The Price of the Crown, the Power of the Room

In the final instalment of this year’s column, a year of arguments comes together: your introversion was never the flaw. It’s a crown, and wearing it comes with both a price and a room.

By Jacqueline Shaulis.

A year ago, you might have still believed your quiet was something to manage. To smooth over. To apologize for before anyone else got the chance to notice it first.

Ten issues later, I hope you know deeper and better.

This column has spent all of 2026 building one argument, issue by issue, in a dozen different ways: that your introversion was never the flaw. It was never the thing standing between you and the boardroom, the byline, the stage. It was the crown you were handed at birth and told, by nearly everyone, to take off before you walked in.

I want to use this last issue of the year (for my column) to put the crown back on. Properly this time. Because a crown, worn honestly, comes with both a price and a room.

Not Broken. Never Was.

Let's start where we began. In The Power of Being Unmoved, I wrote about the woman who downplays a multimillion-dollar company because she learned early that leading with power invites backlash, and the man beside her who gets rewarded for the very confidence she was taught to hide. That gap is not yours to close by getting louder. It was never a flaw in you to begin with. Quiet is not a deficiency state that extroversion is measured against. It is its own complete instrument.

If that's the only thing you take from this entire year, take that. Say it back to yourself the next time a room makes you feel like you're arriving with less: I am not broken. I was never broken.

The Advantage Hiding in Plain Sight

Here's what took me longer to say plainly this year: your introversion is not neutral. It is not simply "fine, actually." It is a strategic advantage in a world drowning in noise and flash, and the women who understand this stop treating their reflectiveness like an obstacle to route around and start treating it like the instrument it is.

Deb Haaland understood this before most of Washington caught up to it. As the first Indigenous woman (the first Indigenous person, full stop) to serve as a US Cabinet secretary, she led an agency that touches nearly every acre of land and every tribal nation in this country, not through volume, but through the kind of deep, patient stewardship that only comes from someone who has spent a lifetime listening before speaking. Her introversion wasn't incidental to that work. It was the method.

And here's the nuance worth considering: introversion doesn't land the same way on every body. The quiet that reads as "thoughtful" on one leader reads as "cold," "difficult," or "not leadership material" on another, depending on what she looks like, where she's from, what body she occupies when she walks into the room. That's not a flaw in the theory. That's the terrain. Knowing it's there is how you navigate it instead of being ambushed by it.

The Crown Is Not a Crutch

Let me hold your hand while I tell you this tough truth that I need you to hear: your introversion is not your permission slip to opt out of your own life.

I have watched too many brilliant, quiet women use "I'm an introvert" as the reason they didn't apply, didn't ask, didn't leave, didn't build. That is not honoring your introversion. That is hiding behind it.

Stacey Abrams lost a governor's race in the most public, painful way a person can lose something, then used the years since to rebuild voting access for exactly the people most likely to be shut out of the room altogether: rural communities, communities of color, communities without the resources to fight a fight that shouldn't have to be fought. She didn't retreat because the loss was quiet-making. She turned the loss into infrastructure other people could stand on.

That is what the crown asks of you. Not performance. Responsibility. The privilege of your gifts (your insight, your depth, your capacity to see what the loudest person in the room missed) comes with an obligation to actually use them. Introversion is not the excuse. It's the mandate.

The Room Is Fuller Than You Think

If you've felt alone in this quiet, careful, deeply feeling way you move through leadership, making you feel like the exception in every room you enter, I want to end the year by telling you plainly: you are not the exception. You are the majority hiding in plain sight.

Condoleezza Rice built an entire career on precision over pomp, shaping American foreign policy from a position of exacting preparation rather than performance, and she's carried that same quiet mastery into new rooms since as a part-owner of the Denver Broncos (alongside fellow introvert Mellody Hobson), and as a classically trained pianist who still finds her clearest thinking at the keys.

Simone Biles, now the most decorated gymnast in history, made the loudest possible statement in 2021 by going quiet: withdrawing from events at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to protect herself, then returning years later to add to a legacy no one else has touched.

Neither woman got there by being less herself. They got there by refusing to be talked out of who they already were.

What This Buys

I need you to actually sit with this as this year closes: every time you choose the crown by letting your depth be your depth instead of shrinking it into something more palatable, you are not just buying something for yourself.

Watch what actually happens when you choose the crown:

You're in the room, the one you almost talked yourself out of entering. And instead of shrinking your read of the situation into something smaller and safer to say out loud, you say the true thing, the thing no one else in this room has yet said or seen. That's the first purchase. Your insight, spoken instead of swallowed.

Then the room moves. The initiative you pushed for gets chosen. Resources shift toward it. Its outcomes land on people who never sat in that room at all: a team that gets funded instead of cut, a community that gets served instead of overlooked, a decision that gets made with the nuance you were the only one positioned to see. That's the second purchase. Not yours. Theirs.

And somewhere in that same room, someone perhaps younger, perhaps quieter, perhaps still deciding whether people like her get to speak in rooms like this, is watching it happen. She sees a woman say the true thing and get taken seriously for it. She sees the door not just open, but held. That's the third purchase, the one that outlasts the meeting: precedent. Proof. A door propped a little wider for the next woman who wasn't sure she was even allowed through it.

This is the actual arithmetic of the crown: one honored insight becomes a better decision, becomes a life changed by that decision, becomes a woman who now believes her own voice belongs in the room too. You don't just buy your own seat when you choose the crown. You buy the next three seats after it, and you don't even get to see most of who sits in them.

That's the real price of the crown, and it's the real power of the room: it was never yours to keep. It was always meant to be passed forward.

So pick your one thing, the best next step you can take. Carry it, implement it, and own it for the remainder of the year. I'll meet you there and I'll bring something with me that's built to help you practice saying and living it out loud.

Jacqueline Shaulis is the leading authority on communication-based personal leadership for intersectional introverts. As an introverted woman of colour, she's leveraged her challenging upbringing into becoming a transformational speaker, bestselling author, and executive coach & advisor to Fortune 500 executives…all while honouring her introversion.

The founder of Awesome Enterprises LLC, Executive Director of the National Center for Intersectional Studies, and author of internationally bestselling books "Embrace Your Awesome" and "Yes Introverts Can". When not globetrotting with coffee in hand or loudly singing "tune-adjacent" at home, you can find Jacqueline getting lost in a good (audio)book or hugging her son, his nine cousins, or the nearest tree. You can read more about Jacqueline and her work on her website: https://jacquelineshaulis.com/embraceawesome/