What My Own Career Is Teaching Me About Systems Literacy Right Now

There is something quietly uncomfortable about building something that helps women see the systems holding them back, while you are still mid-conversation with your own.

I talk about systems literacy alot. I want to help organisations find the structural blocks that are quietly crushing performance. I work with women who are brilliant, experienced, and completely stuck - and I want to help them see that the problem was never them. It was always the system they were operating inside.

And then I open my own laptop, in June 2026, and realise I am still in it too.

This post is not a tidy case study. There is no clean resolution at the end. This is what I am actually wrestling with in my own career right now -what I am learning from it, where I am getting it wrong, and why I think being honest about it matters more than performing certainty I do not currently have.

The irony is not lost on me.

I spent years inside large organisations watching the same patterns repeat. High performers carrying invisible weight. Credit landing in the wrong rooms. Talent reviews that measured presence more than contribution. I watched brilliant women get ground down by systems that were never designed to recognise them - and I knew, with absolute clarity, what was happening and why.

Knowing the system does not make you immune to it. That is the part nobody warned me about.

In building The Human Systems Lab, I brought all of that knowledge with me. I also brought every unexamined assumption I had about what a credible professional looks like, what building a business in year one is supposed to feel like, and how visible I needed to be before I had earned the right to have an opinion out loud.

Those assumptions are systems too. And I walked straight into them.

The version of me that built this is not always the version showing up

Here is what I am sitting with right now.

I know, intellectually, that an authentic version of me is more valuable than a polished imitation of what a consultant is supposed to look like. I have said those words on stage. I believe them.

But I have caught myself, more than once in the past few months, softening an opinion before I published it. Writing a post and then sitting on it for four days because something about it felt too direct. Watching other people in this space speak with a confidence I kept telling myself I had not quite earned yet - even though I had more than fifteen years of operational experience sitting behind every word I was holding back.

The gap between stated values and actual behaviour is something I talk about in organisations constantly. Turns out it lives in individuals too. Including me.

I am not sharing this to perform vulnerability. I am sharing it because “Sophie” - the woman I built this for - is sitting in the same gap. She knows the system is broken. She has known it for years. She still softens the email. She still waits for permission she is never going to be formally granted. And if I am going to tell her that the waiting is a system response, not a character flaw, I need to be honest that I am still catching myself doing exactly the same thing.

What starting over taught me that I did not expect

Year one of building something of your own alongside a long corporate career is a specific kind of disorienting. The metrics change. The feedback loops disappear. In a corporate role, even a dysfunctional one, you get signals - performance reviews, calibration ratings, peer feedback, the fact that someone forwarded your email to their boss. You can read the room because you have been in the room for years.

Starting this means learning a new room from scratch. And I did not anticipate how much of my own identity was built on being the person who already knew how to read it.

I have had to watch my own instinct to over-prepare surface in a completely different form. It used to look like staying late. Now it looks like spending two hours on a piece of content that probably needed forty-five minutes, because part of me is still trying to guarantee that no one can point at a gap.

The perfectionism moved with me. It just changed its clothes.

The structural insight that shifted things: the standards I was holding myself to were not mine. They were inherited. I absorbed them from years inside organisations where credibility was performed, not demonstrated - where the safest move was always to have every answer before anyone asked the question. That is a system response. Recognising it did not instantly dissolve it, but it made it nameable. And once something is nameable, it stops being invisible.

The moment I stopped waiting

About three months ago, I had a conversation that stopped me. Someone I respect told me, plainly, that I was treating my own expertise like it needed more evidence before it could be shared publicly. That I was doing to myself exactly what organisations do to the women I work with - requiring a higher standard of proof before granting visibility.

I did not like hearing it. I also could not argue with it.

That is the thing about systems literacy. Once you have the language, you cannot unknow it. You start to see the structures everywhere - in organisations, in industries, in your own decision-making at 11pm when you are wondering whether a post is ready to go out.

The same pattern. A different context. The same cost.

Where I am still getting it wrong

I want to be specific here, because vague honesty is not really honesty.

I am still not consistent with visibility. I know the research - proximity to decision-makers, narrative control, the compounding return on being findable and recognisable in the right spaces. I teach this. And I still have weeks where I go quiet because something else is taking all the bandwidth, and I tell myself I will come back to it, and three weeks pass.

I am still negotiating with the question of what credibility looks like when you are in year one. The rational part of me knows that the body of experience I am drawing on is real and hard-won.

A quieter part of me keeps checking whether I have done enough to have earned the right to say it out loud. That quieter part is not a self-confidence issue. It is a twenty two-year hangover from operating inside systems that required women to over-justify before being heard.

I am also still learning that building in public - which is what this work requires - means accepting that not every piece of content will land, and that the ones that do not land are not evidence that the work is wrong. That particular recalibration is slower than I expected.

What this is actually teaching me about the work

I would not trade any of it. That is the honest answer.

Being inside my own discomfort has made me sharper on the specifics. When I sit with a woman who says she knows what she needs to do but cannot seem to make herself do it - I am not theorising anymore. I know what that internal negotiation feels like from the inside. I know where the delay actually lives. And I know that telling her to just back herself is about as useful as telling someone with a broken leg to try walking more.

The systems I talk about are not only in organisations. They are in us - layered in over years of absorbing the rules of environments that were not designed with us in mind. Unpicking them takes longer than understanding them intellectually. That gap between knowing and doing? That is where the real work happens. For the women I work with. For me too.

The part that keeps me going: this is all learnable. Not quickly, and not without friction. But the woman who stopped shrinking her emails three months ago because she finally had the language for why she was doing it - that is a real shift. The woman who walked into a conversation with her sponsor armed with a cleaner narrative about her own contribution, and came out with a different kind of visibility - that happened. I have watched it happen in real time.

I am watching it happen in myself too. More slowly than I would like. But it is happening.

Why I think being honest about this matters

There is a version of this business I could run where I present only the finished version of myself. The polished case studies, the clean frameworks, the before and after that makes the journey look linear.

I am not interested in that version.

The women I am building this for have spent years being told they need to perform a kind of competence that leaves no visible seams. That if they are struggling, the solution is to work on themselves - more confidence, better networking, sharper executive presence. That the system is fine and they just need to fit better inside it.

I refuse to replicate that dynamic here. If I am asking Sophie to stop performing certainty she does not have, I need to be willing to do the same.

So this is the real version. I am building something I believe in. I am learning in public while doing it. I am still catching my own system responses and having to work through them. And none of that makes the work less credible. If anything, it is the point.

You did everything right. The system you were inside was never designed for you to win the way you were told you would. Once you can see it, you can navigate it. I am still navigating my own. That is not a weakness. It is just what the work actually looks like.

If any of this landed for you - if you read the part about softening the email, or waiting for permission, or the gap between knowing and doing, and felt something you could not quite name before - I want you to know that recognition is not accidental. It is the work.

I am building The Human Systems Lab for the women who are done being told the problem is them. The content here is the ongoing conversation - the real one, not the polished version. The frameworks, the hot takes, the honest admissions about where I am still wrestling.

Follow along on LinkedIn or Instagram. Not because I have it all figured out, but because I think this conversation is worth having out loud - and I think you do too.