I was told I talked too much as a kid.

Which is funny, considering I now charge people to sit in a room with me and answer my questions.

I was curious, outspoken, and had a lot to say. I was also a teacher's pet, and someone who learned pretty early that being helpful, agreeable, and easy to get along with made life considerably simpler. I could blend in.

What I didn't understand at the time was how easily other people's observations could become my beliefs about myself.

I didn't have the emotional vocabulary to recognize that I felt misunderstood.

I just figured I was difficult.

I remember a particular incident in high school when a teacher reprimanded me for talking during his lesson. He asked me to repeat what he'd just said, presumably to prove I hadn't been paying attention. 

So I repeated it. Almost verbatim.

He grabbed my desk, and slid it away from the people I was sitting with.

I was furious.

I walked out of class and refused to return for the rest of the week.

Not exactly my finest example of conflict resolution, but I stand by the fact that I was listening.

The irony is that I was a good student. I respected my teachers. I wanted to do well.

I also had a mouth on me.

And apparently, those things weren't always compatible.

The art of becoming less yourself

At some point, I think I just learned to say less.

Not because I had less to say, but because I became increasingly aware of how other people responded when I said it.

I got good at reading the room. Anticipating reactions. Making sure other people stayed comfortable.

I could advocate for someone else without much hesitation. While advocating for myself was another story.

By the beginning of my career, the kid who once refused to return to class after being reprimanded had become an adult who struggled to raise her hand during staff meetings.

That's quite a transformation.

And not one I'd recommend.

I think I confused being liked with being acceptable. Being agreeable with being respectful. And being misunderstood with being wrong.

It took me years to recognize how much of myself I'd edited out of conversations before anyone else even had the chance to respond.

Apparently, asking questions is challenging authority

As I became more confident professionally, something interesting happened.

I started speaking up again.

I noticed patterns. Identified potential problems. Connected dots that weren't always obvious to everyone else.

And I asked questions.

A lot of them.

I wasn't particularly interested in doing something a certain way simply because that's how it had always been done. Actually, it was usually the exact opposite.

You can imagine how well that went over in some leadership meetings.

I was often told, quite directly, that we were going to do something a particular way because leadership said so.

I remember thinking that this wasn't a particularly compelling explanation.

But I also remember how quickly that old feeling returned.

Maybe I was being too difficult.

Maybe I asked too many questions.

Maybe the speed or the way my brain worked was the problem.

It's remarkable how easily an adult can return to a childhood belief when the circumstances feel familiar.

The supervisor who got curious

One of the supervisors I initially clashed with eventually became one of the people I respected most in my career.

She later told me she hadn't been sure we'd be able to work together successfully.

Fair enough. I suspect I wasn't always the easiest person to supervise.

I imagine that rather than continuing to interpret my questions as criticism, she started getting curious about me and wanted to understand how I thought.

I believe that she recognized that when I pointed out a potential problem, I wasn't necessarily questioning her competence. I was trying to help us avoid a problem before it became one.

I wanted our team to succeed. I wanted her to succeed.

And she made room for that.

But here's the part that matters: I had some learning to do here, too.

Just because I could see where something might be heading didn't mean everyone else could follow my thinking.

And just because my intentions were good didn't mean my communication was always effective.

I learned to ask questions differently. Sometimes I needed to ask a question before offering my own perspective. Sometimes I needed to listen longer. Sometimes I needed to recognize that the other person wasn't being deliberately obtuse simply because they weren't seeing what I was seeing.

That professional relationship changed both of us and we now laugh and joke about it. Most recently, I realized that somewhere around this time- that I stopped assuming that being misunderstood meant I needed to explain myself louder or better.

Imagine that.

Curiosity is an underrated emotional intelligence skill

I'll argue this one all day. There might even be a future Ted Talk in me.

We talk a lot about emotional intelligence. Self-awareness, empathy, emotional regulation, social skills.

But I think curiosity deserves a much bigger place in that conversation.

Because curiosity interrupts assumptions.

And assumptions can do an extraordinary amount of damage to relationships.

We decide someone is difficult when they're trying to understand. We interpret disagreement as disrespect. Or even assume someone is criticizing us when they're actually trying to contribute.

And sometimes we're so busy defending our intentions that we forget to consider our impact.

I've been on both sides of that.

One of the more humbling things I've learned is that two people can experience the exact same interaction and walk away with completely different stories about what happened.

Both can feel absolutely certain they're right.

Both can have something worth understanding.

That doesn't mean every opinion deserves agreement. Or that we need to tolerate disrespect in the name of being open-minded.

It means we can be curious without surrendering our perspective.

And it needs to go both ways.

Because I spent a considerable part of my life managing other people's comfort at the expense of my own.

I don't consider that emotional intelligence anymore.

I consider it something I learned to do to belong.

Turns out, I wasn't meant to be particularly agreeable

I eventually burned out working in the nonprofit sector.

And while I wouldn't wish that experience on myself again, it forced me to reconsider some things.

Including how much of my professional identity had been built around being useful, accommodating, and willing to carry more than was mine to carry.

I became an entrepreneur.

I built a psychotherapy practice where I could be intentional about how I worked, the relationships I developed, and the kind of support I wanted people to experience.

And somewhere in that process, I realized something rather amusing.

I'd made a career out of the very qualities I'd spent years trying to suppress.

My curiosity. My questions. My willingness to challenge an explanation that doesn't quite fit.

I don't believe my role as a therapist is to nod sympathetically at everything someone tells me.

I listen. I care deeply. And I ask questions.

Sometimes really uncomfortable ones.

Because being genuinely understood is different from having someone agree with you.

And I know how frightening it can be to stop managing how other people see you.

I spent years doing exactly that.

I'm still learning that being perceived as different isn't necessarily a criticism.

I'm still learning that someone can misunderstand me without that becoming my responsibility to fix.

And I'm certainly still learning that I don't need to turn every disagreement into an opportunity to explain myself.

Some days I manage that better than others.

Back in the classroom

This week, I was invited to speak to a high school psychology class.

There was something wonderfully ironic about standing in front of a room full of teenagers, being encouraged to talk, ask questions, and challenge how they think.

The very things that once got me into trouble.

We talked about the teenage brain, the pressure to belong, and the often-unhelpful conversations we have with ourselves.

What I wanted those students to understand was that struggling with their beliefs about themselves is normal.

That the things they tell themselves aren't necessarily facts.

That feeling different doesn't automatically mean there's something wrong with them.

And that sometimes the stories we carry about ourselves began with someone else's inability to understand us.

I wish I'd known that earlier.

I wish I'd understood that being curious wasn't the problem. That having an opinion wasn't the problem. That being misunderstood didn't automatically make me difficult.

But I also recognize that learning to communicate with greater awareness has made me better at what I do.

I don't want to be the loudest person in the room.

I want to be someone who's willing to ask the question nobody has considered yet.

And someone who's equally willing to listen when the answer challenges what I thought I knew.

I spent years learning how to be less of myself so other people would be more comfortable.

I'm not particularly interested in doing that anymore.

Turns out, I had a lot to say after all.