The Role Model I Never Found

What a goody bag, a surgeon who runs a startup, and my husband's push taught me about the leaders who don't exist yet.

The girl with the goody bag

This week I recorded a podcast conversation with Anna Leizerovici Ekstein (the Episode airs on November 4th), and we talked about how our childhood stories shape our thinking and fears as adults. At some point, she guided me through a short meditation and asked me to go back to a moment from my childhood.

I saw myself as a little girl at a crowded birthday party. Standing off to the side, holding my goody bag, smiling faintly, lowering my gaze.

That’s it. That’s the whole memory. No drama, no villain. Just a shy girl who didn’t push into the middle of the room.

But that image did a lot of quiet work in my life. For years, that little girl was the evidence I used against myself. I am shy. I am introverted. So what can I really do with that? Can I be a leader? Am I good enough? I am not like the men around me who fill every room they walk into.

Looking for someone who looked like me

Here is what I did with that story for a long time: I went looking for proof that someone like me could make it.

I searched for role models. Women who looked like me, shy, quiet, introverted, and still strong leaders. For the most part, I didn’t find any. There were very few women at the top to begin with, and the ones who were there were nothing like me. They were loud, polished, always on.

So I reached a conclusion that felt completely logical at the time: perhaps I am not a fit. Not for a manager. Not for director. Not for public speaking. There are others who will probably be better than I am.

Notice what I did there.

I treated the absence of women like me as evidence that women like me don’t belong.

It never occurred to me that the evidence was missing because someone still had to be first.

The woman who reached the opposite conclusion

Karny Ilan, my guest on this week’s episode, ran the exact same search I did, and came back with the opposite answer.

Before starting her residency in general surgery, one of the most demanding and male-dominated fields out there, she was also building a startup. She looked everywhere for one person who had done both, a doctor who was also a CEO. Someone who proved it was possible.

“I wanted to find someone that was me. And I really couldn’t, I couldn’t find someone that was both the CEO, but also a doctor at the same time.” — Dr. Karny Ilan

Karny on searching for a role model who didn’t exist

She found no one. And she decided to do it anyway. She was looking for role models, and when she could not find them, she became one herself.

I will be honest with you: I do not have a glorified story like Karny’s. She is a role model in so many aspects, and I am in awe of what she does. She runs a company between 30-hour hospital shifts. She just became a mom. But that is exactly why I am writing this. Because the difference between us was never capability. It was what we each decided the empty search results meant.

The push I needed

There is one more thing Karny and I have in common, and it humbles me.

When I was 8 months pregnant, and a manager opening came up, I applied. Not because I believed I could do it. I applied because my husband pushed me to. I knocked on that hiring manager’s door feeling like a fool, and I got the role while I was on maternity leave.

Karny’s husband did the same for her. When she was terrified about combining a company with residency and couldn’t find anyone who had done it, he reminded her that people had warned her before, about medical school, about research, and she had handled all of it while watching Gilmore Girls reruns every night.

“Who says it’s not gonna work like that with residency? We don’t know. We have to try.” — what Karny’s husband told her

Karny on the leap her husband encouraged her to take

Sometimes you borrow someone else’s belief in you until you can build your own. There is no shame in that. The shame would be refusing the loan.

What I see now, from the coaching seat

I work with women in tech leadership every day, and I see my own pattern again and again. Brilliant, capable women running the same search I ran: scanning the top of their company for someone who looks like them, someone quiet, someone who leads without performing. And when the search comes back empty, they quietly close the door on their own ambition. Not with a dramatic decision. Just with a small, reasonable-sounding thought: “there are others who will probably be better than I am.”

If that’s you, I want to offer you the reframe that took me years: an empty search result is not a verdict about you, it is a vacancy.

So here is what I want you to actually do this week. Take the sentence you carry - yours might be “I’m too quiet to lead” or “someone more qualified will come along,” and ask yourself: where is the actual evidence? Not the borrowed fears, not the missing role models. The evidence about you. And if you can’t find any, ask one person who knows your work what they think you’re ready for. Let them be your push, the way my husband was mine.

You don’t have to do this alone

And if you’re reading this and thinking, “I know I’ve been waiting for proof that someone like me can do it,” I want you to know you don’t have to figure this out alone. I work with women in tech leadership on exactly this, quiet women who are done disqualifying themselves. Let’s talk: https://limorbergman.com/coaching/

My full conversation with Dr. Karny Ilan is here: https://limorbergman.com/podcast/ (or watch on YouTube:

). If you’ve ever searched for a role model who looks like you and come up empty, this one is for you.

Now I’m genuinely curious, and I read every reply: when you were growing up, what was your version of the girl with the goody bag? And what did you decide it meant about you?