I watched the karaoke from the sidelines.
That felt honest to me. I’m not a karaoke person. When it comes to karaoke, I’m an observer, an introvert in that moment, someone who needs to work up to things. So I stood there, drink in hand, watching everyone else be loud and unselfconscious, perfectly content to keep my comfortable distance.
And then a conga line materialized out of nowhere and swept me up anyway.
And here’s the thing: I loved it. Fully, genuinely, without reservation. I wasn’t performing enjoyment to be polite. I was just… having a great time. Being exactly the kind of person I’d just told myself I wasn’t.
I could have said no. I could have smiled and stepped aside and let the line pass. Nobody would have thought less of me. But I didn’t. I let myself be swept up, and I think that’s the more honest version of what happened. Not that the conga line pulled me in, but that I chose not to resist. I gave myself permission, just through the side door of someone else’s momentum.
The edge of something good
Which makes me wonder how often I’m standing at the edge of something good, waiting for an external force to make the decision for me. Waiting to be invited, waiting for a reason, waiting for it to feel justified…when I could just decide. The permission was always mine to give.
And the strange thing is, in most areas of my life, I know this. I don’t wait for my life to happen to me, I make things happen. Particularly in my career. I’ve never sat back and hoped someone would notice, or waited for the right moment to land in my lap. I move. I decide. I act. But put me in a room with music and strangers and something in me goes quiet, and suddenly I’m waiting for a conga line to solve the problem I could have solved myself.
This keeps happening to me. That same day, I stood at the edge of a group of people I didn’t know, running the familiar calculus in my head: do I have a reason to approach them? What do I have to offer here? Will I seem like I’m inserting myself? And then I walked over anyway. And the conversation was great.
Every time I push past my own hesitation, it goes well. Sometimes I push past it alone and other times I do it with friends around me. Every time I do the thing I thought I couldn’t do, I find out I can. And yet somehow none of this has updated my story about who I am.
Maybe because I never stopped to count it as data.
A juxtaposition to myself
So which version is real? The person standing at the edge of the room, or the person in the conga line?
The honest answer is that I am a juxtaposition to myself.
I am an introvert. I am also someone who can walk into a room, craft a vision, and bring everyone along. I genuinely struggle with small talk. I can’t just chat with anyone about anything, the weather, the weekend, the vague pleasantries that seem to come so easily to other people. And I am also, in the right context, incredibly talkative. Someone who can lose track of time in a conversation.
As a kid I had no fear. I raised my hand. I sat in the front row. Then as a teenager I worked at a bookstore, and I had absolutely no problem walking up to strangers and chatting with them about what they were looking for. That wasn’t social ease exactly; it was something more specific. I loved books. I knew I could help them. The context gave me a reason to be there, a thing to offer, and that was enough. That’s still true of me.
I think what I’m actually describing isn’t introversion exactly. It’s that I lead with what I have to contribute. When I know what I’m bringing to the table, I show up fully: talkative, engaged, present. In my career I’ve never struggled with this. I walk in with a vision, with a point of view, with something real to offer, and I move. The freeze only happens when the context strips all of that away and asks me to exist in the room with no role, no agenda, no clear reason to be there.
Maybe the harder thing is learning that my presence doesn’t always need a purpose to be warranted. That I don’t need a role to deserve the room.
Data I never collected
So why doesn’t the story update? I think it’s because I never stopped to collect the data. The discomfort before feels vivid and fresh every time. But the good conversation, the conga line, the moment I surprised myself, those get filed away as anecdotes, not evidence. They don’t accumulate into anything I’m willing to call a pattern. And if I don’t measure it, I get to keep choosing which version of the story to believe. Not collecting the data is safe. Definitive data would force an update. And updates are uncomfortable.
I don’t think I’m alone in this. Most of us are carrying stories about ourselves that haven’t caught up to who we actually are now. And I suspect the same is true of our organizations, our teams, even our customers, all running on narratives formed in an earlier version of reality, protected by a decision to not look too closely.
The story that says I don’t do karaoke. I don’t insert myself into groups. I’m not a person who just walks up to people. I need a reason to be in the room.
That story is not protecting me. It’s just old. And it’s probably wrong.
So. Do the thing. File it as data. Let it accumulate, even when what it shows you is something you don’t like. Sometimes clarity is uncomfortable. But you can’t do anything about what you don’t understand, and an honest picture is always more useful than a comfortable fiction.
The latest version of yourself might be someone who doesn’t always need a role to deserve the room. Someone who brings enough just by showing up.
That’s not a performance. That’s just the data finally catching up to the truth.
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