The Tampon, the Boardroom & the Practice That Changed My Career

There are moments in life where your brain becomes fully convinced your career is over.

Not because you failed.
Not because you weren’t prepared.
But because you had one deeply human moment in front of other people.

In this episode of Over This Should, Pamela shares the hilarious and horrifying story of accidentally pulling a tampon out of her work bag during a leadership meeting… and the powerful realization that came from it years later:

Self-leadership is not about being perfectly polished.
It’s about not abandoning yourself when discomfort shows up.

This episode dives into:

• Why ambitious women are conditioned to equate perfection with credibility
• The neuroscience behind embarrassment, self-criticism, and nervous system threat responses
• Why beating yourself up actually makes you less effective under pressure
• The “3-Second Stay” practice for handling awkward, emotional, or uncomfortable moments in real time
• How to build true confidence by staying with yourself instead of spiraling

If you’ve ever replayed a meeting in your head for three business days… convinced everyone noticed the one thing you did wrong… this episode is for you.

You are not disqualified by your humanity.
You are connected through it.

Come hang out with Pamela on Instagram and LinkedIn @thepamelameadows and share your own “tampon story.” Because we’ve all got one.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So today let's talk about the time I almost died of mortification. And I want you to settle in because this story has a moral, but it also has a tampon in it. So many years ago, I was sitting in a conference room packed with mostly men getting ready for a leadership meeting. I can't stress this enough. This is a meeting that I had been preparing for for days on end. Reading my research, looking at my PowerPoint, practicing what I was going to say in this meeting. Because if you know me, you know I am a deeply type A personality. I'm the woman who travels with backup chargers, extra sticky notes, erasable pins in every color you can imagine. And handwritten notes, they're basically a part of my personality now. I don't make the rules. At that time, I was still going into the office and I carried an oversized tote bag that was basically a mobile office. Inside the bag, neatly organized folders, lip gloss, gum, sticky notes, pins in every color that you can imagine, highlighters. And as it turned out, one tampon that traveled suspiciously close to the highlighter section. So the room is filling up, laptops are opening, coffee is clinking against the desk. The CEO is ready to start the meeting. And I, confidently and professionally, like the leader that I am, reached down into my bag to grab the highlighter. And as I pulled it up, I pulled out a tampon. And not subtly. Like I pulled it out of the bag and held it up for God and corporate America all to see at the same time. The bright orange wrapper caught my eye first, but it was really that unmistakable crinkling of the wrapper that really let me know what I had pulled out of my bag and held up to high heaven for everybody to see. I panicked, shoved it right back into the bag like I was disposing of crime scene evidence. I almost knocked my coffee over in the motion. My face went red. I felt like I was hot on fire from absolute embarrassment. And in that moment, I wanted the floor to just open up and swallow me a whole game over, career finished. Someone build me a small cabin in the woods where I never had to make eye contact with another human again. And then I had a split-second realization. I still had to participate in the meeting. Nobody was going to call a timeout because I exposed the horrifying fact that I am indeed a woman with a uterus. The agenda was still happening, the CEO was still talking, and the meeting had to continue. So I had to keep going. Not because I felt confident, not because I felt like a woman on the stage of TED Talk with my blazer and my power suit. No, none of that. I kept going. I didn't have the language for this then, but I realized that sometimes self-leadership shows up and it doesn't look like confidence. Self-leadership can look like staying, staying in the room, staying in the conversation, staying in the middle of something even through the discomfort of it. Self-leadership means not abandoning yourself even when you want that cabin in the woods. And today, that's what we're talking about. Here's what struck me years later when I finally had the time and the space to look back at that moment with compassion. It wasn't the embarrassment piece that was interesting, it's how fast my brain moved. In a split second, my brain ran an entire calculation. It assessed whether this one moment, this one deeply human moment, made me look less competent, less prepared, less professional, less intelligent, less credible in my role, even less worthy of being in that room. That, my friends, is conditioning. Women, especially in professional spaces, are taught early that credibility is fragile. Many of us learned not to just manage our work, but to manage the perception of our work. That leadership means polish. That being respected means never fumbling, never needing, never taking up space that you don't need to. So we become exceptional at invisibility, exceptional at carrying it all. Exceptional at proving. Exceptional at hustling. Exceptional at staying polished and poised and professional enough that nobody has to ask that question that we are most scared of. Do you actually belong in this room? Now here's where I want to bring you the research because I've asked myself that question throughout my entire life, whether it's in my career, in my community, with my friend group, do I actually belong here? Do I fit? Am I good enough? Am I worthy? And here's the truth. I love that you're here on this podcast. And I'm not going to leave you with a vibe or good energy. We're going to dig into the facts of why you are worthy and why you belong in the rooms that you're in. There's a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin named Dr. Kristen Neff. And she's taken decades and decades to study what happens when we actually treat ourselves with self-compassion instead of self-criticism in moments of failure or fumblings. And what she's found over and over is truly profound, and it became one of the foundational pieces of my coaching practice. You know, self-criticism, that voice that says things like, Why did you do that? Now they know that you're not professional, now they know that you're not a good enough mom because you did that, you're exposed. That voice, that