Talking About Your Value Without Feeling Awkward: 7 Takeaways from Our Fireside Chat with AdaMarie Expert Marie Libres
If you've ever downplayed your role in a win, frozen when someone said "tell me about yourself," or felt your stomach tighten at the phrase advocate for yourself — this conversation was made for you.
AdaMarie's Director of Business Operations Nancy Fallon sat down with AdaMarie Expert Marie Libres, Product Designer and Founder of Daughters Studio, for an honest, practical conversation about one of the most underrated professional skills: communicating your value without feeling like you're performing it.
Here are 7 things that stuck with us.
Self-advocacy is a skill, not a personality trait.
Not everyone grows up in environments that teach this. Some people develop it through a great manager or early internship. Many of us didn't. That's not a character flaw; it's a gap. And like any skill, it can be learned, practiced, and built over time.
The discomfort is real, and it makes sense.
When you speak your value out loud, you're making a claim. And making a claim means someone could disagree with it. That vulnerability — the gap between how you see yourself and how you fear others might — is exactly what makes this hard.
Naming that is the first step to moving through it.
Culture and identity shape how this feels for each of us.
This doesn't happen in a vacuum. Your upbringing, cultural background, career stage, and personality all shape how natural or foreign self-advocacy feels.
Marie shared her own experience navigating the tension between collectivist and individualist cultural values, a reality many first-gen and BIPOC STEM professionals know deeply.
Not everyone starts from the same footing, and that matters.
Staying quiet has a cost.
You could be exceeding every expectation and your manager might just see it as the machine running normally. As Marie put it: if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?
When promotions, bonuses, and hard decisions get made, the people who haven't made their contributions visible are often the ones who lose out.
Shift from "how do I sound?" to "what do they need to know?"
Bragging is about perception. Clarity is about information. When you reframe self-advocacy as painting a clearer picture — rather than proving yourself — the whole thing feels less loaded.
You're not trying to impress anyone. You're making sure the people who need context have it.
Come with your receipts.
Ditch the vague claims. Instead of "I'm great at collaborating," try: "I was the design lead on a project where engineering and product were stuck for two weeks. I facilitated the conversations using X, Y, Z — and we shipped on time."
Situation. Stake. Impact.
Let the data and outcomes do the heavy lifting for you.
Start small, and not at work.
You don't have to practice this for the first time in a performance review. Start at home. Build the reps in low-stakes moments, then bring it to a trusted colleague, then your manager.
By the time it counts, it won't be the first time you've said it out loud.
This is just a glimpse of the full conversation. Want the real talk and the moments we couldn't capture here? Watch the full fireside chat inside the APN, exclusively for AdaMarie members.
