The safest way to be underestimated is to make the joke first.
You learn it early, though no one ever teaches it directly. You discover that if you point out your own chaos, your own forgetfulness, your own uneven edges, the room relaxes. People smile. The pressure drops. Whatever sharpness might have been perceived in you gets softened, rounded off, made harmless.
It works so well that you begin to believe it is simply good manners.
I grew up in a blue-collar family where work was the measure of character.
People talked about showing up on time, doing what needed to be done, and helping out when someone was in a bind. We worked with our hands, our sore feet, and our determination. If something broke, you fixed it. If something needed doing, you did it.
Intelligence was respected, but it was not something people discussed much. Nobody sat around debating who was gifted. Nobody introduced themselves as intellectuals. If you knew something useful, you used it. Then you got back to work.
Humility wasn’t a virtue you practiced occasionally. It was simply the air you breathed.
So when opportunities came later in life, graduate school, research projects, academic conversations, I carried that air with me.
And for the most part, I’m grateful I did.
The world does not suffer from a shortage of people who take themselves too seriously.
What it often lacks are people who can laugh at themselves.
The problem is that sometimes the line between humility and self-erasure becomes difficult to see.
At some point, I realized I had become remarkably skilled at minimizing my own contributions.
If someone complimented an accomplishment, I immediately redirected attention elsewhere.
If a conversation drifted toward something I had written or created, I found a way to turn it into a joke.
If someone suggested I knew something worth sharing, my instinct was to explain why they were probably overestimating me.
Everyone laughed.
I laughed too.
The funny thing about self-deprecating humor is that it works.
People like it.
A person who pokes fun at herself appears approachable. Relatable. Safe.
The trouble is that after years of repeating the same jokes, people begin to believe them.
Sometimes you do too.
I have spent much of my professional life as a teacher. Teachers become experts at directing attention away from themselves. The work isn’t about us. It is about students.
And although teaching is intellectual work, it is still widely understood—and rightly so—as blue-collar in its rhythm and reality: long hours, emotional labor, physical presence, and the daily demand to produce something real in real time. It is work measured less in theory than in stamina.
We spend years standing beside discovery rather than claiming it.
When a child succeeds, we celebrate the child.
When a lesson works, we move on to the next one.
When we learn something important, we often file it away as experience rather than expertise.
The habit becomes difficult to break.
Recently, as I’ve find myself reacclimating to academic life, I’ve noticed how often I still carry those instincts into rooms where they no longer serve me.
I walk into meetings with researchers, scholars, and professionals who seem to speak a language I once knew but haven’t used in years.
There are moments when I feel as though everyone else received a handbook that somehow never arrived at my address.
They reference theories.
I think about classrooms.
They discuss frameworks.
I think about children.
They cite studies.
I remember faces.
Mulling it over, I interpreted that difference as evidence that perhaps I didn’t belong.
Now I’m beginning to suspect it may be evidence that I have something different to contribute.
Experience is a form of knowledge.
Observation is a form of knowledge.
Paying close attention for twenty years is a form of knowledge.
Teachers spend their careers conducting countless informal studies of human behavior. We notice patterns. We test assumptions. We revise our thinking. We gather evidence one conversation, one lesson, one relationship at a time.
The work rarely looks like research from the outside.
But curiosity lives at the center of both.
That realization has forced me to confront an uncomfortable question:
What if humility and confidence are not opposites?
What if it is possible to acknowledge your strengths without becoming arrogant?
What if saying, “I have something to contribute,” is not the same thing as saying, “I know everything”?
For many years, I treated those ideas as though they were inseparable.
If I wasn’t careful, I worried I might appear self-important.
If I wasn’t self-deprecating, I worried I might appear boastful.
If I spoke too confidently, I worried I might forget the values I grew up with.
Yet the people I admire most never seem trapped by that fear.
They possess a quiet confidence rooted not in superiority but in responsibility.
They understand that if they have something useful to offer, withholding it helps no one.
A teacher who knows how to help a struggling student should speak.
A researcher with an insight should share it.
A writer with a story should tell it.
Not because they are extraordinary.
Because the contribution matters.
I still love a good joke.
I still lock myself out of things, misplace important papers, and occasionally walk into a room with absolutely no idea why I entered it.
I hope I never lose the ability to laugh at those moments.
Humor keeps us human.
It reminds us that life is larger than our ambitions and kinder than our mistakes.
But I am learning that there is a difference between laughing at yourself and hiding behind the laughter.
One creates connection.
The other creates distance.
One says, “We’re all imperfect.”
The other says, “Please don’t look too closely.”
For most of my life, I believed humility meant standing in the back row.
These days, I think it may mean something else entirely.
Perhaps true humility is neither shrinking nor boasting.
Perhaps it is simply seeing yourself clearly.
Not larger than you are.
Not smaller than you are.
Exactly as you are.
A person with much left to learn.
A person with something worth offering.
A person willing, finally, to raise her hand.