When Did You Stop Playing Your Own Song?

I came across a graduation speech recently. Eric Church walked on stage at UNC Chapel Hill with a guitar, played a few chords — some in tune, some not — and built an entire address around that one simple, honest image.

The idea was this: a guitar has six strings, and when even one drifts out of tune, the whole chord unravels. Not gradually. Not politely. The moment you strike it, you know.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

Not because it’s new — most true things aren’t. But because it named something I see constantly in the women I work with. Something that often takes years to put into words.

They’re not broken. They’re not failing. They’re playing a chord that’s drifted, and somewhere along the way they stopped trusting what they were hearing.

There was a line in that speech that landed harder than the rest.

It was about the thinnest string, the one that carries the melody. The single line above the chord that everyone in the room recognises and takes home with them. Church said the world doesn’t need another cover song. It needs an original.

That’s the string I worry about most.

Not because the women I work with have abandoned themselves in any dramatic way. The drift is quieter than that. More incremental and often dressed up as sensible adaptation. You adjust your tone for the room. You soften an edge that made someone uncomfortable once. You defer to the consensus because pushing back feels like too much right now, costs too much. Slowly, without quite meaning to, you start to sound like a very polished version of what everyone around you expected you to sound like.

The difficulty isn’t that you changed. It’s that you got so good at the cover version that you forgot it wasn’t your song.

There was another thread in that speech that stayed with me. Church talked about the temptation this generation faces — performing for everyone and belonging to no one. Being globally visible and locally invisible. Thousands of followers, and nobody who actually knows where you live.

I think about this in the context of leadership a lot.

We’ve become so fluent in personal branding, in positioning, and in curating the version of ourselves that reads well. Quietly starved of the kind of belonging that actually sustains us. The kind where someone has seen you at your actual worst, not your public-facing worst, and didn’t leave.

That kind of belonging doesn’t come from reach. It comes from roots. And roots require you to be somewhere, not just everywhere. To be known, not just seen.

Here’s what I keep returning to, and what I think sits at the heart of so much of the fragmentation I see in women who are technically succeeding.

The drift isn’t the problem.

All six strings drift in their own time, their own season. Your sense of yourself goes quiet when you need it most. Your values start to feel abstract when the pressure is high. The version of you that used to feel most real starts to seem like a luxury you can’t quite afford right now.

This is what happens when you’re a complex, feeling human being living in a world that doesn’t stop to let you tune up. It’s not weakness and it’s not a character flaw. It’s just the reality of being in it.

The question is whether you’re honest enough to hear which string has drifted. And whether you trust yourself enough to make the adjustment, rather than turning up the volume and hoping nobody notices.

You will notice. That part of you that knows what the chord is supposed to sound like — she always notices. And she won’t let you go until it’s right.

That’s where I live in my work. Not in fixing what’s broken, but in helping women hear themselves clearly again. Creating enough stillness that the drift becomes audible. Rebuilding the kind of self-trust that knows the difference between adapting wisely and abandoning yourself quietly.

You have a sound that no one else has. A way of seeing, of leading, of being in a room that belongs to you alone and has never existed before you.

The world has plenty of polished cover songs.

It needs your original.

* * *

What string do you suspect has drifted lately? I’d love to hear.