I read something recently I could not let go.

The actress Hannah Waddingham (you may know her as the formidable Rebecca on Ted Lasso) spent years of her early career being turned away from roles for one reason only: she was too tall. Producers wanted her, and then didn’t, because she stood taller than the men they’d already cast. For a long stretch of her life, she found herself instinctively pulling inward, rounding her shoulders, making herself smaller in the room, so that no one else would have to feel small beside her.

Her advice, looking back on those years, came down to two words.

Don’t slouch.

Not just physically. She means it the way your soul means it. Don’t slouch emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Don’t dim your light because your presence is inconveniently large for someone else’s comfort. Don’t fold yourself down to fit into a room that was never built to hold the whole of you.

Let us sit with that for a moment, because I think most of us know exactly what she’s talking about, even if none of us have ever been told we were too tall for a part.

We’ve all slouched. Not in our posture but in our silence. The comment we didn’t make. The boundary we didn’t hold. The truth we watered down until it was polite enough not to cost us anything. We told ourselves we were being humble, or patient, or gracious. Sometimes we were. But sometimes, being honest, we were just afraid. Afraid of the room. Afraid of what our full height might make someone else feel.

Here’s the part I keep circling back to: Waddingham names whose discomfort she was managing. Not her own limitation; someone else’s inferiority complex. She was shrinking herself to manage a feeling that belonged to another person, not to her. And I wonder how much of our own slouching is exactly that. We are not actually too much. We have simply agreed, quietly and over many years, to be shaped by what makes other people comfortable rather than by what we were made for.

That is not humility. That is hiding. And you cannot hide from yourself, even when you’ve gotten remarkably good at hiding from everyone else.

I think about this in terms I’ve come to trust: notice, pause, respond. Most of us are excellent at the noticing. We feel the moment arrive — the meeting where we should have spoken, the relationship where we should have said no more of that, the room where our particular gift was needed and we knew it. We notice. And then, in the pause, instead of asking what wants to move through us, we ask what will keep the peace. We respond from management instead of from the soul. That’s the slouch. It isn’t cowardice, exactly — it’s a kind of premature surrender, done so quietly we don’t even notice we’ve done it. We didn’t respond from truth or love.

Do you ever regret it? I do. Not always the big things; sometimes it’s a small conversation, a word I swallowed, a moment I let pass because speaking would have cost me something I wasn’t ready to pay. And here is what I’ve come to understand about those moments: whether you speak or stay silent, you leave a trace. There is no neutral option. Your slouch is as much a footprint as your standing tall would have been, but it just isn’t the one you meant to leave.

This is where freewill and freedom actually live. Not in the certainty that others will understand you, or agree with you, or even notice what it cost you to say the thing. They might not. Waddingham didn’t get every part back. Some doors stayed closed. But she stopped shrinking to be chosen by rooms that required her to be less than she was. That is the whole point: not winning the room, but refusing to disappear inside it.

You have been given a will that is genuinely free. Not free to control outcomes- none of us have that; but free to choose, in this pause, whether you rise to your full height or fold yourself away again. Your soul already knows which one it’s asking for. It usually does.

So here’s the question worth carrying with you today, into whatever room you’re about to walk into: What have you been slouching to avoid? And what would it cost you, really cost you, to simply stand at your full height and let the room feel whatever it’s going to feel?

Don’t slouch. Leave the footprint you actually came here to leave.

 

Reflection derived from The Practice of Sacred Noticing: Transforming Your Spiritual Footprint

 

 

References

Soares, Isabella. “Quote of the Day by Hannah Waddingham: ‘I Don’t Want Anyone to Ever Think That They’ve Got the Measure of Me…'” TVLine, August 8, 2026. https://www.tvline.com/2232748/quote-of-the-day-hannah-waddingham-trying-new-things/.

“Hannah Waddingham Says She Lost Out on Acting Roles Due to Her Height.” AOL, August 2026. https://www.aol.com/articles/hannah-waddingham-says-she-lost-153336000.html.