I’ve worked with a particular kind of person more than once, and maybe you know someone like this too.
They’re great at advocating for the people around them. When a colleague needs someone to speak up, they do it — clearly, confidently, without hesitation. When a team member is being overlooked, they notice, and they say something. They’re the person in the room who makes sure others get heard.
Ask them to do the same for themselves, and something changes entirely.
The confidence retreats. The clarity evaporates. The words that came so easily on behalf of someone else become almost impossible to find.
This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a fear — and usually, it’s a fear that hasn’t been named clearly enough to examine.
When I work with people who can’t advocate for themselves, we almost always start in the same place: what, specifically, is the risk you’re afraid of? Not the vague feeling that something bad might happen — but the concrete, specific thing. Getting passed over. Being dismissed. Being seen as difficult. Losing the relationship.
And here’s what almost always emerges when those risks get named out loud: they’re seldom as bad as they felt in the dark, quiet recesses of our mind.
There’s a useful question I often ask: if your boss has never fired anyone for standing up for a colleague, why would they fire you for standing up for yourself? The answer is almost always that they wouldn’t. The risk feels enormous, but once you examine it, it’s not actually a risk at all. It’s a fear that’s been allowed to grow in the absence of light.
Once you clarify the risk, the second part of self-advocacy is how you say it. Here, the language matters enormously.
If a sentence starts with “you,” pay attention. Any statement that begins with “you always” or “you never” or “you did” is immediately understood by the listener as an accusation — and you risk them spending the rest of the conversation defending against it rather than hearing what you actually need.
Flip it to “I feel” or “in my experience,” and something different happens. You’re not accusing anyone of anything. You’re describing your experience — which is personal and which the other person can’t argue with. They might still be defensive. But it won’t come from feeling attacked.
Here’s what that can sound like in practice. Rather than: “You always let John dominate the meeting while I get interrupted,” try: “In my experience, when I start speaking in team meetings, I often get interrupted before I can finish my thought. I’m not feeling like my contributions are landing, and I’d love to figure out how to change that.”
Same situation. Entirely different conversation.
Self-advocacy, at its core, is about making it about you — your experience, your needs, your goals — not what someone else is doing wrong. When you do that, you give the other person a chance to be curious and supportive rather than defensive. You open a door instead of putting up a wall.
The risks of advocacy are real. But they’re usually much smaller and more manageable than they feel before you name them. And with a little preparation — thinking through what you want to say and how you want to say it before you say it — those risks shrink further.
Self-advocacy is hard. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. But it’s a skill you can learn, practice, and build over time. And the people who do it well almost always started by doing it badly — and doing it anyway.
If you’re working on this, or helping someone else work through it, I’d love to connect.
Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