voice doesn't actually motivate you to do better. You might think it does, you might think it's your inner drill sergeant or the thing keeping you in order, but it does not motivate you to do or be better. It's the opposite. It activates the body's threat system. Your cortisol goes up, your heart rate goes up, you have the same physiological response as being chased by something dangerous. Which is why after an embarrassing moment like that, your voice gets shaky, you can't think straight. You take a shower and you spend six hours shampooing your hair thinking about how you could have done it differently. I know you've been there. I've been there. So translation, when you're mentally beating yourself up, your nervous system thinks it's under attack. And nobody leads well from threat mode. Nobody. So self-compassion, on the other hand, is just a fancy way of saying treating yourself with the same kindness that you would to a friend who is in the same situation. It actually keeps you regulated. It lets you stay in the moment. It lets you stay in the room. It lets you stay in that hard conversation. The research consistently shows that people who practice self-compassion bounce back faster, they make better decisions quicker, and they gain more confidence over time. So, in short, beating yourself up doesn't make you a better leader, employee, wife, mom, friend. It actually makes you less effective. And here's the thing that nobody warned us about. We didn't just learn to be polished, we learned to be polished as survival strategy. Because somewhere along the line, we learned that being respected meant being as close to perfect as possible. That credibility was something fragile that we had to protect from moment to moment in front of an audience. Every meeting, every introduction, every email calculated, reread, replayed in our head. So let's reframe that. Credibility is built by the woman who fumbles and stays, who makes mistakes, takes accountability, and levels up. Who pulls out the wrong tools and still keeps speaking. Who gets called ambitious like a capital B, but still stays motivated in her career. Who has a human moment and doesn't feel the need to apologize for being a human. You don't have to perform emotional gymnastics every time you have a human moment. You don't have to grab the right highlighter the first time. Although that would have been easier. You have to show up and show out through all of the discomfort. That's the whole job. That's the point. So, how do we actually do that? I want to give you a practice you can use today, during the next meeting, the next car ride with the kids, the next moment that your face feels hot and your brain's like, abort, abort. I call it the stay practice. It's borrowed from cognitive behavioral therapy, and it's one of the most effective ways to interrupt this pattern in real time. Just four steps you can do without anybody knowing that you're doing it. Step one, notice the urge to abandon yourself, the urge to shrink, to apologize, to overshare, to self-deprecate. Just notice it. And then name it. That's conditioning. That's just conditioning. It's not me, it's just what I was taught. And step two is stay for three seconds. Don't fix it. Don't perform. Don't rush to recover. Just sit for three seconds. Three seconds feels like an eternity when you're mortified. I know. But three seconds is the difference between abandoning yourself to self-deprecation, self-criticism, over-sharing, over-explaining, versus self-compassion. Just letting it sit for a minute. Not beating yourself up. Step three, reframe the thought. Catch that sentence in your head, the one that's running through it that says, now they don't think I'm as professional as they once did, or now they think I don't belong in this room. Catch the thought. And replace it with something truer. Sorry, this one. I'm a human who had a human moment in front of other humans. Because that's all that happened. You didn't lose your competence, your intelligence, your capacity, your capabilities. You didn't lose your track record. You didn't lose your seat at the table. You had a human moment. That's all that happened, period. Step four is continue the work. Pick up from where you were, the meeting, the conversation, the presentation. You don't need to reference the moment that just happened. Just keep going. And I know that the stay practice sounds really small. It sounds like it's nothing. It is not nothing. Every time you stay in these moments and you choose self-compassion over self-criticism, you're teaching your nervous system something brand new. You're teaching it that you can be seen and have human fumblings or human mistakes, and there was no need for the floor to open up and swallow you whole after all. You're teaching yourself and your whole body that your worthiness doesn't shatter if your polish does. Repetition by repetition, you are building a foundational muscle for self-compassion. And self-compassion is a critical component of self-leadership. In just those few seconds, and just those four steps I have done time over time over time, you're reaffirming to yourself that you're able to stay with yourself and support yourself even when staying is hard. So this week, watch for these moments. They will come, they always do. You'll fumble a sentence, you'll forget someone's name, you'll forget that today was a day that the kids needed cookies for their classroom. You'll cry in a meeting when you swore you'd never cry at work again. You'll ask questions that you're afraid are going to sound dumb. You might even pull out your tampon in front of God and corporate America. And when these moments show up, don't abandon yourself. Stay in it for three seconds. Reframe it, and continue on. That's the whole process. If this episode hit you deep, send it to a woman who's replaying an embarrassing moment from 2017 like it's still breaking news. Come find me on social and give me a follow. I'm at the Pamela Meadows on LinkedIn and Instagram. And I want to hear your tampon story. I want to hear your fumbles. I want to hear about the meeting you decided to stay in when you actually just wanted to disappear. You can even send me the messy stories. I read every single message I get and I love hearing from you all. And here's what I want you to remember: you don't owe anybody the polished version of yourself. You owe it to yourself to stay. You owe yourself the woman who's self compassionate. You owe yourself the woman who stays through discomfort. The goal is not to become unshakable. The goal is to stop abandoning yourself when life shakes you. Remember, you are allowed to be over it. And I'll see you next week.