EP118: You’re the Reason It Works: How Women Reclaim Recognition and Authority

In this powerful, leadership strategist and speaker Sarah Khan dismantles one of the most ingrained forms of conditioning ambitious women face — being the invisible backbone of other people’s success.

Sarah explores how women in midlife have spent decades holding up organizations, leaders, and legacies that rarely hold them back — becoming indispensable but invisible in the process. She unpacks how loyalty, usefulness, and quiet excellence have been weaponized to keep women small, and why recognition, authority, and visibility are not ego, but equity.

Listeners will learn how to:

• Identify where they’ve been supporting instead of leading
• Reclaim authorship over their brilliance and contributions
• Set boundaries that re-educate others on their value
• Redefine visibility beyond performance
• Restructure power dynamics to claim credit, compensation, and authority

This is a call to every midlife woman who’s tired of holding up structures that were never built for her. It’s time to stop being the scaffolding of someone else’s legacy — and start building your own.

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Blasphemous Stage
• 0:52 The Backbone Of Others’ Brilliance
• 3:36 Conditioning: Helpfulness And Invisibility
• 6:53 When Reliability Turns Into Erasure
• 10:20 The Quiet Tax Of Invisibility
• 13:45 Loyalty Versus Your Own Ambition
• 16:24 Claiming Brilliance Without Permission
• 19:30 Ownership, Authority, And Fair Credit
• 22:44 Stories Of Recognition Denied
• 26:12 Naming What’s True Without Apology

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Welcome to the business quick on my business. They're coming. The normal trends and overall bullshit status quo of entrepreneurship to uncover what it really takes to build the business that you want to build in a way that honors you, your life, and your vision for what's possible, and maybe piss off a few gurus along the way. So if you're ready to commit business blasphemy, let's do it. Hello, hello, blasphemers. Welcome to Business Blasphemy, where we dismantle the rules of business and leadership so that ambitious women can lead on their own terms. I am Sarah Kahn, speaker, strategist, business advisor, and your blasphemous host. All right, all of that aside, uh, there's a phrase that I used in last week's episode, and I posted it on social media, and it's actually garnered a little bit of hullabaloo. Now, you may have heard it, you may not have heard it, you may have seen it, uh, but I really want to talk about that today because every once in a while I say something and it's like, damn, that was good. So I want to talk about it, but not like as a sound bite. I want to talk about it as an ethos, as a way of being. The phrase was women need to stop being the backbone of other people's brilliance. Now, before we get into it and before I get emails and letters and text messages and whatever, I'm not by any stretch of the imagination saying that we should not support other people. I'm not saying that we shouldn't show up in service of a shared mission, okay? Those are all very important things. What I am talking about is a little bit more nuanced than that. And it is the fact that too many of us have spent our careers holding up structures that were never really meant to hold us in return. And somewhere along the way, we stopped noticing and we started disappearing in the fucking process. We became reliable, we became essential, we became trusted, but unfortunately, we also became invisible for the most part. So this episode is really for the woman who spent years, maybe even decades, making sure everything runs smoothly for other people, making other people's ideas work, making sure that, you know, somebody else looked shiny in the spotlight. And and and now, you know, quietly, maybe, maybe even a little bit shamefully, even though there should be no shame around this, they're wondering if they waited too long to prioritize their own vision, their own voice, their own brilliance and ambition and goals. Because a lot of us were raised to be helpful. That's the conditioning that we got. You know, be thoughtful, be useful, be helpful, be in service of people. And we learned very, very early on, and it was reinforced in our workplaces and our schooling and a lot of the social rhetoric, that our worth was tied to how much we could do for other people. So we grew up learning to anticipate other people's needs. We learned to solve problems sometimes even before they surfaced, right? We were so hyper-vigilant. And we were taught to take pride in being the one that everyone counts on. I have so many examples of this in my own life, and I know that you do too, right? But I want you to start thinking about like where in your past or even in your current job, personal life, business, whatever, where have you been the reliable one? The person everybody counts on, the one everyone knows is gonna be there. And you know, it does work. Like being reliable, being the person anyone can uh trust and rely on, it does work. I did become very valuable to the people who needed me to be reliable. And then one day I woke up and realized, huh, I'm propping up a thing that I never really wanted to build in the first place. Sometimes it's somebody else's career. Sometimes it's somebody else's platform, you know. But you you you've built this thing and become the backbone of this thing that you don't actually benefit from. Sometimes you're