THE THING YOU ARE HIDING MIGHT BE YOUR GREATEST ASSET.

You have achieved things that would impress most people in any room you walk into..

And yet.

There is always an asterisk. A quiet internal footnote that follows every success, every promotion, every moment someone looks at you with respect and you think if only they knew. I was lucky. Right place right time. It was the team not me. Anyone could have done it.

You have become fluent in the language of deflection. Not out of false modesty. Out of genuine belief that if people knew the full story, the real story, the one that starts before the title and the track record and the carefully constructed professional version of you, they would reassess everything they think they know.

So you keep it close. The difficulty at school. The spelling you check three times before hitting send. The word someone used in a meeting that you did not know and looked up quietly afterwards. The presentation you over-prepared because underprepared felt too exposed. The moment you attribute your success to luck and mean it, because luck feels safer than claiming it as yours. Because luck does not require you to be enough. And luck, you have quietly decided, is not infinite.

That is not humility.

That is a story you have been telling yourself for so long it has started to feel like fact.

I know this from the inside. Not the same hiding. But the same tremor underneath it. The sense that everything you have built is balanced on something nobody else can see. That one wrong move, one unguarded moment, one question you cannot answer, and the whole carefully constructed thing comes down. It is the constant quiet vigilance of someone who has never quite believed the foundation was solid enough to stop watching it.

I have been completely deaf in my right ear since birth.

For most of my professional life that sentence felt like a confession. Something to manage around carefully, to position myself to compensate for, to hope nobody noticed before they had already decided to trust me. I was terrified it would disqualify me as a coach. What if I missed something critical? What if I answered what I had misheard? What if they found out and decided I was not good enough for the work?

I did not fail at school.

The school failed me. There is a difference and it matters. Schools back then were not designed to understand hearing loss, learning differences, or the many adjustments that are made as a matter of course now. The children who needed those adjustments were simply left to drift. That was never a reflection of their intelligence. It was a reflection of the system’s limitations.

I got here the long way, through resilience and instinct and a fierce refusal to stop, not through the conventional path that everyone around me seemed to have taken.

For years I believed those things were the asterisks on everything I had achieved.

Here is what I discovered instead.

Not hearing everything taught me to listen in a way that most people never develop. I learned to read what was not being said. To notice the pause before the answer. To pay attention to what the body was communicating when the words were carefully chosen. To sit in silence without rushing to fill it because I had spent a lifetime learning that silence carries information.

The thing I was hiding was not a flaw. It was a superpower I had been too frightened to claim.

And the path I had spent years apologising for, the unconventional one, the one without the right grades or the right start, gave me something the conventional path never could. The ability to sit with a client who is hiding their own asterisk and know, from the inside, exactly what it costs them to keep it there.

Your version of this is not your hearing.

It is the gap you have decided exists between who you appear to be and who you believe you actually are. The school years that did not reflect your intelligence. The start that did not match your destination. The success you have spent years attributing to luck because claiming it as yours felt too dangerous.

Here is the truth about luck.

Luck does not build a track record. Luck does not walk into a room and hold it. Luck does not lead a team, make a decision under pressure, or get back up after the thing that was supposed to stop you. You did all of those things. Not luck. You.

And the thing you are hiding, the part of your story you have decided disqualifies you, is almost certainly the thing that makes you extraordinary at what you do. It is the thing that built the instincts nobody else in the room has. The resilience that looks effortless because you have been practising it your whole life. The empathy that comes from knowing what it feels like to be underestimated.

You did not get here despite your story.

You got here because of it.

The asterisk was never a footnote.

It was the whole point.

This is one of the stories I tell in full in my book, Be A Rare Diamond, coming soon.