Usually, when I tell the story of a woman I attended grad school with, it takes one format. This morning, when I woke up, I thought about another layer of the story, and then discovered another.

The usual story is inspiring.

This woman was unusually quiet in class, never raising her hand, never participating in chat between classes, never volunteering information. She faded into the background.

At the end of the first year, we worked on a group project together. The other members of the group and I were enthusiastically bloviating about how we were going to blow the project away when I caught, out of the corner of my eye, a micro-expression on the silent woman’s face. I quietly asked her what was up and she said she thought we had completely missed the point of the assignment. As I asked questions and she answered, I realized she was right. The other two members of the group were too full of their ideas to listen but, as it turned out, this woman was right.

And that made me look at her differently and wonder who else I had overlooked because they were introverted.

When we returned after summer break, she behaved differently: she raised her hand in class; she volunteered information; if someone debated one of her ideas, she debated back. She held her ground. Between classes, I pointed out the difference and asked what had changed.

“I joined Toastmasters,” she replied simply.

The change it had made in her was so different that it stuck with me and, ten years later, when I was struggling to find my voice again after several years of burnout, I thought about this woman and joined Toastmasters.

And it worked.

More to the Story

Inspiring story, right? I learned how to look beyond someone’s introversion, to not underestimate them just because they weren’t the loudest voice in the room. And then I learned by her example to join Toastmasters when I needed help finding my voice.

Here are some more layers.

This woman worked in a non-managerial job at an extremely large company. Our graduate school cohort had gone back to school for a variety of reasons: to get promoted; because this would help us start our own venture; to better serve the community that we served. But mostly to get someone to take us seriously professionally.

That, I learned, that was not this woman’s reason. In fact, I heard her say towards the end of the program that her company was pressuring her to accept a promotion – pressuring her to accept a promotion. Why would they do that, I wondered.

Well, her company actually paid for her graduate degree. And it wanted to get its money’s worth out of the degree. Which, I responded, was kind of a crazy attitude.

Well, she said, a little embarrassed. They were getting kind of tired of paying for her graduate degrees.

Oh, this wasn’t her first graduate degree. What other degrees did she have?

It turned out she had several, including an MBA, a degree in HR, and others that I can’t remember now.

This quiet woman was a genius. And, as she spoke, I sensed that she was working in a role far below her capacity, and that she knew it. So why not accept the promotion?

Well, her current role was a union role, which meant that it was pretty hard to fire her. If she accepted the promotion, she’d become management, which meant that they could fire her at will. I wondered why that would be her first thought: if they were pressuring her to accept a promotion, why worry that they would fire her. Did she have that little self-confidence?

Well, no. She was an African-American at a company where management was mostly not, and that would put a target on her back. If layoffs happened, she’d be amongst the first to go; she’d seen it happen. And, as an African-American woman, that target would be 10x as large. But so what? She was brilliant, she could get another job.

Yes but. She was the single mother of a young son. If she lost her job, she lost her healthcare, she lost his healthcare. And she couldn’t take that risk.

So she stayed in her secure, non-management job, racking up degrees like she was counting coup.

At the time, I just thought it was a strange attitude.

I was younger then, less educated about life. I had worked my entire career at the same organization, an organization with a lot of African-American people on the frontline and almost none in the management office. I had almost no African-American friends and had read very little about the African-American experience. I had never been a single mother and had no intention of ever having children. I didn’t even know anyone in a union. I had been living a pretty sheltered life.

My life is still pretty sheltered but I’ve learned a lot since then.

This woman was so strategic about her life. As a mother, healthcare for her child was essential and so she sacrificed a career path – a path that carried a level of risk for her as an African-American and as a woman and as an African-American woman – to retain that healthcare. At the same time, she gave her brilliant mind the stimulus it craved by earning degree after degree, I imagine, to keep from going insane.

Years later, I saw on LinkedIn that she had left that company and accepted a role – a far better role – at another company. Doing the math, I calculated that her son had just graduated from college and was no longer dependent on her for healthcare.

