t feel safe to show up as themselves, they stop sharing ideas, stop taking risks, and stop contributing fully.
To run an effective team is to create the conditions where people feel safe and inspired to do their best work. We cannot create those conditions for others without creating them for ourselves first. That’s not a soft idea, it’s a business outcome.
Building psychological safety
Google’s Project Aristotle identified psychological safety as the most critical factor in team effectiveness. Teams that felt safe were more likely to take risks, voice unpopular opinions, and admit mistakes. In other words, they could afford to be human. A meta-analysis of 85 studies confirmed it: psychological safety increases idea generation by 25% and team performance by 30% (Zhu, Lv & Feng, 2022). The chain is simple: safety makes collaboration possible. Collaboration makes innovation inevitable. Because no one does their best work alone.
But you cannot build that environment from the outside in. Safety in a room doesn’t start in the room. It starts with the voice inside. The one that says you don’t know enough. That you’re not ready. That you don’t belong here. We all need safety mechanisms that allow us to hear ourselves over that voice, and discern what’s true from what’s just fear.
For some of us that’s creative practices, moving our bodies, or standing in nature, away from the noise. For me it’s yoga, writing, and meditation, where I can slow down and just be. These aren’t indulgences. They are the pockets of peace we return to so we can keep showing up whole, and most like ourselves.
Self-care is a non-negotiable for me now. I carve out two hours every morning to eat, move, and meditate, the only pocket of peace I have before the noise of the world starts leaking in. I still struggle with it. But it’s a practice of recognizing that I cannot show up as my best without feeling my best; that I am human, not a machine.
Leading yourself to change
I noticed the shift again years later, in my first year running my own studio. I took on every job, because I thought that was what new business owners do. You hustle. You earn your stripes. But very quickly, a familiar dread returned, the same feeling that led me to leave my corporate career. If I built this to get away from that feeling, why was it back?
When I finally had an honest conversation with myself about my capacity versus what I actually wanted, I realized I had to say no to the roles that felt familiar but weren’t right anymore. Those weren’t easy conversations. People had expectations of who I was and how I worked. “It’s no longer a good fit for me” felt as uncomfortable as learning that “no” is a complete answer. But when I stopped managing the perception of who people wanted me to be, I could finally be the version of myself I actually am. The room changed. Not because I had more capacity, but because I stopped pretending I could do it all. When a leader stops managing perception, she gives everyone else in the room permission to do the same. People show up with more parts of themselves, and ideas start moving.
When we know what makes us feel safe, we can begin to create that for others. Not by having it all figured out, but by being someone who is honest about what she knows, what she doesn’t, and what she needs.
Find your container. Then walk into every room you lead as that person.
Quyen is a Chapter Lead for our Orange County chapter, a founder and product strategist, and you can find her at on LinkedIn and her website. Currently building her dream company, Gentle World, a product studio helping health and wellness startups and businesses build digital products and scale thriving communities. Passionate about creating a more interconnected world that prioritizes well-being.