I Used to Be a Smart Employee. Now I’m a Naive One. On Purpose.

I thought wisdom was protection.

If I could just understand office dynamics, coworker motives, leadership tendencies, red flags—I’d never be caught off guard. I’d never say the wrong thing in a meeting. I’d never misread a passive-aggressive comment. I’d see every power shift coming from a mile away.

That was the logic that nearly broke me. And, it wasn’t even working. Of course I still say the wrong thing, misunderstand comments, and feel totally defenseless.

I’ve always been anxious. Clinically depressed, too. My symptoms showed up before middle school. I didn’t know what it meant back then—I just knew I felt things harder, faster, and longer than most people seemed to. It wasn’t until years later that a therapist told me I’m what they call an HSP—a Highly Sensitive Person.

It’s not a personality test result, it’s not a quirk, it’s how my nervous system operates. I pick up on tension, tone, energy shifts, unsaid expectations, and those uneasy feelings linger through the work day, and sometimes even half the work week. So I built coping mechanisms around it. I studied people, pre-read the room twice, three times, however long I had until I needed to speak. T tried to forecast mood swings and micro-politics before they reached me.

At work, that made me useful. I could read between the lines of feedback. I knew how to defuse tension with a well-placed joke. I saw problems coming before they turned into deliverables gone wrong. I anticipated needs and over-delivered.

It made me a great performer. But it also exhausted me.

Because when you’re always trying to stay one step ahead, you’re never fully present. You’re scanning, calculating, monitoring how every decision might reflect on you, or ripple into team dynamics, or trigger some unspoken chain of consequences. That kind of hyper-vigilance looks like strategy, but it’s just fear in a button-down.

Eventually, I stopped learning for growth. I started learning for self-defense.

And now I’m trying something I never thought I would: conscious naivete.

Not indifference, not detachment, just the willingness to not know everything—on purpose. To stop trying to anticipate every reaction or control every outcome. To show up to work without a psychological escape plan in my back pocket. To say what I think without rewriting it four times in my head first.

In an industry that rewards precision and performance, this feels like mutiny. But I’m not looking for perfection anymore. I’m looking for peace.

I’ve spent years sharpening every skill that made me “good at my job”—when sometimes, the most humane thing I can do is put the tools down. Be open. Let a conversation unfold instead of choreographing it. Trust my team instead of managing their perception of me and my work. Let my work be human. We’ll clean it up before it goes to the client.

Naivete at work isn’t failure. It’s trust. In other people, and in myself.

And that might be the smartest move I’ve made yet.