Too Intense to Be Liked

For years, across different roles and different managers, I kept getting the same note. Not the same words every time, but close enough that I started to hear it before it was said. "You're a perfectionist. You're intense. You'd go further if you loosened up a little." I remember sitting with that last one the longest. Loosen up. It was stated as if the thing that was responsible for the stellar work I produced, the thing I was actually being paid for, was also the thing standing between me and being liked.  Nobody ever told me to loosen up on the deliverables. It was just on myself and that distinction mattered a lot. In this episode, I tell the story of how I learned that what I was receiving wasn't really feedback at all. It was a personality judgment presented as performance feedback.  This is the pattern that shows up again and again for women in leadership: the qualities that help men look decisive and strong often get women labelled as difficult, abrasive, intense, or too much. The same behaviour that gets men promoted gets women told to soften, be more agreeable, and be easier to like. The real problem is that leaders are using language that confuses a person's traits with a performance issue. Once you have the language for it, you can see it everywhere. In this episode, I talk about: - Why the feedback wasn't about my work - The competence-likability bias and the social cost of being both capable and warm - The difference between a trait and a behaviour, and why that distinction matters - The five-part test I now use before I give or receive feedback - The practical rewrite process that turns vague judgments into actionable guidance I also walk through the research that makes this pattern impossible to dismiss.  The most important distinction here is this: a trait is a label. A behaviour is something someone can actually do differently. A person can learn to change a behaviour. They cannot develop themselves out of the personality category someone else has assigned to them. This is why I got serious about a new standard for feedback, which I share in this episode. **This week's permission:** You are allowed to reject the version of feedback that asks you to shrink yourself to be easier to manage. Being effective is not the same thing as being easy. Being clear is not the same thing as being difficult. And the part of you that makes your work land is not a flaw to be corrected.