The Parts of Myself I Kept Hidden for Years

BD3 Solutions
May 11
7 min read

By Nancy DeFina | BD3 Solutions:

There's a moment I've thought about many times.

I was in a conversation with someone I'd worked alongside closely for more than a year. We were talking about our backgrounds and she looked at me with real surprise and said she hadn't known I had multiple advanced degrees in art history and curating.

I'd never mentioned it. Not once.

It wasn't by accident.

I've spent my career as an entrepreneur in sales and eventually in leadership, training, and development of other salespeople. If you've spent any time in that world, you know how it might read when you mention that your academic background is in art museum curating. At best, people smile politely and wonder what that has to do with anything. At worst, they decide you're not quite one of them—too academic, too impractical, too pretentious.

So I kept it quiet. Part of that was genuine modesty. I've never been someone who leads with credentials. But part of it was more deliberate than I fully acknowledged at the time: I was in a position of leadership, developing other salespeople, and I didn't want my educational background to become a reason for someone to compare themselves, rather than push themselves. I wanted to be the colleague who pulled people forward, not some ideal they measured themselves against.

The problem with that instinct, however well-intentioned, is that it's still a form of erasure. You can't keep half of yourself invisible without paying for it somewhere else.

The Other Thing I Kept Quiet

The art degrees were one thing. The other was harder.

I've practiced Buddhism for decades. It's not a casual thing—it's a genuine part of how I think, how I process difficulty, how I stay grounded when circumstances are uncertain or hard. The Buddhist understanding of impermanence, of sitting with not-knowing, of finding stability in the middle of flux—these aren't abstract concepts for me. They show up in how I work, how I make decisions, how I hold space for the people I'm trying to help.

Early in my career, I made the mistake of mentioning it to a few people. Not as a conversation I was trying to start. Not to proselytize or convert anyone. It was an offhand comment, the kind you make without thinking: I'm Buddhist. Two words, said in passing, the way you might mention any other unremarkable fact about yourself.

The response was rude. I don't mean mildly uncomfortable or slightly awkward. I mean dismissive in a way that was designed to communicate that I'd said the wrong thing, to the wrong people, in the wrong room. There was no curiosity. No engagement. No compassion. Just a kind of social closing-off that made the message clear: this part of you doesn't belong here.

I never brought it up professionally again.

I want to be honest about what that did over time. It wasn't just inconvenient to keep it quiet. It created a split between the version of me that showed up in professional contexts and the version of me that actually existed. The practice that most deeply informed how I think about change, about resistance, about why people get stuck and how they find their way through—I was doing all of that work while keeping its foundation invisible. It became increasingly hard to help the people I was leading find their footing while carefully avoiding the very constructs that had helped me find mine.

Andrea's Mirror Image

Andrea came at this from the opposite direction.

She built an entrepreneurial career, too—eighteen years running a landmark, $1 million retail operation, coaching inside organizations like Thrive Global, Salesforce and Pfizer, doing work that required her to show up credibly in rooms that respect results and track records. She had that. She also had Reiki and Feng Shui certifications, breathwork training, and practice of energy work that she understood as fundamental to how she functioned.

And she introduced it carefully. Or not at all. Depending on who was in the room.

We were doing the same thing from different angles. I was keeping academic depth and spiritual practice out of sight in professional contexts. Andrea was keeping her inner work backgrounded when she was trying to be taken seriously by a certain kind of client. We'd both absorbed the same lesson: that certain parts of you are welcome in certain rooms and the rest belongs somewhere else. And we'd both complied with it for longer than we should have.

The compliance was exhausting. The split was expensive. And neither of us fully understood what it was costing until we stopped.

What My Curatorial Background Actually Gave Me

Here's something I've come to appreciate about the education I spent years downplaying.

Training as a curator teaches you a specific skill: how to look clearly at what's in front of you and make honest decisions about what belongs. Not just what's good—there's usually more good work than wall space. What belongs in this context, for this audience, in this arrangement? What earns its place and what, however worthy, needs to come down?

I've been doing that my whole entrepreneurial life. Every pivot, every transition, every decision to step away from something that had run its course—the same skill, applied at a different scale. I just didn't name it that way until recently, because I'd spent so long keeping the curatorial training out of my professional identity.

The Buddhist practice gave me something related: the capacity to sit with impermanence without being undone by it. To hold the not-knowing that comes with transitions—both professional and personal—without needing it to resolve before I could function. To recognize that some things are over before their replacements have arrived, and that this is not a crisis. It's just how change works.

These two things: the curatorial eye and the contemplative practice, are not separate from what I do professionally. They're the foundation of it. And I spent years presenting the building while hiding the foundation.

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What This Has to Do With Procrastination

Let me bring this back to the work we do, because it's directly relevant.

The behavioral tools in our framework—the Procrastination Cycle, the Three Hidden Knots, the Tiny Habits Method—work. They help people understand why they're stuck and take action in ways that feel sustainable rather than forced.

But here's what we've learned after years of working with people on this: the tools get you moving, but the inner work tells you where to go and whether you're moving in the right direction.

Here's what Fogg Maxim #1 (Help people do what they already want to do.) makes clear: trying to build habits around goals that don't align with who you are isn't just difficult—it's why nothing sticks. The habits don't form. And motivation was never going to carry you there anyway. Fogg compares motivation to a wave: it rises, it falls, and no one can count on it showing up on demand. Untangle Procrastination™ works with that reality—leveraging low motivation with Tiny Habits®, harnessing high motivation with one-time actions that set you up for success. But none of that works if the goal itself is a mismatch. You can't design your way into alignment. That part has to come first.

You can use every productivity tool in the box and still feel like something essential is off. Because the tools are downstream of alignment. The procrastination you feel in those moments isn't really about the task. It's about something deeper that hasn't been named yet.

The people who get the most from our framework are the ones willing to use the tools in service of the real question: not just how do I get this done, but is this actually ME or mine to do? Those questions don't live in a habit tracker. They live in the honest, sometimes uncomfortable, examination of what you're building and why. And whether the version of yourself doing the building is the whole one or the edited one.

What I Stopped Hiding

I still don't open every professional conversation by announcing my educational background. That's not the point. But I've stopped making the deliberate choice to keep it invisible. I no longer quietly edit myself into seeming less credentialed so the people I'm developing don't feel outpaced. That instinct, however kind it felt, was ultimately a disservice. People don't grow by being around someone who's hiding her capabilities. They grow by being around someone who demonstrates what's possible and invites them toward it.

The Buddhist practice took longer to bring forward. The rejection I experienced early on left a mark that took years to fade. I'm still thoughtful about context because I'm not interested in repeating that experience. But I no longer pretend the practice doesn't exist, or that it has nothing to do with my success. It has everything to do with it.

And the art degrees—the ones that read as impractical or pompous in sales situations—those are the reason I can look at a problem, a career, a stuck place in someone's life, and see not just what's there but what belongs and what needs to come down. That's curation. And it turns out to be one of the most useful things I do.

You don't have to split yourself in half to be taken seriously. We've learned that the hard way, from different directions. And we built Untangle Procrastination™ because we believe there should be a place that doesn't ask you to choose.

Next week: both of us, equally share the season nobody has a playbook for—and what we actually learned from going through it.

Andrea Spyros and Nancy DeFina are the founders of BD3 Solutions and creators of Untangle Procrastination™, a science-based program built on methods from the Stanford Behavior Design Lab.

ICYMI→Download the Procrastination Cycle map here

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Andrea Spyros and Nancy DeFina are the founders of BD3 Solutions and creators of Untangle Procrastination™, a science-based program built on models and methods from the Stanford Behavior Design Lab.