Early in my agency career, someone made a joke about taking the meeting to the sauna and “bringing the girls.”
The room laughed. I sat there watching a real business conversation turn into a punchline, and somehow the women in it had become part of the joke.
I was a coordinator. Brand new. I absorbed it and moved on.
But something stuck.
For most of my career, I walked into rooms where people had already made assumptions about me before I had a chance to contribute. 5 feet tall, Asian, always looking younger than I was.
I responded the way a lot of people do when they’re underestimated early: I worked harder, prepared more, and carried what I now call proving energy.
I wanted to prove I belonged. Prove I was smart. Prove that my size, my face, my age, my gender, my race, and where I sat in the room didn’t determine the weight of what I had to say.
At that stage, being small felt like something I had to overcome.
The shift came slowly. Through experience, mistakes, and rooms I eventually learned to lead instead of just survive.
One moment I still think about: someone said to me, almost in passing, “You’re tiny, but when you speak, you have so much impact.”
I had been trying to create presence for years. Here was someone reflecting back that I already had it.
Being mighty wasn’t about proving I wasn’t small.
It was about knowing my value and learning to use it well.
That realization quietly shaped how I think about small businesses too.
Small But Mighty isn’t a tagline about trying to act bigger than you are. It’s about understanding your size as part of your strategy.
Bigger can outspend the room. Smaller can out focus it, out care, and build trust in ways that compound quietly over time.
That’s a different kind of power. And it belongs to you.
The full story — including the moment someone said something I didn’t know I needed to hear, and the Olympic rowing lesson that reframed everything — is on my Substack.
