How Power Moves

You've felt it — the meeting where your ideas get built on without credit, the  praise that somehow makes you smaller, the feedback that comes without names or specifics. That's power moving, and it rarely announces itself.

In this episode, Sarah breaks down the hidden power dynamics that shape your career before you even realize the game is being played. She introduces the "cardigan" — the polite power move that's cashmere on the outside, barbed wire underneath — and walks through the most common types: the moving target, the whispered warning, and claimed credit.

You'll learn a practical framework for reading any professional space (green, yellow, or red rooms), how to recognize when you've been cast in roles that serve the system instead of you — the fixer, the buffer, the daughter, the translator — and three strategic shifts you can make this week to stop shrinking and start reshaping the dynamic.

This episode is for anyone who's ever walked out of a room feeling smaller than when they walked in and wondered if they imagined it. You didn't.

Subscribe to The Career Strategist and leave a review if this episode gave you language for something you've been feeling but couldn't name.

Key takeaways:

• Power isn't just titles and corner offices — it's who gets to be comfortable, who gets forgiven, and who has to manage everyone else's reactions
• The "cardigan" is a polite power move that looks supportive on the surface but contains you underneath — learn to spot the moving target, whispered warnings, and claimed credit patterns
• Every professional space is a green, yellow, or red room — naming the color
• gives you back strategic choice about how much energy to invest 
• If you've been cast as the fixer, the buffer, the daughter, or the translator, you're propping up someone else's comfort at the cost of your own growth
• Three shifts to try this week: stop auto-volunteering, name the real decision maker, and replace "happy to help" with "I deliver [specific outcome]"

Resources Mentioned

•  The double bind research on women in leadership
•  The Career Strategist Episode 1: Defining yourself before someone else does

Connect with Sarah

LinkedIn / website 

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction: The Power Dynamics at Play
• 0:51 Understanding Subtle Power Moves
• 5:15 The Cardigan: Hidden Power Dynamics
• 13:33 Identifying Room Colors: Navigating Professional Spaces
• 20:39 Recognizing and Reshaping Assigned Roles
• 29:19 Strategic Shifts: Taking Control of Your Career
• 31:34 Conclusion: Embracing Your True Potential

Transcript

[00:00:00]

Introduction: The Power Dynamics at Play

You walk into the meeting five minutes early, you're prepared. You're always prepared. You know your numbers, but when the conversation starts, something shifts. The person who shows up unprepared, gets deferred to your ideas, get built on without attribution, and when you try to jump in, you find yourself softening your voice.

Prefacing with, oh, I might be wrong, but that, that's power moving and you felt it long before you could name it.

I am Sarah Caminiti. Welcome back to the Career Strategist. 

Understanding Subtle Power Moves

Last week was about defining yourself before somebody else flattens you into what's convenient for them this week is about the force that makes that 

[00:01:00] flattening. So persistent power, and I don't mean the obvious kind. I'm not talking about the title, the corner office, the person who signs your paycheck.

I'm talking about the sneaky kind, the kind that hides in politeness, the kind that hides in praise in meeting dynamics and casual comments. The kind that shapes how you're being seen. The kind that shapes how you're being seen before you even realize the game is being played. Today, we are building language so that you can finally name what's happening, because once you see how power really moves, you're gonna be seeing it everywhere.

The thing about power is that real power is much quieter than most people realize. Power is who gets to be comfortable. Who gets to take up space without apology? [00:02:00] Who can raise their voice and be heard, and who has to lower theirs just to be tolerated? Who gets forgiven when they mess up? And who has their mistakes carved in stone?

You felt this difference, that meeting where you held back while somebody else interrupted everybody. The moment you found yourself softening your tone, so you wouldn't sound too much, you were not being overly sensitive, you were reading the room correctly. The flip side reveals who lacks power. Those expected to protect everyone else's comfort to soften their tone.

To anticipate needs to carry the invisible labor of keeping the peace to absorb the emotional residue when things go wrong. But here's the thing, power dynamics don't actually start when someone makes a decision about you. They start when you make a [00:03:00] decision for them. When you decide to shrink your presence, to phrase statements like questions, to make yourself less threatening before you even enter a room.

I know this because. I lived it. I still live it sometimes. For years, I was softening everything, my results, my tone, my very presence, because I believed that if I made myself small and agreeable, people would see my potential and they would reward me accordingly. Isn't that a fun lie? They're really good at selling that lie, aren't they?

We all know how this all pans out. We know how that beautiful lie ends up proving to be just that a lie, that reward. It never came because the second that you walk into a room already deciding to make yourself manageable, [00:04:00] that's the role that people are going to hand you and they will hold you there as long as they can.

And the great thing is that this is where research catches up to the lived experience, the experience of women in leadership. US women face what's called a double bind. You're competent, but you're unlikable or. You're likable, but you're not taken seriously. Either way, you're managing someone else's comfort instead of just delivering results.

So let's name this. Clearly,

power is already in every single room that you enter. It's already shaping how the room hears you and whether or not. You claim it. It's always moving. The hardest thing about power is that it rarely announces itself. You don't walk into a meeting and hear someone say, alright, attention [00:05:00] everybody. I just want to let you know that I am about to undercut you.

Yeah, they don't even put that in movies or TV shows because it's so, so far removed from the reality of things. 

The Cardigan Metaphor: Hidden Power Dynamics

Power usually hides in something so much softer, like a cardigan. The cardigan is the polite power panic that people slip into when you step outside that role that they've silently assigned you, and it always comes with a smile.

Thank goodness for that. You ask for more scope and what comes back is praise, but that praise lands like a lid. You've been such a steady hand. We can always count on you and then they move on without acknowledging what you asked for. Yeah. That's on purpose because on the surface it sounds flattering.

They gave you a cookie. You took the cookie, but the message they're delivering underneath is sharp. I [00:06:00] decide what's happening here. You must stay where I put you. Yeah. Yeah. That's the cardigan. It's cashmere on the outside, but it is barbed wire underneath, and the moment that you push against it, you feel that wire cut.

But the best part is the moment that you react. The moment that you say, ow, that hurt. The cashmere gets pulled back over the wire and suddenly you're questioning whether you imagine the whole thing, but you're still bleeding. You see the blood, and that's how you know that it worked. These cardigans come in a variety of shapes and colors and sizes, so instead of just lumping everything into one fun bucket.

Let's open up this beautiful cardigan closet and see what different kinds are [00:07:00] out there. 'cause they're probably surrounding you right now. We have the, uh, the moving target cardigan. So picture a cardigan with sleeves that just keep getting longer. Just when you think you've got the right fit, you realize that you can't reach anything because your hands are covered.

At work. That's when you hit the goal. When you exceed the goal. Yeah. There's a little bit of celebration. It lasts exactly one meeting, and then suddenly those accomplishments shift because the goal shifts. Now that you've mastered this, let's see how you can handle this one. And then it's followed by expanded scope with no additional authority, no extra resources, a shortened timeline.

No recognition. It kind of feels like growth, especially in the moment. Sounds like an opportunity [00:08:00] ish. Look closer. You are running faster and faster, but you're staying in the exact same place. That's not promotion. That's a treadmill designed to exhaust you and not a safe treadmill because you're wearing a cardigan that has sleeves that by now are down to your feet, and they would get trapped in the treadmill and you could get really hurt.

The next cardigan. Oh, this one. I see this one way too often, the whispered warnings. This one looks like beautiful cashmere, but it has this really weird, invisible pattern woven into it. It's got these threads that only show up under certain light. You can't quite see what's so wrong about it, but something feels really off.

This cardigan always [00:09:00] manages to show up as a concerned colleague. Pulling you aside, just between us, people are saying that you're a little intense, they're not giving you names. Nope. No examples, no specific incidents, just enough fog. To make you spiral into self-doubt and soften yourself preemptively.

Picture someone spreading rumors about you, but when you ask for details, they suddenly become your protector. I didn't wanna make this a big thing. I just thought that you should know. Let's just, let's pretend that I never said anything. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. I didn't expect you to be so sensitive about this.

If feedback can't be owned with specifics and a name attached, it's not feedback. It's psychological warfare, trust up as care, and the next beautiful cardigan, it's claimed credit. This [00:10:00] cardigan has someone else's named monogrammed on it and no. It's not a cardigan that you got from the LL bean outlet that somebody had monogrammed and then they never picked it up and you got it for like five bucks.

No. You know the person who has their name monogrammed on this cardigan, this cardigan fits you perfectly. You wear it everywhere. You feel so good in it, but everyone sees their initials when they look at you. And what does that even mean? Well, it means that they get to say, she's one of mine. They get to say, man, did I take a chance on her?

That was a risk that I had to fight for. That paid off. Sounds generous. Sounds like championing kind of. But listen to the language of ownership. Picture your boss introducing you at a company meeting. I am so proud of the work that Sarah's done on this project. When I brought her onto the team, I knew she had potential.

Nobody else knew that she had potential. I knew [00:11:00] she had potential, so I took her under my wing and she really delivered on my vision. You heard that, didn't you? Your work, their vision. Your execution, their strategy, the risk, the reward, your late nights, their leadership. When someone keeps attaching your wins to their risk taking.

Yeah, they're not expanding your opportunities, they're limiting them. Every success becomes a reflection of their judgment, not your capability. And there are so many more of these cardigans. But I didn't want this to be a seven hour episode, so we'll stop right there and acknowledge that. The brilliance of all of these cardigans is that in every single situation, you are doing all the work.

You soften your approach. You second guess your instincts. You walk into rooms pre apologizing instead of showing up in your full [00:12:00] capacity. Meanwhile, the person delivering these cardigans, wearing these cardigans. Gifting you with these cardigans? Oh, they get to look so supportive, protective, even you'd be nothing without them really.

Sure, yeah. They're not protecting you. They're protecting the dynamic that keeps you contained. And any one of these patterns might look harmless in isolation. But stack them together and they form a system designed to keep you in the same role with the same scope, the same salary, taking up the same amount of space, no matter how much you actually grow.

Odds are you lived this. Your gut may be telling you, you lived this before. Your brain totally tells you that you live to this. The praise that somehow makes you smaller. [00:13:00] Instead of bigger. Yeah. You weren't imagining the barbed wire underneath that cashmere. Your instincts were right. Over time, these dynamics don't just shape your day.

They shape your roles and rolls form inside the rooms that you walk into. Every room sends signals about what's allowed and what isn't. Here's a tool that changed how I navigate. Professional spaces. 

Identifying Room Colors: Navigating Professional Spaces

Think of every room that you walk into, like a traffic light, green, yellow, or red. Yes, yes. I'm really talking about a traffic light.

It sounds simple, but the cool thing is that it gives you back perspective and strategic choice. You got your green rooms. Green is where clarity is explicit. Roles are defined. Boundaries are respected. Disagreements aren't just survivable. They're encouraged [00:14:00] because. That's how real progress happens In green rooms.

You can name conflict without losing credibility. You can push back on decisions and still be seen as valuable and no doesn't make you a problem. A no makes you part of the solution. Think about the last time that you walked away from a meeting feeling energized. Even if the decision didn't go your way, you probably just walked out of a green room.

Remember that feeling because these are spaces where you can invest fully because your energy compounds instead of drains. Then we've got our yellow rooms. Yellow rooms are trickier because they are very, very good at disguising themselves as green On the surface, you are getting the recognition. You've got some praise, you've got the smiles.

But underneath the real power [00:15:00] is not shared. Decisions happen off channel. Urgency gets weaponized. Praise shows up, but without any authority attached. Yellow is the zone of polite containment. You're negotiating constantly, even when no one names it as a negotiation. And it is exhausting because you're spending all of this energy on defense instead of your contributions.

Instead of what you were hired to do, a classic yellow signal, you discover that a key decision happened at a lunch that you weren't invited to. But everyone insists that it wasn't intentional. They just happened to, uh, all like physically bump into one another. On a random street corner that was across the street from the best lunch spot around the office.

And for some reason, the only thing that they wanted to talk about was this decision that they were making without you [00:16:00] super, super unintentional. But through all of that, yellow is survivable. You can sometimes push it towards green. But know that it's never safe to assume that you're fully supported there.

And then we have our red rooms. Red is exclusion. Red is where you asked for more. And suddenly you're abrasive, you're emotional, you're not ready. Red is where credit actually disappears. Projects get reassigned. Meetings you've always attended suddenly don't need you. In red rooms, you're not negotiating.

You are contained and the container is locked. Red feels destabilizing because it is destabilizing. It's destabilizing by design. These are the spaces that train you back into smallness. I have [00:17:00] lived in so many red rooms. I have walked out questioning my own memory, my own competence, my own sanity. You can sometimes shift red to yellow, but you cannot shift it to green.

Even shifting it to yellow requires leadership willing to examine their own blind spots, not just you. Carrying all of that emotional labor. So why does this matter? Well, most of us move through rooms, adjusting our tone and our energy without naming what's happening. We call it reading the room. We call it being strategic, but naming the color gives you back choice in green.

Maybe you do go all in. Maybe you do. Share that big idea. Take the risk. In yellow. Maybe you contribute more strategically, but you keep reserve energy because you know that the [00:18:00] game isn't fair and in red. Maybe the most strategic move is stepping back because giving your full self to a space that only wants to contain you is the fastest path to burnout.

So let's try this. Label your next three meetings before you enter them. Green, yellow, red. Ask yourself, what evidence do I already have? Are decisions made transparently here? Are disagreements welcome? Do I walk away from this room feeling larger, or do I walk away from this room feeling smaller? Be honest with yourself.

That simple practice shifts the question from. What's wrong with me to what's happening here? And that shift makes a huge difference. Okay. Done a lot of doom and gloom here. So let's pause for a sec and let me just be clear. [00:19:00] This is not about assuming that everyone has malicious intent. Most people aren't consciously trying to contain you.

But they are operating inside systems that reward certain behaviors and punish others. The healthy version of power dynamics exists. It exists when authority is transparent, when feedback is specific and actionable and growth opportunities come with actual resources. When someone says you're ready for more, it includes a raise.

It includes decision rights and clear scope, not just additional responsibilities. In aligned environments, good managers tell you upfront when a room is yellow, because there will still be yellow rooms. They'll say, this decision is already made, but we want your input on execution. That is transparency.

That's not manipulation. Intent doesn't change impact, but understanding the [00:20:00] system helps you navigate it strategically rather than taking everything personally. When you recognize these patterns, those cardigans, the room colors, you're not becoming paranoid. You really are becoming strategic. You are taking all of that responsibility that you have been carrying off of your shoulders.

Now, once you're thinking strategically, you start seeing the pattern isn't random. These cardigans, these room colors, they're all working towards the same end. They're casting you in roles that serve the system, not you. 

Recognizing and Reshaping Assigned Roles

What are these roles? Well, I know a handful of them because I have found myself in all of them more than once.

I'm sure there are many, many other roles. These are the ones that I'm gonna go over today. We have the fixer. Your cast is the fixer because you're calm under pressure. [00:21:00] You see around the corners. You don't drop balls. People say she always finds a way. This isn't about being good at problem solving. It's about being brought in only when things are already broken.

You become known for crisis management instead of strategic thinking, the pattern shows up everywhere. You're called into meetings after the project has gone off the rails, but you were never included in the planning phase where you could have prevented the disaster. You're praised for putting out fires, but no one asks why these fires keep starting in the first place.

Your expertise is only valued in damage control mode. And the trap here is that authority rarely comes to fixers. What does come is blame when the next crisis hits and you can't work miracles this time, suddenly it's your fault for not fixing what was [00:22:00] unfixable from the start. If you find yourself in this role, you gotta pivot.

So the next time you find yourself in this situation, say. I'm happy to help solve this, but I need to be involved in the planning next time to prevent it from happening again. Period. That's it. The next role, the next role is the buffer. The buffer gets described as being so good with people. You make harsh leaders palatable, you smooth, difficult conversations.

You absorb team frustration. This isn't about having strong communication skills. It's about becoming the human shock absorber. Between dysfunction and the people who have to live with it. You're the one that people come to asking. What did leadership really mean by that? You're asked to deliver those difficult messages because you have such a gentle way of explaining things.

When someone's upset about a decision, they don't go to the decision [00:23:00] maker. They come to you to process their feelings about it. The cost here. Is that you carry emotional labor without authority. You are absorbing harm instead of changing its source, you become responsible for everyone's reactions to decisions that you didn't make.

The pivot here, the next time you find yourself in this situation is to say, I think this conversation would be way more effective coming directly from you. Alright, onto the next one, the daughter. The daughter role is the trickiest because. It's presented like family. It feels like family. You're protected, you're defended.

You're championed until you want actual power. Then the dynamic shifts. This isn't about someone literally calling you their daughter, though I have heard people [00:24:00] say he thinks about me like a daughter, as if that's a good thing. It is not a good thing. The role of the daughter is really about being treated like a child who needs guidance instead of a peer or a trusted ally who brings expertise.

Picture this, you're in a leadership meeting and when you disagree with a strategy, the response is an engagement with your ideas. It's a patronizing smile. And, uh hmm. I appreciate your perspective, but let me explain why we're doing it this way. So you have access without influence, without visibility, without credibility.

You get invited to important meetings, but you walk in and you notice that there's a, a little table over in the corner, the kids' table, that's where you're sitting. You can watch the adults make decisions. But you don't get a vote. [00:25:00] They may tell you that you have a vote, but you know, deep down your vote does not count.

You're allowed in the room. As long as you stay grateful, as long as you don't challenge the people who gave you a chance. The moment that you wanna be seen as an equal, you become ungrateful, you become difficult. Someone who doesn't appreciate what they've been given, the pivot on this one's a little bit different.

If you're still positioned as someone who needs that really close mentorship years into your tenure, and no one else in a position similar to yours has that same level of handholding, that's not development. It's really just containment. It's just dressed up as care this time, and you deserve so much better than that at that point.

There's really nothing that you can say to someone. To snap them out of it. You just kind of have to decide if this is where you wanna be. This is the role that [00:26:00] you wanna have for the rest of your time working at this company. And finally, we have the translator. The translator makes everyone sound brilliant.

Oh, you are so great at editing. You polish. You give structure to half warm thoughts. This isn't about being a good communicator. For a good listener, it's about disappearing behind other people's ideas. You are the one piecing everything together, yet your strategic thinking becomes someone else's executive presence.

You're the one who takes the CEO's rambling thoughts and turns them into coherent strategy documents. With their name on it, not yours. You're asked to wordsmith the VP's presentation because you are so good at making things clear. So you build out a framework, but your framework gets referenced in those meetings without any attribution.[00:27:00]

And that VP barely understands what the heck they're talking about. But your speaker notes were so thorough that they're able to coast through. The trap here is pretty obvious. Your fingerprints are everywhere, but your name is nowhere. You disappear from strategy because your power seems to be in quiet execution, not thinking.

You're thinking the whole time. So the pivot on this one, the next time you find yourself in this situation is to say, I'd like to help present this framework myself, or let me walk through my thinking on this approach. Or if you're working on a document, put your name on the document

so you've heard. Four different types of roles. And if you found yourself thinking, oh, that sounds familiar. Ooh, that one too, don't take it as a failure. You've been surviving by being useful, [00:28:00] and the better you get at these roles, the harder it becomes to break out of them. But smooth for the system is often costly for you.

The shift happens when you spot the role being offered and decide whether to accept it, reshape it, or refuse it. And sometimes you'll still play these roles. I do. But it's on your terms with authority attached. And that shift starts with strategic action, not someday. This week when you stop playing roles that prop up someone else's comfort, you break an unspoken contract.

The contract that says, I will stay small so you can stay comfortable. And when that contract breaks, that's when the cardigan power panic starts showing itself. But don't worry, the polite power panic shows up in many, many different cardigans all the time. You just have to prep yourself. You're going to get hit with the soft [00:29:00] smiles, with the sharp messages.

Then you've gotta remind yourself that the resistance isn't proof that you're wrong. It's proof that you've disrupted a balance that was working for them and not for you, and you don't have to wait for their permission to start. You can begin shifting these patterns right now. 

Strategic Shifts: Taking Control of Your Career

So I know I've already given you a lot of things to do in the next week, but I've got three more.

These are three strategic shifts, not tips. They're deliberate acts of choosing yourself first.

Each one builds momentum towards alignment by interrupting the patterns that have been defining you this whole time. So let's start with the first one. You got shift number one. Stop auto volunteering. The next time someone mentions a problem or a challenge in a meeting, please resist the urge to immediately offer [00:30:00] a solution or say that you can handle it.

Let there be a pause, see who else steps up. This breaks the automatic pattern where you become the default person for every extra task. It forces others to own problems instead of just defaulting to you as a solution. Shift number two, name the real decision maker. The next time you're in a meeting where things feel a little unclear.

Ask. Before we dive in, can we just clarify who's making the final decision and what success looks like for them? You're probably gonna see some people squirm, but that discomfort tells you who benefits from keeping the power dynamics foggy. And your willingness to ask tells everyone that you're not playing the guessing game anymore.

The third shift is practice power language. Stop yourself from saying, I'm happy to help however I can, and start saying I deliver, and then insert your [00:31:00] specific outcome. Practice it until it doesn't catch in your throat. The language you use trains people how to see you. Every time you soften what you do into vague helpfulness, you're teaching them that you're flexible every time you name your actual capability, you're teaching them that you're strategic.

Each of these three shifts is small enough to try this week, but significant enough to signal that something has changed. You are not just surviving the dynamic anymore, you're taking control and you're reshaping it. 

Conclusion: Embracing Your True Potential

Let's just take a breath here because this has been a lot and it should be. We've just named something that's been quietly running underneath your entire career.

Maybe your whole entire professional life. Your personal life, probably a little bit too. We didn't sugarcoat it or pretend that this is a mindset issue that you've gotta fix. No, [00:32:00] it's power. This is real power, the kind that you've been navigating without a map. If you're ending this episode feeling a little tired, maybe a little relieved, or a little raw, angry good, that means you're finally not gaslighting yourself.

What we just did. We just gave ourselves permission to stop pretending. You just gave yourself permission to stop pretending just by being here. You stopped pretending that this is normal, that this is your fault, that this is yours to carry, that you're imagining it, and now that you're seeing more clearly, you're gonna start noticing it everywhere.

You'll notice when someone says, oh, just between us and gives you no information. You'll notice how you soften your language when a certain person's in the room. You'll notice who gets to make mistakes and who gets scrutinized for the smallest detail. You're [00:33:00] going to start seeing all of these things happening all around you.

You're not pretending that you don't see it anymore and you're also not shrinking anymore and seeing it, it's not gonna mean that you're healed, that power dynamics are just gonna disappear. No, no, no, no, no, no. Those things aren't going anywhere, but it does mean that you're awake from this point forward.

You don't owe anyone your silence. You don't owe anyone your neutrality. You don't owe anyone a soft landing. When what's required is clarity that ends today. That ends right now, because you were never meant to stay small. You were never meant to make yourself manageable so others could feel powerful.

You were never meant to absorb the dysfunction of broken systems. Keep calling it teamwork. All of this work. It's not a dramatic shift. [00:34:00] It's a quiet revolution, and it starts with one question. What would change if you stopped shaping yourself to be manageable? Well, I'm going to answer that question for you because the answer is everything.

Everything would change

next week. We're continuing on this foundation. We are gonna dig into the non-negotiable values, not the ones in the conference room, not the ones on those posters that you walk by and wonder what decade that they were made in, not the ones. That say live, laugh, love. I'm talking about the ones that you live by you even when you're pretending that you don't.

Because you can't recognize when you're out of alignment if you don't actually know what you stand for. And if power dynamics are the system that shaped you, [00:35:00] your values are the counterbalance. We made it through the episode. You're still here. That's great, but now it's time to get to work. I'm Sarah Camon.

And this is the career strategist. If this episode gave you language for something that you've been feeling but you couldn't name, I'm so glad I ask now that you share it with someone else who's ready to stop. Accepting less than they deserve. The career that you want is on the other side of seeing clearly and seeing clearly that is just the beginning of what you're capable of when you stop playing roles that were never designed for your success.

So stick around. We've got a lot to build together. I'll see you next week.