Code Like a Girl
The Courage Nobody Talks About
What does your life look like when you are living at your courageous best?
That question came from a leadership coach during a women’s leadership program I was part of at work. The room went quiet, then people started naming their fears. Talking to a large audience. Doing something new outside their comfort zone. Networking with unknown people.
I sat there realizing I did not share any of those fears. Mine was self-advocacy.
For years my mantra was to let the work speak for itself. It felt like the safer, more dignified choice. But in a world of shrinking attention spans, is it fair to expect someone else to notice what I built? That question sent me into a why-why analysis on what I was missing.
Two problems surfaced immediately. Firstly, I do not always know what I should be advocating for. I do the work, but I rarely stop to name what it proves about me. Moreover, even when I know what to say, I do not know how to say it without sounding like I am bragging.
And I am living this right now. I led a product build that went from zero to one with a successful beta run in three months. We are now moving towards general availability. Scaling it from here on needs more people on my team. But when I raise this with my leaders, I can see they do not instinctively get why.
Because I never told them what it actually took to get here. I never walked them through the build, the partner negotiations, the scaling decisions, the ongoing support, all of it stacked on top of each other for months. I assumed the beta success would speak for the effort behind it. It did not. Success is visible. The work underneath it is not, unless you name it.
This article is my attempt to work through both, using what I learned in the session and what I have tested since.
Problem one: knowing what to advocate forSelf-advocacy begins with self-trust, and self-trust is shakier than it looks.
Every evening a voice shows up and tells me the day did not amount to much. It does not pause to check; it just delivers the verdict. I used to treat that voice as the final word.
But there is a second voice, if I actually let it speak. It does not argue with the critic directly. It just asks one question first. What did I actually get done today? Most evenings, when I stop and answer that honestly, the list is longer than the critic gave me credit for. The day was not wasted. I simply never stopped to notice it before moving on to the next thing.
Call it the critic and the mentor. The critic is fast and loud. It shows up uninvited every single day. The mentor only speaks if you deliberately ask it a question, which is exactly why it loses so often.
Here is the fix I am using. Every time the critic makes a claim, I call in the mentor to check it against evidence, not feeling.
And evidence comes in two forms. Functional evidence talks about what I actually produced. That is a fact, not a feeling, and it directly counters the critic's claim. Emotional evidence involves what I got through. Moments I stayed steady, or recovered from something hard.
The reason self-trust feels shaky is not that the evidence does not exist. It is that we never log it. The critic keeps a precise record of every shortfall. The mentor gets no record at all, unless you build one.
So the practical answer to problem one is simple. Keep a running log, even three lines a week, split into two columns. What did I produce. What did I get through. That log becomes the material your mentor uses to talk back to the critic. It is also, directly, the raw material for what you advocate for later.
Problem two: saying it without braggingKnowing your evidence is only half the problem. The other half is saying it out loud without it sounding like self-promotion.
Here is the distinction that unlocked this for me. Self-advocacy is stating a fact. Self-promotion is trying to win approval. The two get confused because they can use the same words. The difference is in what you attach to the sentence.
If I say, I turned around this initiative despite the constraints, and stop there, that is advocacy. It is a fact, stated plainly, with no ask attached.
If I add, so I hope people notice, or, so I deserve more credit, that same sentence turns into a request for approval, and it starts to feel uncomfortable to say, and to hear.
The technique is to separate the update from the ask. State what happened. Do not hedge it with a joke, do not shrink it with a qualifier, do not attach a request unless you actually have one. If you do have an ask, make it separately, and make it direct.
In practice, this sounds like: This shipped, and it took solving three specific constraints. Not: I don’t know if this matters, but I guess I managed to get this out despite everything. The first is advocacy. The second is an apology wearing the clothes of an update.
The two-part practice♦Self-advocacy is not one skill. It is knowing what to say, built from evidence you deliberately collect, and knowing how to say it, built from separating fact from request.
- Log your evidence weekly, split into what you produced and what you got through.
- When the critic speaks, ask what the mentor would say, using the log as proof, not opinion.
- When you communicate an update, state the fact plainly, with no self-deprecating qualifier and no unstated ask.
- If you have an actual request, make it as its own sentence, separate from the update.
I turned this log into a skill called daily self-advocacy log, open source on GitHub: github.com/kaantibshetty/skills-library/tree/main/career/daily-self-advocacy-log. You can schedule a task using this skill on Claude Cowork or Perplexity, and it will auto-trigger a conversation at the end of your day. Each evening it asks two questions: what did you produce and what did you get through, then saves the entry to a running log so the mentor always has evidence on hand.
The courageous version of me is not the one who talks the loudest about her work. It is the one who keeps the receipts and hands them over without apologizing for it.
♦The Courage Nobody Talks About was originally published in Code Like A Girl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.