The Real Work: There Is Room For All Of Us

I believe in taking up space.Especially if you grew up being told to make yourself smaller. Especially if the rooms you walked into were not designed for you. Especially if the instinct to shrink was trained into you long before you knew you were doing it.I know what that costs. I am not writing this from a soft place. I have had to fight to take up space and I still do.This piece comes out of a conversation I was having this week with another founder. I will not get into the specifics, but it sat with me afterwards. Long enough that I had to write about it.Because somewhere along the way, taking up space got confused with needing to be in every space. The two are not the same. And the founders I respect most have learned the difference.Holding your own does not mean redirecting every conversation back to yourself.Believing in your work does not mean needing to be the loudest voice in a room that is not about you.Confidence is not the same thing as being in the centre of every story.The mature founder knows when to enter and when to make room.Taking up space and giving space are the same muscle. The practice is learning to use both.This is something I learned from my mentors before I learned it from anywhere else.I have always been deliberate about who I choose to learn from. I do not pick mentors who make me feel small. I do not pick mentors out of fear. I pick them because of one specific thing they can teach me about my next level. One thing that will move me forward when I listen to them, when I watch how they show up, when I notice the choices they make.I chose them as inspiration. Not as comparison.That distinction is the most important thing I have learned in business.Inspiration moves you forward. Competition keeps you locked in a loop where someone else’s win feels like your loss. One is generative. The other is corrosive. And we pick between them, often without realising we are picking, every single day.I picked inspiration a long time ago. And it changed everything about how I show up in this work.When I look at founders doing similar work to mine, I do not see threat. I see evidence. Evidence the work matters. Evidence the market is real. Evidence I am not the only one who saw something worth building.Their angle is not my angle. Their voice is not my voice. Their audience is not my audience. There is more than enough room.And here is the part I have been sitting with this week.The founders who have fought hardest to take up space are often the ones best equipped to hold space for others. Because we know what it cost to claim ours. We know what it feels like to be in a room that did not believe we belonged. And once we have built the muscle to take up our space, the same muscle teaches us to make room for someone else to take up theirs.That is not weakness. That is range.The need to be in every conversation comes from a quiet fear that there is not enough to go around. That attention is finite. That if she gets the moment, you lose yours.It is not true.There is no scarcity of attention for founders who are actually doing the work. There is only scarcity of grace.And grace is the thing that separates the founder who builds a business from the founder who builds something people want to belong to.So this is what I want to leave you with.Take up your space. Especially if you were taught not to. Especially if it still feels uncomfortable to claim it. Especially if the room is full of voices louder than yours. Take it anyway.And give space too. Not as a sequence. As the same practice. The same muscle. The same work.Other founders being seen does not make you less seen. Their growth does not subtract from yours. Their moment does not steal yours.Everyone has a unique DNA. The work that is yours is yours because of who you are, not because of who you are not.Take up space. Give space. Both are the practice.That is the real work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit muneeraqureshi.substack.com