And now she was free to stretch her wings and soar.

And there’s more to this story…

There’s so much to this story, right? About how I learned to ask questions, to look beneath my own assumptions, to learn what others are going through.

So here’s an update:

Today I looked her up on LinkedIn again, just to refresh my brain about which degrees she had exactly earned and where she had ended up working.

Here’s what I discovered:

I had remembered a few things wrong. She didn’t have an MBA. In fact, she had an undergraduate degree at a technical college and the MS that we had earned together and a few technical certifications.

She didn’t entirely leave the company that she had been working for. She took a job with a company that worked closely with her old company that it was dependent on that company.

She is still a member of Toastmasters.

And what should we learn from this?

Our memories play tricks on us.

Memory is a notoriously tricky thing. Witnesses who are absolutely certain pick people of a lineup that, it turns out later, had nothing to do with the crime.

Experiments have shown that you can trick an adult into having a very firm memory of a childhood experience pretty easily.

I know that my mind likes stories, it likes inspiring stories about people who overcome unbelievable adversity, and who are hiding some amazing quality that takes everyone by surprise.

The roots of that story were true: this woman was quiet (although maybe not as quiet as I remember); we did work on a group project together where she surprised me with her insights; she did start speaking up in class and, when I asked what had changed, she did tell me she had joined Toastmasters. And she did say that her organization was pressuring her to accept a promotion because they wanted to reap the benefits of the education they were paying for; and she was reluctant to accept the promotion because of the risk of losing healthcare for her son. The company did sponsor her in the graduate degree we were earning together and I suspect that the company did sponsor her undergraduate degree at the technical school and her other certifications.

But she didn’t hold multiple graduate degrees. And her change of job in the end – this triumphant culmination of her strategic patience – was not as dramatic as I remembered it.

It’s still a great story, about a single mother (if my memory didn’t make that up, too) who found a job that provided healthcare for her son, earned a college education and a graduate degree, and – once her son was off her healthcare and she could accept the risk – took a promotion into a job that I suspect is very satisfying.

She is still a success and should be very proud of her career and her decisions.

We often make up stories about change.

When you’re working with people in a change management situation – whether you are coaching, mentoring, or leading an informal or formal change management strategy – you’re going to come up against the stories that people have in their head. Stories that they tap into emotionally and that prevent them from embracing change or even dipping a toe into it.

Stories about how change didn’t work in the past. Or how they took a chance and got shot down. Or how someone – always someone else – won’t let them change.

These are emotional, visceral stories, stories that tap into something they believe about how the world works or should work or doesn’t work anymore. Stories that, when you hear them are moving.

But being moving doesn’t make them true.

As a change manager, we have to ask questions to understand the stories. And then understand, carefully, how much of the story is based in emotional truth as opposed to the factual truth.

It doesn’t help to fight the emotional truth with facts.

Right now, I’m struggling with a story myself. I am, to use a Strengthsfinder’s term, an Achiever – I have to feel like I am achieving something important every day or (shadow-side) I feel like the day was a complete waste. For the last year at the organization that I left in June, I struggled to have a positive impact. We’d put a lot of effort into new ideas and processes and, just as it seemed we were making progress towards something, we’d be asked to pivot to a new plan again and again and again. It’s pretty hard to feel you’re having a positive impact when that happens.

Which makes it hard to update your resume. We had done a ton of work – burnout-level amounts of work – with the potential to deliver results and then had been told to abandon them. I didn’t feel like I had racked up any wins. This was my emotional story. I would sit and look at my resume and type things and then delete them. Anything PARS that I typed felt like a lie. Finally, I spoke with the CEO, who had also left the company and a few other former colleagues, only by hearing the story through their eyes, could I update my resume to reflect the value of what I had been doing and the wins I had actually supported.

Only then could I replace the emotional story I had felt with a factual story that more accurately represented the situation.

So the next time someone is resistant to a new idea, ask them to tell you their story and listen for their emotional truth.