From Flat to Flare

Every time I talk about this concept with my coaching clients, I think about the time we took Grandma to the thrift store to play dress up

When I started my corporate career in my mid-20s, I had a bachelor's in scenic design and directing and a master's in acting. I could talk endlessly about anthropology and human behavior and lots of other stuff, but I had never touched a spreadsheet.

While my colleagues threw around terms like "pivot tables" and "ROI calculations," I told myself that I wasn’t “serious” or “smart”. Surely successful business people were supposed to live and breathe Excel formulas, right?

It took me years to realize something that now seems obvious: there were plenty of MBAs around me who understood the spreadsheets. I would be lots more helpful if I led from my gifts: my ability to see patterns in human behavior, to understand what motivates people, to design experiences that actually change how people feel and act.

The moment I stopped apologizing for my theater background and started leveraging it was the moment my real career began. My "weird" combination of performance training and business strategy became my superpower, not my liability.

In a couple of weeks on The Uplifters Podcast, you’ll meet Catherine Clark, who, after leading a traditional brand agency for 25 years, realized in her 50s that following conventional business wisdom was stifling her creativity. She made a radical decision to close up shop and build an entirely new agency with her passion for Gyrotonics, a movement practice, at its philosophical center. She didn't just incorporate it as a side interest; she made those flowing, spiraling movements the organizing principle for everything from client relationships to problem-solving approaches. What others might have dismissed as "too woo-woo" became her most powerful competitive advantage because it was so authentically, unapologetically her.

Women over 40 are masters of compartmentalization. We've spent decades keeping our "professional self" separate from our quirky interests, unconventional experiences, and passionate curiosities. We code-switch so automatically that we don't even realize we're doing it anymore.

Professional LinkedIn version of you: Strategic leader with extensive experience in cross-functional team management and stakeholder engagement.

Actual you: Strategic leader who also makes killer sourdough bread, knows an embarrassing amount about true crime podcasts, and can identify bird calls from her morning runs.

Relentless personal editing zaps our energy to be brave. If we’re constantly monitoring which parts of ourselves are "appropriate" to share, how much mental bandwidth do we have left for actual courage and creativity?

Remember Mrs. Roper from Three's Company? She wore caftans to the grocery store, spoke her mind without apology, and never tried to be anyone other than exactly who she was. At the time, the character was written as comic relief, the older woman who was "too much." But watching her now, there's something kind of radical about her refusal to shrink or code-switch or make herself smaller for anyone's comfort.

In the second half of life, we get to be unapologetically ourselves. We get to wear the metaphorical caftan. We even get to lead with our weird.

This doesn't mean being inappropriate or unprofessional. It means being authentically, fully, courageously ourselves in all our dimensional glory. In a world where everyone is trying to fit into the same small boxes, the woman who refuses to shrink becomes utterly irreplaceable.

The Weird Intersections Exercise

Ready to identify and amplify your own weird intersections? Here's how to stop hiding your quirks and start highlighting them: