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For the first several years I lived in the United States, I mispronounced my own name. Nobody asked me to; nobody corrected me or told me it was too much. I did it on my own, before anyone had the chance to struggle with it, smoothing it out and softening it so it would be easier to receive. I was handing people a version of myself that required less of them, and in doing so, required less of me. It took me a long time to notice I was doing it.
My father could not find a name he thought was sufficient for his first daughter among the ones that already existed, so he and my mother made one: Nancy for my mother, Lino for my father, and Y, which in Spanish means and. Nayli, a name that had never existed before I did. My mother did something similar with my middle name, changing the spelling of Diana to Dayana so that Spanish eyes would hear exactly what she heard in the song she loved. Before I had done a single thing in the world, my parents had already refused the available options, and then I arrived here and started saying my name wrong.
The Accommodation Nobody Requested
Here's the thing: an environment can make something costly, and it can also receive a discount you offered before anyone asked for one. Both happen at work constantly, and I want you to start differentiating one from the other. You soften a recommendation before anyone pushes back on it. You add a qualifier you do not believe, or let a colleague present the idea because you think it will land better coming from him. You leave out the credential, the experience, or the thing you actually know because it might read as too much, and you shorten your point to save someone the trouble of following it. None of these arrived as a request; you handed them over in advance. I called mine adjustment for years, when what I was actually doing was preemptive compliance: reducing myself ahead of time so nobody else had to do it for me.
Why we do it
The accommodation is usually built on something real. Maybe you watched what happened to someone here who did not soften it. Maybe the lesson is older than this job, learned in a room where taking up space had a price, and you have been carrying it ever since. Sometimes you read correctly that your idea travels further coming from someone else's mouth. Preemptive accommodation is not irrational, and I am not walking that away at all; it is a forecast, and forecasts are built from evidence.
The problem is that a forecast made once tends to keep running without ever being checked. We carry the same accommodation into rooms that never asked for it, around people who might have met us all the way. Because nobody ever demands it out loud, nothing comes along to disconfirm it.
The cost is slow
A single softened sentence costs almost nothing, which is exactly what makes this hard to catch. What I see in my practice is that most people do not lose themselves all at once; they make themselves easier one decision at a time, and what that produces over the years is erosion. You are still doing good work and still being useful, and slowly you may become a less accurate version of yourself in the room. The erosion also travels. Once you have learned to make yourself easier in one place, the habit can follow you home, into your team, into a new organization, and even into a room where you already had all the standing you needed.
When Accommodation Is Good Judgment
Now hold both, because this cannot become a case for never adapting. Adjusting how you deliver something so people can actually receive it is part of the work, and refusing to adapt is not the same as integrity. There are also environments that genuinely impose consequences for taking up space, and reading those conditions accurately matters; Why Smart Leaders Stop Speaking Up at Work is about exactly that calculation.
Research on hiring shows how real some of these consequences can be. Bertrand and Mullainathan (2004) found that otherwise comparable résumés received different callback rates when they carried names associated with White versus African American applicants. Later, Kang, DeCelles, Tilcsik, and Jun (2016) found in a field experiment that résumés from Black and Asian applicants received more callbacks when racial cues were removed. So no, every accommodation is not imaginary.
The distinction I want you to make is this. A condition the environment is imposing is something you have to read and decide about; an accommodation you keep handing over without checking whether this environment requires it is yours to examine. Nobody asked me to mispronounce my name, and I did it anyway. That part belonged to me, and it is what I mean by Authorship: how much of what I bring have I actually examined and chosen?
How to Find What You're Handing Over: A Five-Step Read
Grab something to write on, and choose one behavior rather than your whole personality.
Step 1: Catch one preemptive edit
Think about your last few meetings and find one moment when you made yourself easier before anyone asked. It might be the hedge you added, the point you cut, the expertise you left out, or the disagreement you delivered as a question. Write down exactly what you said, then write what you would have said without the edit.
Step 2: Ask who actually asked
Did someone in this environment ever tell you directly that the unedited version was a problem? Did you watch something happen to someone else here, or did you bring the expectation with you from a room you left years ago? All of these are evidence, and they are not the same kind of evidence.
Step 3: Examine the trade
Ask what the accommodation buys you: smoother meetings, less friction, faster agreement, lower exposure, fewer arguments. Then ask what it costs you in accuracy, in the idea nobody heard, in credibility with people who cannot tell what you actually think, and in your own ability to tell. Both columns are real, and the question is whether this is still a trade you would choose.
Step 4: Run a small test
Take the edit back in one low-stakes place this week. Say the number without the qualifier, present your own idea, or say your name the way it is actually said, and then watch what happens. That response is information you cannot get by predicting the room without ever testing the prediction. You may discover latitude you have been declining for years, or you may confirm that the consequence is real; either way, you know more than you did before.
Step 5: Decide what you're carrying, on purpose
Keep the adaptations you would choose again, and pick back up what you set down without ever deciding to. When I started saying my name correctly, it was a decision: a small correction on the surface with a much larger shift in ownership underneath. I did not go around correcting everyone; I simply stopped going out of my way to make myself easier.
A guardrail here, because this is not permission to decide that every adjustment you have ever made was self-betrayal. It is also not permission to bring the most unedited version of yourself into every room and call it authenticity. I want you to be more discerning than that.
If You're the One Being Accommodated
If you lead a team, people are making these edits around you constantly, and you will never see the versions they did not bring you. The accommodation is invisible by design, so the questions are yours to ask. Who softens their recommendations around you, and what did they learn that taught them to? Whose ideas only reach you through someone else, and who is editing their disagreement before it ever reaches the room?
Start with one of the smallest, most concrete signals available to you: learn how to say people's names, ask whether you are getting them right, and keep asking until you are. If you hold power in the room, you are shaping what other people learn is safe, credible, rewarded, and possible, whether you mean to or not.
Pick It Back Up Deliberately
Nay is what my family has called me since I was a little girl singing in the choir in Los Teques. It was there the whole time, underneath everything else; what changed is that I stopped setting it aside for anyone's comfort. When I introduce myself now, I say I'm Nay, and something in me settles when I say it.
The question was never whether you should adapt. The question is what you have been handing over before anyone asked, what that accommodation is actually buying you, and which parts of yourself you want to pick back up on purpose.
Read the Research: The research behind this lives at naylirusso.com/research.
Bring this conversation into your room: If your audience is wrestling with what leadership asks of people, where those consequences land, and what responsibility requires next, that's the conversation behind my keynote What It Costs to Lead. Invite Nayli