Cassie Crosby learned the rules by watching what happened to the people who broke them.
Take the hard job, whether you want it or not. Never let them see you cry. Nobody said either one out loud, but she watched who got promoted and who got sidelined for being emotional, and she drew the correct conclusions.
The second rule was already installed before the army got to her. She was the teenager who would not let the boys see her get flustered. The army did not teach her to go quiet; it confirmed that going quiet worked.
Cassie joined at 18, on her birthday, as an act of rebellion that did not land the way she planned. It was the first place anyone had ever called her a leader. She led at every level over the next 24 years, from Baghdad at 25 as the only woman in her unit to the highest levels of government. Every rung came with more weight and fewer people to put any of it down in front of.
She retired on the cusp of battalion command, the assignment most officers spend a career trying to reach, because her family needed her more than the army did. She and her husband retired the same day. Then she waited for the relief. What arrived instead was the same hustle, the same burnout, the same need to be producing something in order to have earned the day. The institution was gone but the rules were still running.
In this episode, Cassie — leadership consultant and founder of Iterata, and author of the Leadership Reimagined newsletter and podcast — walks through the two hours she lasted as a squad leader before a drill sergeant fired her, the platoon sergeant who told her on day one that he did not want to work with a woman, the therapist who handed her an emotion wheel in 2015 because she no longer had language for what she felt, and the five thousand dollars she sent back to a client rather than keep working with someone who did not respect her.
This is the version of validation dependency that hides instead of performs. The trade is quiet and it looks like strength: be the one who needs nothing, and you get to stay. It also works, which is the problem. The jobs get bigger and the rooms get harder and there is less company in every one of them. What Cassie found on the other side is that the suppression was never selective. Once you start putting one emotion down, it dampens all of them. We trace where that trade gets made, what it costs to be the steadiest person in the room, and why leaving the environment does not uninstall the behavior it rewarded.
If people describe you as steady and not one of them knows what you are carrying, this one is about you.
GUEST INFO Cassie Crosby — Leadership consultant; 24-year U.S. Army veteran, retired officer. Connect at LinkedIn: Cassie Crosby; Newsletter and Podcast: Leadership Reimagined
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Host: Andi Johnson — Instagram @andijohnsonleadership
Take the Validation Pattern Quiz — link in bio.
