I have a line I use a lot. Someone explains a tricky idea, I nod slowly, and I say, "Bear with me, I'm not the sharpest crayon in the box."
It gets a laugh. It lowers the temperature. It gives me permission to ask the obvious question. I've leaned on it for years.
Then Advita Patel took it away from me.
The Moment on the Podcast
Debra and I interviewed Advita for our podcast, Corey-osity Unleashed, this spring. Advita is a communications and confidence strategist, and her book Decoding Confidence: The Seven Habits of Confident Leaders came out this year. The book talks about cultivating "an internal narrative" to help you reach your goals.
Somewhere in the conversation I reached for my favourite line. Not the sharpest crayon in the box.
Advita stopped me. She didn't let it slide as a throwaway joke. Her point, as I remember it, went like this: you're not short of intelligence. You're not experienced in this area yet. And those are two different sentences.
I've been chewing on it ever since.
Two Sentences, Two Different Futures
Read them side by side.
"I'm not the sharpest crayon in the box."
"I'm not experienced in this area yet."
The first one describes who I am. It's a statement about my wiring. Wiring doesn't change, so the sentence has no exit. If I'm blunt, I'll stay blunt.
The second one describes where I am. It points at a gap in experience, and experience grows every time I show up. The word "yet" does all the heavy lifting. It turns a verdict into a waypoint.
Carol Dweck opened her TED talk on believing in improvement with a story about a Chicago high school. Students who didn't pass a course got the grade "Not Yet" instead of a fail. Dweck's reaction: a failing grade tells you "I'm nothing, I'm nowhere," while "Not Yet" tells you you're on a learning curve. It gives you a path into the future.
Advita handed me the same grade. I hadn't noticed I'd been giving myself an F for years.
The Research Behind the Reframe
I don't want to oversell this. Changing one sentence won't rewrite your brain. The research does point in a clear direction, though.
What you believe about ability shapes what you do with it
In 2007, Lisa Blackwell, Kali Trzesniewski and Carol Dweck published a study of 373 seventh graders moving through junior high. Students who believed intelligence was malleable saw their maths grades climb over two years. Students who believed intelligence was fixed stayed flat.
In a second study, they taught one group of students the "your brain grows" idea. The control group's grades kept sliding downward. The group who learned the growth idea reversed the decline.
To be fair to the sceptics, growth mindset research has taken some knocks. Dweck and David Yeager wrote a paper addressing the controversies in 2020. They argue large pre-registered studies back the core idea, and they also admit the effects vary a lot across people and settings. It isn't magic. It's a nudge.
I'm not sure about this part: almost all of this research involves students, not working adults with long-standing habits of self-deprecation. I found nothing testing whether swapping a single self-deprecating phrase changes adult performance.
The words you use for yourself change how stress lands
Ethan Kross and colleagues ran seven studies with 585 people on self-talk under social stress. People who talked to themselves using their own name or "you," instead of "I," performed better in first impressions and public speaking, according to objective raters. They also showed less distress, and they saw upcoming stressors as challenges rather than threats.
The authors put it plainly: "small shifts in the language people use to refer to the self during introspection consequentially influence their ability to regulate their thoughts, feelings, and behavior under social stress."
Small shifts. One pronoun. One "yet." The words you mutter at yourself aren't neutral background noise.
Why I Held On to the Crayon Line
Here's the uncomfortable bit. I've written several posts celebrating what I call dumbassery. I stand by them. Saying "I don't know" out loud builds trust. Leaders who pretend to know everything are dangerous.
So why did Advita's challenge sting?
Because admitting you don't know something and declaring you're not smart are different acts. The first is honest about a gap. The second is a label, and labels stick.
I used the crayon line as armour. If I call myself slow first, nobody else gets to. If I get something wrong, well, I warned you. It felt humble. Looking back, it was self-protection wearing humility's coat.
And it had a cost I never counted. Every time I said it, I rehearsed a story about my own limits. What does a junior engineer hear when their boss jokes about being dim? Perhaps they hear "it's safe not to know things here." Or perhaps they hear "being slow is who you are, and it's funny." I'll never know which.
What Leaders Model Without Meaning To
Your team copies your self-talk. Not the words you plan, the words you blurt.
If you routinely say "I'm rubbish with numbers" or "I'm not a tech person," you give everyone permission to write themselves off the same way. You teach a fixed story about ability, one joke at a time.
Flip it. When you say "I haven't worked with this kind of data before, walk me through it," you model three things at once:
- Not knowing is normal.
- Not knowing is temporary.
- Asking is how the gap closes.
Same honesty. Same humility. None of the self-sabotage.
How I'm Changing My Script
I haven't cracked this. Old habits don't vanish because one smart person called me out on a podcast. Here's what I'm working on.
Catch the label
Labels sound like "I'm not a..." or "I've never been good at..." or "I'm the kind of person who..." They describe identity. When I hear one leave my mouth, I try to notice it.
Swap in the gap
Replace identity with experience. "I'm terrible at finance" becomes "I haven't spent much time with finance yet." "I'm not creative" becomes "I haven't practised this kind of creative work."
Keep the humility, lose the verdict
I still want the laugh and the lowered temperature. I still want permission to ask the obvious question. So I'm trying "Bear with me, this is new ground for me." It does the same job. It doesn't insult the person saying it.
Try the Kross trick when it's loud
When the inner critic gets noisy before a talk or a tough meeting, I'm going to try using my own name. "Ken, you've done harder things than this." It'll feel daft. The research says it helps. I'll take daft.
The Gift of Being Challenged
The thing I keep coming back to is how easy letting it go would have been for Advita. It was a joke. Everyone laughs at it. Letting it pass would have been polite.
She chose the harder kindness. She named it, in the moment, on a recording. Good coaches and good friends do this. They notice the small lies you tell about yourself and they refuse to co-sign them.
So here's my question for you. What's your crayon line? What's the phrase you use to get ahead of your own failure, the one everybody laughs at?
Write it down. Then rewrite it with "yet" on the end, and see how different it feels to say.