What makes endings so difficult is that they demand trust — trust that something else will meet us on the other side, even if we cannot yet see its outline. Trust that letting go does not mean failing. Trust that the world keeps offering itself to us in different forms. Trust that the sun will come back up tomorrow.
~ Patti Digh, A Geography of Endings
For me, and maybe it’s true for you as well, my identity has been shaped by the companies and institutions I’ve worked for.
An impressive title, marquee universities, and an Emmy in my back pocket — all telegraphed my level of authority and the world I operated in. I relied on the shorthand because it worked like a charm every time. I didn’t need to explain it. The masthead did it for me.
Inside most organizations, the results are visible. The person responsible for them often isn’t. For women in particular, the higher we rise, the more our singular contributions blur, dissolving into the titles we assume.
Which raises the question I keep coming back to: do we actually matter, or are we simply there?
When we talk about wanting to “matter,” we usually mean recognition, influence, and authority. Being seen for the value and expertise that have carried us this far.
You see this everywhere — nonprofits, professional firms, businesses we’ve built. We are indispensable to the results themselves — things would fall apart without us — yet we’re seen as a faceless part of the enterprise rather than a key person driving it.
Results carry our fingerprints, while the credit goes elsewhere.
Part of the problem is cultural.
Women learn early on not to call attention to our accomplishments. Don’t crow. Don’t brag. Be a good colleague. Let the work speak for itself. If someone else takes the credit, so be it.
That conditioning runs deep. Over time, we unconsciously settle for being invisibly indispensable while remaining largely anonymous.
But there’s another way to think about this.
Mattering isn’t just about being good. Everyone is good enough. It’s about taking control of the narrative — showing up unapologetically, claiming credit for what we’ve built, and envisioning a future that expands rather than shrinks.
Stepping out from behind the title and owning what has been ours all along.
That shift is ours alone to make. But it requires a different mindset — a willingness to shape how we are perceived, to claim the outcomes we create, and to define our worth on our own terms outside the narrow definitions of titles and corporate status.
I’m working with a client who leads a successful organization she built from the ground up. It is thriving. Her leadership is widely respected. But as we talk about the future, a central question has emerged: where does the organization end and where does she begin?
For years, the two have been almost indistinguishable. Her authority, her ideas, and her leadership are defined by the business she spearheads. That has served her well. But it also means that much of what she has created is seen as belonging to the enterprise rather than to her.
The work she and I are doing now is about widening that lens. Well before she decides what comes next, she’s beginning to define a fuller public identity — one that stands on its own.
So what would happen if you asked yourself the same question? What are you willing to leave behind — and what can you take with you?
If we want to matter, we have to embed ourselves at the point of consequence.
We have to connect what we do directly to outcomes — money, risk, growth, credibility — and make that connection visible.
That shift doesn’t happen by accident.
We have to position ourselves there, deliberately, confident that the sum of the parts will create an even greater whole. Only then does the question answer itself.
Photo credit: Annie Spratt @ unsplash