just building somebody else's brilliance. And the worst, the worst thing that can happen is sometimes it's not anybody else's brilliance at all. It's your own brilliance, but other people are leveraging it for their own success, right? When you are the backbone, people learn to lean on you, obviously. They learn that you can, that you're gonna catch whatever falls through the cracks and that you're gonna make it happen no matter what. And because you're so freaking good at it, nobody really stops to question whether you want to be the one holding it all together in the first place. They just assume that you do. Every mother knows this, every mother knows this, every spouse knows this. We get taken for granted, and that assumption really slowly kind of erodes your own sense of agency. You you start to confuse usefulness with value, with purpose. And over time, what happens? The line between helping and caring it disappears, it becomes a dot in the horizon. And you start to realize that you were never really as valued. You were valuable, but you were not as valued as you thought you were. But you were still always the reason everything worked out. And I'm sure that there are experiences that, you know, taught you a lot, and that's wonderful, and you don't regret it. Like I don't, I don't regret my experiences. It's not that simple, right? It's a very nuanced sort of situation. There is a great sense of pride in being someone else's support, you know, being somebody else that um, somebody that other people can rely on. But there's also something under the surface of that when it's gone on for a very long time. There's this kind of restlessness, this low grade, I don't know, resentment, maybe. But it's this really quiet sort of ache, this impending feeling of like, when is it gonna be my turn? When am I gonna be seen? When am I gonna be valued for more than what I can do? Because I'm really fucking smart and I know a lot of things. And it kind of just manifests itself as this feeling of being tired, really. And I know all of my women listening who are like 40 plus, you know exactly what I'm talking about. We talk about burnout, we talk about, you know, midlife exhaustion. Maybe it's because we've been fucking propping shit up for so long and we've not actually benefited from any of it to the degree that we have earned the benefit. And the longer you hold up the weight of other people's legacies without building your own, the heavier that weight gets until one day you wake up and it doesn't feel noble anymore. It just feels like a depleting bag of shit, honestly. So I want you to think about where in your life you're contributing to something that at this point is probably not going to be able to run without you. But it also doesn't get you recognized either. Like, where are you essential to everything and everyone except your own vision and ambition? Because that is the quiet tax of invisibility. And that is a tax that too many women are still paying and keep paying throughout their careers. And then they bring that into their businesses and they pay it there. So you got a lot of women who stay in situations, whether it's like roles or partnerships or collaborations, because we have been taught, we have been conditioned to equate loyalty with integrity. We have been told that good women don't quit, that we don't make it about ourselves, that we stay until the end, we see it through. And I really want to underscore the fact that, you know what, you can honor what you've built and still choose a point to move forward from towards something that honors you back. You can love your team, you can love your boss, you can love your clients, you can love your business, you can, you can love your job, and you can still recognize the point where you have outgrown the role everybody sees you in. There's nothing noble about loyalty that costs your own ambition. So, so many women, especially women in midlife, are sitting on an enormous mountain of brilliance that they have never claimed out loud. Like you know how to lead, you've done the work, you've built entire fucking businesses and systems and teams and families and empires, you've been the engine behind all of that. But when it comes time to center yourself, what do you do? You hesitate, you defer, you downplay, you downplay the excellence because that's how we've been trained to see it. And a lot of the time, it's because stepping into that vision, right? That our own vision, after years of supporting somebody else, it can feel really unfamiliar and really uncomfortable. It feels like you're breaking some sort of unspoken rule, right? Like we've been told probably our whole lives, don't take up too much space, don't be too big, don't be too demanding, don't outshine the people you're helping. I've worked with clients who had a major problem with me because of the work I was doing outside of my client work. Hell, I remember I was even offered a job and I've done an episode about it. You can go back and listen to it. It's, I think it was January of 2023. But I was offered a job as an executive coach. And when I said I was going to keep my podcast and still do my speaking engagements, because like literally that was the only thing I wanted to do. They were not in conflict with the job itself. I confirmed that at the beginning of the six-week-long freaking interview process. But I confirmed it. But when push came to shove at the end, like I was ready to burn my whole business down for this woman, but then she was like, absolutely