The Committee You Didn’t Hire

Updated October 2026: added quick summary and link to the replay.

There’s a free roundtable that goes with this post. Watch the replay.

A client reached out recently, mid-launch, a few days away from putting new site copy live. She’s a consultant and strategist who’s spent more than a decade building her practice. She knows what she does and she’s good at it. And she was on the edge of throwing a big part of it out.

Here’s how it happened. She’d just been through a great session with a client, the kind of high-stakes work she does best. She fed her reflections on it to an AI tool and asked it to help sharpen how she describes herself. The tool came back with a confident recommendation. Stop calling yourself a facilitator and a consultant, it told her. Those are commodities, priced and compared on day rates. You’re something else. Talk about the quality of the decisions you help people make instead. Over the next year, stop talking about facilitation, workshops, the work you’re actually known for. Reposition around this cleaner idea.

What it handed her was clean. Sounded pretty smart. And there was a real insight buried in it, which is the part that makes this tricky. She’s right that her higher-stakes work should read like exactly that, not like commodity facilitation. The instinct to sharpen was, I think, an interesting point and possibly even a sound one. But the tool didn’t stop at sharpening. It jumped way ahead and told her to walk away from the words people actually search for and book her by. One client conversation, run through one confident tool, and she was wobbling on the thing she’s known for.

She emailed me the rewrite, half-sold on it. I pushed back. The “cleaner” phrase was a lovely way to describe the value of her work, I told her, but it was not something people type into a search bar or put a line item in their budget for. She read that, sat with it, and agreed.

The problem wasn’t the advice 

I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this story is “AI gave bad advice.” It didn’t, at least not exactly. The positioning it produced was coherent. It read well. The problem wasn’t the quality of the answer. It was the speed and the confidence of it, arriving at the precise moment she was least sure of herself. 

Launch does that to people. You’re about to be seen, and every doubt you’ve ever had about whether you’re allowed to take up the space lines up to speak.

My teenager has a name for a lot of what we make. She calls it millennial beige. The greige walls, the same five fonts, the captions that try to sound like everyone and land as no one. She can spot it instantly. She can also spot a fake video in about half a second – the same half-second I’m sitting there just starting to wonder whether I should question it. I find that genuinely humbling, especially since I like to think of myself as a critical thinker and pretty savvy. The tools nudging all of us toward the safe middle were built and adopted by people my age, and the kids who grew up with those tools seem strangely immune to them. They didn’t learn to perform for the room the way we did. They just clock the fake and move on.

That gap is worth sitting with, because the thing my client was feeling isn’t new. It’s just faster now.

The committee has been meeting a long time 

In 1978, two psychologists named Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes published the first study on what they called the impostor phenomenon. They’d been noticing it in high-achieving women, the persistent belief that you’re not really as capable as people think and that you’ve somehow fooled everyone. The part of their work that has stayed with me is this. The achievements didn’t fix it. You could line up the degrees, the results, the years, and the belief held anyway. The evidence was right there and it changed nothing.

So there’s a committee. It lives in your head and it has been there a long time. For a lot of women building service businesses they’re genuinely expert at, the committee never fully shuts up. It’s the voice asking whether you’re really the one to say this, whether someone more qualified should, whether you’re about to embarrass yourself by sounding too sure.

What’s new is that we handed that committee another member. A fluent one. One that answers in seconds and never hedges. We gave it a seat it never earned.

I think this has a generational edge too. I’m right on the bridge between Gen X and millennial, 1976, old enough to remember the fear that ran underneath a lot of how my cohort was raised. The fear of losing the job, the income, the foothold. I grew up on two pieces of advice that don’t fit together. You can do anything you put your mind to. And also, nobody will take you seriously until you’ve got the degree, the certification, the external stamp that proves it. Be limitless, but wait to be validated. You learn to want the gold star and to distrust yourself until someone hands it to you. When that’s the wiring, a tool that hands you the safe, credible-sounding version isn’t a threat. It’s a relief. It feels like protection, like the stamp you were taught to wait for. Which is exactly the trap. The thing that feels safest is the thing sanding you down to sound like everyone else.

Telling the wrong people to stand out 

This is the part most of the advice gets wrong. We tell women to be bold. Be unique. Stand out. Find the thing that makes you different and lean all the way in. It sounds like encouragement. But look at who that advice lands on. It lands on the exact people the committee has spent a lifetime training to blend in, to soften, to not be “too much”. Telling them to stand out doesn’t quiet the committee, it just hands it new material. Now there’s a fresh way to be doing it wrong, and a tool standing by to confirm the suspicion in clean, confident prose. (Wicked. Thanks.)

So what is it about beige, the greige my kid rolls her eyes at? It isn’t a failure of imagination. People treat it like laziness, like these founders just didn’t try hard enough to be interesting. But that’s not it. Beige is a successful response to a pressure you can’t see. It’s what you produce when some part of you is staying safe from something, judgment, exposure, the risk of being the one who said the bold thing and got it wrong. That’s why “just be more interesting” – or even, “just be more bold” – never works. You can’t talk someone out of a behaviour that’s protecting them. The blandness is doing a job.

Which is exactly why a tool that produces confident, polished, agreeable copy on demand fits the moment so well. It doesn’t reduce the pressure. It gives the pressure a faster outlet. You feel uncertain, you ask, it hands you something that sounds right, and the discomfort lifts. Except what lifted was the friction that was actually yours. The hesitation that, sat with for a few more days, might have produced the real thing.

My client didn’t need new positioning. She needed to not make a permanent decision in a temporary state of nerves. The work she does well, the work she’s known for, was never the problem. One conversation and one confident tool nearly convinced her it was.

I’m not anti-AI. I use it every day, including in how I work through pieces like this one. But I’ve gotten strict about when I let it near the things that are core to who someone is. A tool that always has an answer is a dangerous thing to consult at the moment you most need to hear your own voice. The committee is loud enough already.

What the people watching are looking for 

There’s a practical edge to this too, beyond how it feels. The people deciding whether to work with you are doing their own research now, long before they reach out. They read back through your posts, your site, the things you’ve said over time. What they’re looking for, whether they’d put it this way or not, is a through-line. Someone who knows who they are and has known it for a while. A founder who repositions every time the wind shifts, or every time a model suggests something cleaner, reads as someone chasing a shiny ball or still working it out. Consistency isn’t playing it safe. It’s the thing that tells a stranger you can be trusted with their work.

Where she landed 

My client kept her positioning. We talked it through, traced the wobble back to its single source, and she put the site live as herself rather than as the tidied-up version the AI tool handed her. She sounds like her own work on it. That was never in doubt to anyone but her.

The committee will keep meeting. That part doesn’t go away, and I’d be lying if I said mine has been disbanded or fired. But you get to decide who has a spot on that committee, let alone a vote. The tool that talks fastest and most confidently is usually the one that’s earned it the least.