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Written by the Speak Up! Team
We live in uncertain times. Sometimes, we choose self-preservation, and nobody can blame us for that decision. You love your job. You need your health insurance for your family. The commute is short. And your colleagues are agreeable.
As a multicultural or immigrant professional, you have responsibility for global markets. You are the expert on how relationships work in other countries and cultures. How people negotiate contracts, or how they conduct themselves in meetings. And then a strategy gets laid out from the higher-ups, and you know… you know something is wrong.
Working for a translation company in New York City, I was assigned to manage three PMs handling projects in different languages. Two of them were French and Italian, languages I have some proficiency in.
My most troubling PM was this young German guy. He was a very recent immigrant, afraid of looking insecure or not knowledgeable. I didn’t speak the language, so I had to trust his judgment. However, when the process was compromised with one of the accounts, the client’s complaints came directly to me. We fixed the problem and moved on, but at that point, I started to manage him closely, asking him to report more often on calls and results.
My mistake? Not reporting the incident to my supervisor, the owner of the agency. I thought that I could handle the problem myself without making waves. Self-preservation.
The young man reacted negatively to my attempts to monitor his job. He started complaining and arguing. I decided to give him a second chance and let it run. Until a second big problem came in on one of his accounts that spilled the beans. I involved higher management this time because we were at risk of losing the account. I had to come clean that the mistakes had happened before, and I received a performance warning, losing my bonus that year.
What I didn’t know, being an immigrant professional myself, was that corporate American culture might be tolerant of mistakes as a first-time error but extremely strict about hiding or concealing problems.
This was self-censorship, and it shaped my reputation whether I chose it or not.
What is self-censorship at work?
Self-censorship at work is the conscious choice to withhold an opinion, fact, story, or part of yourself because you expect a social or professional cost for sharing it. You make that decision in seconds, usually for reasons that feel sensible at the time.
You can usually spot it in the gap between what you thought in the meeting and what you said. If you have replayed a conversation on the drive home and winced at what you left out, you have seen it up close.
Self-censorship is not the same as discretion. Discretion means choosing when and how to say something. Self-censorship means it never gets said.
Most writing on this topic treats it as political silence: the opinion you swallow when a debate heats up. For many multicultural and immigrant professionals, the edited material is quieter and more personal. It is your accent, your faith, your family obligations, and how directly you disagree or perform.
The concept has limits. Some silences are not problems to fix:
- Keeping a family/partnership situation confidential
- Staying quiet where speaking up could put your visa or your safety at risk
- Choosing not to share your health history
Those are protective choices, and this article does not ask you to give them up.
What does self-censorship look like when it is about who you are?
It looks ordinary, which is why it is easy to miss. Most of it happens in small edits nobody else sees:
- You reword a disagreement until it disappears.
- You skip the story about your parents’ shop at the team offsite because it feels too personal or too foreign.
- You work through a religious holiday that is important to you rather than explain why you need the day off.
- You let a colleague mispronounce your name for years because correcting it feels like making a fuss.
Each edit feels too minor to matter. Repeated week after week, they become the only version of you that colleagues know.
Deloitte’s research on inclusion calls one version of this pattern “covering.” Its Uncovering Talent report looks at how employees tone down parts of their identity at work.
For an LGBTQ+ professional, covering can mean saying “my friend” instead of “my husband” at the holiday party or hiding your gender or sexual preferences because you know the corporate culture you working in is not a safe one for sharing.
How does self-censorship connect to your personal brand?
Self-censorship removes exactly the material your personal brand is built from. When you hold back your opinions, stories, and background, colleagues do not see a neutral blank. They fill the gap with their own assumptions.
The inside-out idea starts your reputation from who you already are rather than from a template you copy, which is the thinking behind how your background becomes your leadership story.
My framework, grounded in Speak Up!, builds from four pillars: values, character and personality traits, cultural attributes, and leadership interaction skills. The pillar self-censorship usually silences first is cultural attributes, because those are the parts of you most likely to feel “too different” to show, but it can run through all of them because of a lack of understanding or knowledge of cultural differences.
Why do cultural attributes go quiet first?
Researchers describe cultural differences as tendencies, not rules. Geert Hofstede’s model of national culture includes power distance, the degree to which people accept that power is distributed unequally, and individualism versus collectivism. If you grew up where power distance and collectivism tend to run high, you may have learned to defer to seniority in public and to put the team’s credit ahead of your own.
Those habits are strengths. They build loyalty, patience, and careful listening. But when your company rewards whoever speaks first, balancing two sets of rules becomes a real form of role stress, and self-censorship is often how people resolve it: the quieter rule wins every time.
Over time, that choice shapes how you interact as a leader. If you never disagree in the room, nobody sees you lead, even when your quiet work holds the project together. If you are not sure which parts of yourself you have been muting, self-awareness as a leadership skill is a useful place to start.
What does holding back cost your mental health?
Holding back takes steady effort, and research links hiding what you feel or who you are to lower well-being and ongoing strain. The cost is rarely dramatic. It builds one held-back sentence at a time.
The closest research on everyday self-editing comes from studies of emotion suppression. In a study by James Gross and Oliver John in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, people who habitually suppressed the outward expression of their emotions reported less positive emotion, more negative emotion, less closeness with others, and lower well-being than people who did so less.
Hiding part of your identity carries its own load. John Pachankis’s review in Psychological Bulletin describes how concealing a stigmatized identity can keep people preoccupied and constantly vigilant, and connects that effort to emotional strain such as anxiety and shame.
Why does faking it at work drain you even when nobody notices?
Being on guard in an ordinary week means rehearsing answers, watching your tone, and bracing for the comment before it comes. Catalyst’s research on emotional tax describes the strain women and men of color report from staying on guard against bias at work.
Self-monitoring is work. Tracking your accent, choosing safer words, and checking your face before you react all use attention you could spend on the job itself.
There is a people cost, too. Colleagues often sense distance even when they cannot name it, which is part of why authenticity has become a leadership currency. If the voice behind your silence says “I don’t belong here,” impostor syndrome at work may be part of the story.
None of this means something is wrong with you. It describes what constant self-editing tends to cost.
If holding back has started to weigh on you, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional or your Employee Assistance Program.
A free worksheet helps you notice what you edit out at work, and why you edit it.
Back to the lesson learned
If I had warned management of the problems I was facing, measures could have been taken to handle the situation differently. I would have shown trust in my supervisor and asked for help. The goal is to know what you are choosing to leave out, and why.
Maybe your concern is about something that needs some softening or something that might cause harm to the team or the company in the long run. Maybe your story needs one rewrite, not three. Either way, once you can see the edit, the choice becomes yours again.
Self-awareness matters, but so does understanding the hosting culture’s unwritten rules.
Your voice has value, and sharing your ideas gives others the chance to recognize your contributions. Staying silent can leave great ideas unheard and slow your career progression if others do not see your leadership potential or consider you for promotions.
Although holding back can gradually erode your confidence and make speaking up feel harder, each contribution is an opportunity to begin building that confidence. Your organization benefits too: your perspective can enrich the diversity of ideas, innovation, and impactful communication that help teams grow.
To keep exploring how to build a personal brand from your own story, visit susanagbaumann.com.
Edited with AI