not. You can't keep doing your podcast or speaking because then you're not fully bought into my vision. But everybody knew it was really about keeping me quiet. It was about keeping me behind the curtain because who am I to outshine the person whose name is on the fucking building? Meanwhile, I would have been working day and night to drive people to her business, to train her in her methodology. We get so caught up in the ego side of it and it's ridiculous. So instead, you know, we we shrink, we tell ourselves we're being thoughtful or humble or strategic or whatever. And sometimes we're just afraid, especially when we're around personalities that are really big and really boisterous. We're afraid that if we step forward, no one's gonna follow us. We're afraid that without someone else's name or clout to anchor ourselves to, we're not gonna be seen as credible enough on our own. Let me tell you something, and I want you to hear me really clearly. Your brilliance, your excellence is not borrowed. It is not a reflection of who you have helped. It's yours. It's yours. You own it. It was born of you. Now again, I I want to reiterate, I am not saying that there is something wrong with working for somebody else. Not at all, not even a little bit, okay? There's nothing wrong with choosing to support a founder or a CEO or a visionary because leadership doesn't always look like having your own company, right? Sometimes leadership is in how you show up for a mission that isn't your own, but it's still fully and totally aligned with who you are. You don't have to want the spotlight. That's totally fine. Not every woman wants to be the face of a brand or stand on stage, but this is the hill that I'm I'm planting a flag in. Every woman deserves ownership of their work, and they deserve authority over how they show up in the work. Do you want to be public? Fine, don't be public. But invisibility shouldn't be the price of peace. The choice has to be intentional, not expected or assumed or inherited. And also, you deserve to be appropriately compensated, whether it's monetarily or through other things. You deserve to be respected publicly. And you deserve to be credited very clearly for the work that is yours. Too many women I've worked with have told me the same story in a number of different ways, right? Oh, I was doing the work of a VP, but I had the title of an assistant. Or, you know, I was going to develop a strategy. And when it came time to talk about it, like I wasn't even included in the decision-making process. Or, you know, they called me the right hand, but a lot of the time I was just an afterthought. Like I will never forget I worked for a private design firm in Europe, and I was given the opportunity to spearhead an entire new division that I had thought of, like I had come up with it as a way to diversify the market share. And so I built this entire division with my own hands from the ground up, right? I hired the people, brought them in, put them in the right place, marketed everything. And within six months of going to market, we grossed over 1 million pounds sterling. When I tell you that is fucking amazing, it's fucking amazing. And yes, I'm going to sit here and toot my own goddamn horn for a second. And so we took the idea back to the founders because this was like a trial run, right? They they gave us the leeway to run this as a trial. And so I brought it back to the founders and I was like, all right, let's bring this into the business as a full-time thing. And they were like, absolutely. And guess who got made executive director of this division? Not me. I was thrown back into the trenches to do more work because I was more valuable there. There you go. And the division is still there, it's still making money. But my name, nowhere in the history books, not even a friggin' footnote. But I stayed. Despite that huge slap in the face, I stayed. And it wasn't because I didn't know better, but I truly believed eventually my hard work would pay off. Maybe that wasn't enough. Maybe I need to work harder. And then somebody will notice and somebody will finally say, Oh my God, she's the reason all of this works. Like, yeah, there were instances in my past where, you know, people did say that, you know, hey, you you're the reason this works. But more often than not, they didn't. And my entire career is riddled with examples like this because people don't change their narrative unless you force them to. And I know there are a lot of people listening today who have very similar experiences. So forcing that narrative change means stepping out of the role that keeps you small, even if you're really, really good at it. Especially if you're really, really good at it. We've been taught, I guess, that asking for recognition is somehow vanity, that needing your name on something makes you selfish, that it's full of ego, that you know, your if your motives were pure, you wouldn't care about the credit. Who benefits from that belief? Certainly not the women doing the work. Wanting your contributions recognized is not ego. Wanting to be listened to is not ego. It's about being visible in the spaces that you helped create and build. It's about showing up for your own success, not just enabling success for other people. If you're writing a strategy, why aren't you speaking about it? If you're driving outcomes, why aren't you part of their leadership team? If you're shaping vision, why are you still sitting in the back? Recognition is not a fucking trophy and it's