In November 2020, I submitted the first full draft of my bachelor’s thesis to my mentor at UT. It was a jumbled, half-formed explanation of all the work I had done in the last year – graphs created by someone who doesn’t really know how to use RStudio yet were competing with the text blocks for page space. The cover page was marked as page 1 and I had no idea how to change it. Scraps of sentences, after multiple rounds of rearranging, were strewn around through the whole document like the bits of stuffing left all over the floor from my dog’s plushie toy acorn.

The real critique that my mentor had of it all, though, wasn’t the bad explanations or ugly formatting. He called to talk about my conclusion section and said “it sounds like you’re apologizing for not having better results or a larger study or more time to complete it.” And his pointing it out made me see it everywhere. What I thought was a neutral discussion of my study results sounded more like “this difference is significant, which hints at this pattern, but it could also be a lot of other things and I didn’t control for those because I didn’t have time and I didn’t use a big test population and actually, you know what, my conclusion probably isn’t valid at all, never mind.”

I didn’t even know I was doing this when I wrote it. In my mind I was just making it clear that I considered all of the possibilities other than my conclusion, bracing against criticism that wasn’t there yet by saying “no, I’ve thought of that already too.” I wrote that way out of a sense of pressure to downplay my own work and opinions in case they got proven wrong, and from what I’ve observed it’s a really common thing to do. I’ve tried to be aware of this since then and stop myself from doing it out of habit. I still don’t do it perfectly and I don’t have all the answers, but here are some things I’ve learned from it (haha I just did it right there in that sentence, see?).

It’s not just you

When I started paying attention to this pattern in myself, I started noticing it a lot more in other people too. In a seminar on experimental linguistics recently, I listened to a lecturer who made some self-deprecating jokes and nervous laughs about citing his own papers in his lecture. This was research he had worked on nonstop for the last few years and published and presented multiple times, but he still gave off an insecure and apologetic vibe when talking about it.

Even some of “the greats” are susceptible to this downplaying of their own (super famous) work. In this interview, even composer Stephen Sondheim referred to some of his pieces that start a certain way as “pretentious,” and when the interviewer asked him to explain he said “well, I mean ambitious.”

Obviously there’s a reason that people do this, even when they actually feel confident about their work. It’s to come across as humble and not “pretentious” (Sondheim 1997), and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. “The man who overestimates himself” Elon Musk and other ridiculously advantaged people like him will never have to pretend to be relatable in order to be successful, but the rest of us have to be at least somewhat likable to do well professionally.

But don’t do it too much

The trap I fall into there is overdoing it. If I’m confident in myself but express it a little too “relatably,” no one in a professional context will take me seriously. And then in most cases when I’m not super confident in what I’ve done, the way I communicate about it is even worse, resulting in overly apologetic writing and presenting.

I think there’s a balance here between being humble/relatable and confident. Honestly I don’t really know where it is. These are some things I’ve been trying to keep in mind recently, though, when I’m writing or getting ready to present something professionally.

• Look out for terms that diminish you/your experience. When I add something new to my resume or CV now, I look back through it and try to remove any words I had added out of habit that don’t really serve a purpose and make my work seem less important. Here are some examples from my own stuff:
  
  – performed introductory research
  – elementary-level tutoring in German
  – assisted in conducting interviews
  – presented on research in a small and informal linguistics colloquium
  
  
• Replace insecure expressions. This applies more to presentations, emails, and describing yourself in interviews. I try to catch myself before I say these things and replace them with more confident-sounding equivalents. It’s a constant battle.
  
  – Does that make sense? -> Do you have any questions?
  – So yeah. -> Thank you for listening!
  – No pressure to respond! -> (nothing, just get rid of that)
  
  
• Literally just stop apologizing. I’m really bad at this. Something can fall on the other side of the room and I’ll apologize because it made a loud noise. HOWEVER, I know that it’s good to try to avoid it, and I’ve found that finding replacements can help.
  
  – Sorry. -> Damn. Oof. Duly noted. Hmm, you’re right, that is a weird thing to do at this late hour.

Those are just a few things I’ve tried to keep in mind for myself as I’m trying to get my career really going. I hope they prove helpful for you too! I would love to hear any other thoughts and tips on this too. 🙂 Thanks for reading! (I said that instead of “so yeah …” see? Strategy™.)