Reputation: The Stories That Arrive Before You Do

The first time I met him, he already knew who I was.

Senior leader. Most senior stakeholder on a project I had just been assigned to. We had never been in the same room before. I walked in, introduced myself, and before I had said anything of substance, he looked at me for a moment and said, almost as an afterthought, I’ve heard about you. If it’s assigned to you, it’ll get done.

I remember that moment more clearly than I should. Yes, the praise and the validation helped. But, it was more impactful because I hadn’t said a word yet. My reputation had entered the room before I did.

Part of it came from the work, the way things had been delivered, the way people had experienced working with me. But part of it, I suspect, came from somewhere else too. He had worked with my father. Known him well. It is difficult to say where one story ended and the other began, how much of what he saw when he looked at me was me, and how much was something carried forward from a completely different association altogether. Reputation doesn’t always belong entirely to you. It attaches anyway, and once it does, it starts doing work on your behalf, in rooms you are not in, in conversations you are not part of, in two-sentence summaries of who you are that travel faster than you do.

You walk in already explained.

What I didn’t understand then, and honestly took me embarrassingly long to figure out, is that even a good reputation narrows you. Because once people know you for something, they start expecting only that version of you to show up. In my case it was reliability. Delivery. Getting things done. Solid, useful things to be known for. Also, apparently, the entirety of my personality as far as work was concerned.

There were other parts of me running alongside all of that. I had been blogging since 2004, writing and thinking out loud and building something that had nothing to do with quarterly targets or stakeholder management. Comment sections that felt more like actual conversations than anything happening in my office. A serialised story I wrote and posted as I went, for months, because I could and because it was fun and because nobody was grading it. It was less contained, less structured, considerably less professional. It was also, if I’m being honest, the part that felt most like me.

And I was told to keep it separate.

Professional woman in focus with multiple faded versions of herself behind her labeled as different roles, representing hidden aspects of identity.

It was a distraction, they said. It took up mind space. I was already, by their quiet calculation, working at a disadvantage. Married. A mother with a small child. And on top of all that, this hobby. Never mind that I did it in my own time, late evenings, weekends, holidays. The concern wasn’t the hours. It was the signal. It suggested I wasn’t fully committed. That I had interests outside the story they had decided I was living.

I believed it. I am slightly mortified to admit that, but I did. For longer than I should have.

So I maintained the version that matched the reputation. Reliable. Focused. Fully present. The blogger stayed outside, not gone, I kept writing, but not visible. Not part of the story I was allowed to tell about myself at work. Two separate lives, carefully managed, because someone early in my career had decided that made me easier to assess.

It didn’t. It just made me smaller.

The thing about reputation is that it is built in rooms you are not in. Someone summarising you to someone else in two sentences because that is all the time they have, and those sentences travel, get simplified, get sharpened into something more portable. Reliable. Difficult. Smart. Emotional. Gets things done. Too much. Not enough. And then that version of you shows up before you do, and people respond to it, and you find yourself responding to their response, and somewhere in there the gap between who you are and who you are understood to be widens, without anyone deciding it should.

When the reputation is good, you feel the expectation settle. The need to live up to something already agreed upon, the slight hesitation before anything that might contradict it, because it won’t just be a mistake. It will be a crack in a story people have already settled into.

When the reputation is working against you, the task is different. You are not just doing the work in front of you. You are undoing something that was said about you somewhere you weren’t present, and you often don’t know exactly what it is. You just know the room is receiving you differently than you intended, and there is very little you can do about it in the moment except keep going and hope it eventually catches up.

What shifted things, eventually, was stopping the hiding.

Not dramatically. Not as a statement. Just gradually letting the two parts of my life stop pretending they were strangers. The writing had made me a better communicator, I could see that clearly once I stopped apologising for it. The blogging had taught me more about marketing and content and what people actually respond to than most formal training ever managed. The telecom engineer and the blogger had been building the same person for twenty years and I had been keeping them in separate rooms because someone early in my career had decided that was tidier.

It wasn’t tidier. It was just convenient for everyone except me.

The moment with that senior leader stayed with me. Not because of what he said about me, but because of what it made visible. By the time you arrive, parts of the story are already in circulation. You can add to it, change it slowly, contradict it often enough that it shifts.

But you don’t start from a blank page. And sometimes the more interesting question is not what reputation you built. It is which parts of yourself you quietly set aside to keep it intact. And whether you even noticed you were doing it.