not a fucking reward. It's people deferring to your judgment because they recognize your excellence. And you know what? Maybe that looks like being in those decision-making rooms, being compensated, proportionate to your contribution. Maybe it's people acknowledging the work that you helped create. It all starts with one really consistent act of self-leadership. And I want you to hear this. Start naming what is true. Do not soften it, do not minimize it, don't package it for palatability. I when you say I led that project, you are not bragging. You are documenting fact. When you say this idea came from my research, you are not being arrogant, you are being accurate. It is clarity, and clarity commands respect. You do not need to be aggressive about it. You don't need to shout at people, but you do need to take ownership. Because if people only see you as a support, they're only ever going to treat you as a resource and never the actual source of the excellence. Now, part of this is reclaiming the power that you, I mean, inherently have, but has leaked out over the years. And you reclaim that power by holding better boundaries before you get to the breaking point, you know? You start saying things like I'm no longer available for roles that depend on me staying small. It's it's a decision, a conscious, intentional decision you make to stop being the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain and assuming that everyone and everything will just keep running. I want you to start asking yourself, what am I building? Who sees me clearly? Where is my name going to be in the legacy that I'm hoping to leave? So those boundaries, let's talk about those boundaries. I know a lot of people think the boundaries are walls or barriers. They're not. They're not there to keep people out. They're actually filters. They show you exactly who respects your time and your talent. And in a lot of cases, just your humanity. They're educational tools. They teach people how to engage with you. So I want you to get some practice in starting communicating your boundaries out loud. Like, I'm sorry, I'm not available for actually, no, nope, nope. I wouldn't even say I'm sorry. I'm gonna take that back. Communicate your boundaries like I'm not available for that last-minute turnaround. My strategic input should be credited. My role includes decision-making authority, not just execution. Yes, I'm happy to contribute to this project, but I need my work attributed. And my absolute favorite. I'm not gonna stay late unless I'm compensated for it. Because how many times have we stayed late and not been compensated for it? And now when you start setting boundaries, it's gonna shift the dynamic to the point where people start getting uncomfortable because you have stopped overgiving and they're gonna notice when you stop saying yes to things. They're gonna start pushing back because that's what happens, right? Because they realize that access that they've had a free-for-all to, it's no longer available. Fucking let them. That discomfort is not a sign that you're doing something wrong. That's exactly the point of the boundaries. The people who truly value you are not gonna be threatened by them. Whether they are new boundaries or boundaries that are old boundaries and you're just starting to reinforce or enforce them at all. Some people will respect them and they'll adjust and they'll meet you where you are. And then the ones who are threatened, well, now you know who was never really on your side to begin with. And it's always the people who are benefiting from stepping over you. A lot of the time when women start implementing changes like this, one of the big fears that comes up is uh, oh, people are gonna think that I've changed. And my answer to that is always the same. You have changed. That is the fucking point. You are not the same person who's gonna say yes to everything out of obligation. You are not the same person who's gonna confuse helping with belonging. You are not the same person who's gonna who believes that being indispensable means being valued. Change is the outcome of awareness. And once you make people aware, things will start to change. Once you see the system that you have been maintaining through sweat equity, you can't unsee it. The goal is not to stop serving others, it's to stop centering them. So you can still collaborate, you can still contribute, you can still support, but you do it from a position of power. You do it from a position of leverage. So, how do we do this in practice? All right, well, the first thing you do is you start naming your impact. So, like I said earlier, and then I got sidetracked, document it, write it down, track it, speak it out loud, keep a record of what you do and the results you create and how your presence changes things. That's not ego, it's data, and data becomes leverage. When people say, like, we couldn't have done this without you, I want you to start asking them, really, so how are we showing that in my title? How are we showing that in my pay? How are we showing that in my decision-making authority? That's what I want you to do. So start tracking it, write it down, name your impact, give it words. The second thing I want you to do, redefine what visibility actually means. Okay? We have taken it to mean performance. Being on social media, being out there, that's not visibility. Visibility means being known for something very specific. So decide what it is that you do, what you want to be known for. Maybe it's how discerning