Things I Can’t Say On LinkedIn
There are things you cannot say on LinkedIn. Mostly because they fail to open with "I'm thrilled to announce" or "Humbled and honored."
Lucky for me, I have this newsletter. Lucky for you, you're on it.
This week, two posts crossed my feed and tested my commitment to professional pleasantness that all got channeled into messages to my bestie. And now to you here.
Post number one. A man from a traditionally "fancy" university shared his big realization that imposter syndrome might have external causes. That maybe, just maybe, there are reasons people feel like they don't belong.
Sir. Welcome. We have been here for years. Tulshyan and Burey wrote about this in 2021, in a very popular Harvard Business Review article.¹ Women and people of color report imposter feelings at higher rates, and that pattern lines up suspiciously well with environments that signal, over and over, "this wasn't built for you." If a room keeps telling you that you don't belong, feeling like an outsider seems like a pretty rational read of the room...
We have been having this exact argument since before I was born. In 1978, a consultant named Marilyn Loden sat on a panel literally titled "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall," where speaker after speaker explained how women's self-image was holding them back. She pushed back: the real damage was coming from invisible, cultural barriers. She called it the glass ceiling, and the name stuck.² Forty-eight years later, a man posts the same realization and it's a thought leadership moment. Cool...
Post number two. A man reposted Jay Shetty content about the importance of sleep. You make better decisions when you sleep! Sleep is important! Here are some tips!
Everyone knows sleep is good. Nobody is skipping sleep recreationally (or at least most of us aren't). People are not lying awake at 2am because they lack tips. And the research here is genuinely fascinating: women technically log slightly MORE sleep minutes than men.³ Sounds like a win, until you read the fine print.
The biggest gaps favoring women show up at exactly the life stages when getting up at night to care for someone else is most common, a job that falls disproportionately on women and wrecks sleep quality. The researchers themselves question whether an extra 30 minutes even compensates a mother for being the one who wakes up. Minutes in bed and actual rest are two very different things.
Here's the point: It's more complicated than "go to bed at the same time every night and stop looking at your damn phone." Everyone's life is different. We all have different shit going on, and for a lot of people, a bad night's sleep was never a choice. The baby does not care about your wind-down routine. Neither does the aging parent, the night shift, the work deadline, or the mental load of that big presentation tomorrow AND the grocery list...
The whole "you need to sleep more" assumes sleep is always a decision. For so many us, it's a negotiation with a life full of people, demands, and decisions.
Both posts fail the same test. Neither one asks WHY.
Why do people feel like imposters? Why are people not sleeping? Ask that question even once and the advice changes completely. Skip it, and you get tips that assume everyone lives inside the same body, the same schedule, the same life.
Which brings me to my favorite genre of context-free advice that these posts fall into:
"You have the same 24 hours as Beyoncé."
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
No, I do not. Beyoncé's 24 hours come with a chef, a trainer, a security team, and a person whose entire job is her calendar. My 24 hours come with my own laundry, two adorbale but needy dogs, a full time job with no assistant(s), etc, etc...
And even if I had her hours, I don't have her goals. Beyoncé needs her 24 hours to run an empire. I need mine to do work I care about, eat delicious food and drink wine with people I love, go on walks with my husband and our dogs, and watch trash TV without apology. Different lives. Different math.
Which is where the optimization discourse loses me completely. Steven Bartlett recently went viral for sharing that three glasses of wine ruined three whole days of his life. He slept worse. He ate worse. He skipped the gym. His podcast suffered. He tracked every minute of his decline on his WHOOP and mourned his lost productivity like a man who had survived something.
Three glasses of wine with people you love sounds like a Tuesday well spent to me.
And that's what I keep coming back to. Every piece of advice that annoyed me this week came from someone optimizing for a life I don't have and don't want. Steven can keep his WHOOP data. Beyoncé can keep her empire. I'm over here building my own thing: work I care about, people I love, wine on a Tuesday, trash TV without apology. All of it on purpose.
That's the exact conversation I have with the women I coach, and it runs on entirely different fuel…
We are designing a life you love. Joy is a key metric. We spend a massive chunk of our lives at work, and that time should bring you joy. Will every minute? Of course not. Some days are spreadsheets and meetings that should have been emails. But joy belongs on your list of goals, and you do not need to optimize the shit out of everything to deserve or earn it.
That work starts with your actual life: your circumstances, your demands, your goals. A course built for everyone is really built for no one. That's why the Summer Pack is anchored in personalized 1:1 coaching, plus live online events and weekly challenges with women doing the same work in completely different lives.
We start Monday, June 15, and this is your last chance to register. The pack is ready to run.
DM me for all of the deets.
And grab a free intro call with me here: https://calendly.com/kelseymedeiros/check-in-2
xoxo Kels
Trash TV MBA
Off Campus dropped on Prime last month, and I have been loooooving it. Anyone else? Well, the internet collectively gasped at hockey players who communicate, apologize, and show up for the women in their lives. A woman wrote the books, a woman runs the show, and suddenly the male characters are non-toxic. FOR ONCE.
This is exactly what we're doing with leadership. Men have dominated that definition for, like, ever, because they've been the loudest and have held (and still hold) the majority of positions at the top. When someone new gets the pen, the story changes. That's why rethinking and rewriting what leadership can look like matters so much, at Briar University and everywhere else.
This Week's Thing
Grab the last piece of advice that made you feel behind. A post, a podcast, a viral 5am-club manifesto. Run it through these four questions:
Whose life does this advice assume I have? (Kids? Caregiving? A personal chef?)
Does this advice help me live my life to the fullest in a way that aligns with my personal goals?
Which piece, if any, fits my real life in this season?
What can I drop this week, guilt-free?
A Girl's Gotta Cite Her Sources
Tulshyan, R., & Burey, J. (2021). "Stop Telling Women They Have Impostor Syndrome." Harvard Business Review, February 11, 2021. https://hbr.org/2021/02/stop-telling-women-they-have-impostor-syndrome
Loden, M. (2017). "100 Women: 'Why I invented the glass ceiling phrase.'" BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-42026266
Burgard, S. A., & Ailshire, J. A. (2013). "Gender and Time for Sleep among U.S. Adults." American Sociological Review, 78(1), 51–69. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122412472048