You are so terrified of appearing arrogant because you’re bright, that you play it small – a lot. This brings an extra benefit beyond being better liked: They don’t catch you with a skill ‘you shouldn’t even have and can’t explain‘. They don’t get to call you out as the fraud you secretly fear you are.
You are smart and you know it – or aren’t you?
There are these moments in your life when everything clicks and seems just right. Your mind provides everything you need (the ideas, the solutions, the connections). You create exactly the super cool thing you had in mind. It feels like magic how things come together. You catch on patterns and mould them into the solution no one else could see. These are your genius moments, when everything flows and you tap into the incredible resource of your intellect.
Until stuff goes wrong (cue wah wah wah sound). Someone doesn’t like your solution. They don’t understand it. You can’t explain it, at least not in a way they catch on. When you tell them you just know, you’re arrogant. And when they find a flaw, you feel stupid and you regret that you got carried away at all. It doesn’t even matter if the flaw was small or big or just exists in their head: Your secret fear that it’s all just a fluke, and you a fraud, just waited to be confirmed, once again.
Self-absorbed genius one moment, secret fraud the next – same pattern, opposite disguise. Neither one is actually true. You’re not constantly brilliant, and you’re not secretly nothing – you’re just never sure which version is about to show up, so you brace for both.
You avoid the pattern, at all costs – yet the cost is high
This pattern is super uncomfortable, so you have learnt to avoid and manage it as much as possible. It has made you and your intellect more digestible and fitting in better. You try to be fathomable, hit the right step width, make sure you please those around you.
For that, you pay a price and it’s high: You don’t tap into your full potential. You waste your energy on hiding and managing, and worst of all: It has never fully resolved the underlying issue. You’re still afraid of getting caught in the act and being exposed as a fraud.
The true fraudulence here isn’t that you know stuff ‘you shouldn’t’. It’s betraying your actual self by performing being ‘normal’. Attempting to be average where you aren’t. Every time you slow down your speech, skip a connection you’ve already made, or pretend you didn’t see the solution five minutes ago, you are lying. Call it humility if you want. It’s just you, editing yourself down once again.
for neurodivergent leaders, it has a name: masking
As a neurodivergent leader, you may have come across the term masking: It’s a specific skill that goes beyond “being humble about your intelligence”. You rehearse a sentence twice before you say it out loud, read every twitch in someone else’s face – constantly tracking whether your tone landed in real time… whilst running the meeting. All of it to avoid being called “disinterested”, “weird” or “confrontational”.
You genuinely feel like being your normal, real self is a danger to others and to your career, so you hide – mask – your full self, to meet their expectations and be a “good” leader. You’ve got proof. The time you said the thing and their eyes glazed over. The project that went to someone “easier to work with.” The performance review that used the word “intense”. You’re not paranoid – you’ve got data!
But you forget two things: One, you learnt to mask years back with the tools of a child – now you’re an adult with a completely different skillset. Second, it hands you an excuse:
you avoid facing your own imperfection
You have an excuse to never find out. You never have to face the truth about your full potential, because you always stay below. You fabricate what your genius can do based on your best moments when the potential breaks through. It isn’t based on you as a full human round the clock.
Even the smartest people on the planet have the ‘problem’ that they are human and as such a mixed bag. They have an exceptional skillset in some areas (sometimes many!), but in others it’s mediocre at best. When they really lean into their potential, they will get exactly this mixed bag as a result. They don’t finally unleash their genius and will be flawless, frictionless leaders who never make a mistake.
So you shy away from the confrontation with your own mixed bag, your actual, messy humanity. And that leaves you stuck between two hopes, that are both tutile: To belong by ‘being one of them’ (you won’t) and to have your genius recognised (that just doesn’t exist as a constant) . If you do what you do now, you end up with neither.
why your natural skills insult them
Until you realistically look at who you are, confident in your knowledge of what you can and cannot do, you’re susceptible to others thinking you’re too fast, too much, too arrogant. This is two-layered:
First, people will always think what they think. When you show up with your full intensity, you are a mirror. You reflect back to others the connections they aren’t seeing and the speed they aren’t reaching. Their reaction – calling you ‘arrogant’ – is a defense mechanism to protect their own ego. They look away from their limitations and make it about the other person – you. So nothing you could ever change.
Second, as long as you don’t confidently state what you can and cannot do, people say those things more. By trying to avoid the conflict, you invite the conflict. Let’s say you are vague about a connection you already made, but then you accidentally mention it during the project. How does that make someone feel? Like you’ve been holding out on them. And that makes you look exactly like the arrogant person you were trying so hard not to be.
dare to appear arrogant, remain humble inside
The path forward is to hold the paradox of sometimes being an exceptionally gifted genius, and other times being a messy, limited human. Really look at your capabilities. Accept that even in your best moments, your path isn’t the only one. And communicate all of that as honestly as possible to the people around you.
That doesn’t mean you will never appear arrogant. You have to lean in and risk being called exactly that. But you have the choice to make it less about something being ‘wrong’ with you and remind yourself it’s just as much about them and their insecurities.
Stop making yourself small, because it hurts everyone more down the line. In fact it hurts who you love the most. People you love won’t want you hiding and lying, even if may be a little uncomfortable to live with someone faster than them at times.
You won’t get this right out of the gate – the practice to embrace your messy human-ness is already messy and imperfect in itself. You won’t always feel humble when you have a great idea – and you don’t have to. It’s about embracing a realistic, fuller picture of yourself, bit by bit. Accept the parts you don’t like. What if you being arrogant wasn’t the be-all-end-all? What if you felt guilty for your own gifts at times and you could just acknowledge it and then kept moving anyway? What if being faster than most other people wasn’t a social error, but just an aspect of who you are – and if you explained it upfront, people would be a lot more okay with it?
Every single person on this planet is a collection of strengths and absolute blind spots. What gets you celebrated in one room gets you side-eyed in the next. You will never “get it right” across all of them — so stop trying to. Let yourself be seen for the whole mixed bag, and use it.
If this pattern — genius one moment, fraud the next — sounds familiar, there’s more where this came from. The Complexity Compass goes deeper into exactly this, free, in your ears whenever you need it.