you are, maybe it's your strategic mind, maybe it's how well you lead under pressure. I don't care. It doesn't matter. I mean it does matter, but you know what I mean. Whatever it is, figure it out and then communicate that clearly and consistently. Okay? Clearly, consistently. That's what we're going for. Credibility, not spectacle. And then number three, I want you to restructure the power dynamic as a whole. I want you to stop accepting thank you as a substitute for influence and your ability to influence. Yeah, there are always going to be certain occasions where thank you is appropriate and enough, but you'll know when it's not. You know, if you're already operating at higher levels, then I want you to start asking for authority that matches that. Yeah, you might have to renegotiate your role or your title or your decision rights or your boundaries or your pay. Isn't it time you took your rightful seat at the table you fucking helped build? And then finally, I want you to diversify who gets your energy. This is really, really important, okay? If all of your time and your brilliance and your emotional labor go to one team or one person or one organization, you're building dependency, not just for them, but for you. And that is not leadership, that is not agency, that is not choice. Start looking for opportunities to mentor elsewhere. Look for opportunities to speak on panels, look for opportunities to collaborate with peers. Start your own initiative, right in your industry, in your niche, in your field, whatever. When your contributions are spread across spaces, that's how your authority multiplies. That's how your brilliance is no longer contained in one person or team or organization. So, what do I want this to lead to? What am I no longer available for? Where do I need to be seen and respected? Because that's the difference between being a backbone and being a builder. At some point, you're going to reach a line, okay? And you're going to realize that the version of the life that you're living right now is way too small for the woman you've become. When that happens, you have two options. You stay and you keep giving your brilliance away, or you leave with a plan. A real exit strategy is not reactive. It's not like throwing your papers in the air, you know, fuck this, I'm out. You're not kicking over desks. No, it's thoughtful. And we've talked about what that looks like. And what I know is that eventually every woman who's been the backbone reaches a point of choice. Do I continue holding up structures that don't hold me, or do I build my own? Like at the end of the day, the form doesn't actually even matter. The agency does. You can build something for yourself inside the system or outside the system. It doesn't matter. Either way, it's time to stop living in the belief one day someone else will give you permission to be an authority. You've always been a leader. Now it's just time to make that leadership visible. First to yourself, then to everybody else. But whatever it looks like, it starts the minute you decide that you're no longer available to just be the backbone. You're not an option. You're not support. You're the reason it works at all. We spend our one life making someone else's dreams come true. It's time for you to own your voice. It's time for you to own your vision, your authority, your desire to be recognized, your ambition. It's time to refuse to stay quiet about it anymore. Oh, you know, and before you start second-guessing yourself, let me just say this. You don't need to prove yourself one more time in order to do any of this. You don't need another certification or another degree or another year of experience. You already fucking proven it. You've been proving it for years. The proof is in every late night you spent at the office, or every morning you woke up earlier, every every time you were in bed with your phone answering emails or whatever, every crisis you solved, every project you saved, every person you made look brilliant. So now go and start collecting the credit for it. Go collect the compensation, the authority, the recognition, all of the shit that you've already earned 10 times over. And if you want help, this is where we need to talk. Sign up for the strategic freedom snapshot. The link is in the show notes, but it's a 90-minute session where we map out where you've been operating from obligation, where your value is no longer reflected, and what needs to structurally shift, not emotionally, it's not mindset work. What needs to structurally shift so that your brilliance starts working for you, not just through you. When we make a plan so that you stop waiting for permission, you stop hoping to be seen, you get a clear and grounded strategy that honors where you are today and what you're looking to do next. Or go relisten to this podcast, write down those five points that I made, and start doing them. I want you to prove to yourself, most of all, that you're ready for what comes next. And this is exactly what success without all that BS actually means. I'll talk to you next week. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Business Blasphemy Podcast. We'll be back next week with a new episode, but in the meantime, help us sister out by subscribing, and if you're feeling extra sensory rating this podcast. And don't forget to share the podcast with others. Head over to businessblastfamypodcast.com to connect to this and learn more. Thanks for listening. And remember, you can have success without the end.