Early in her career, Alani Bankhead struggled to see herself as a natural fit for the rooms she kept ending up in.
“When I was younger, I struggled with imposter syndrome a lot,” she said. “I am small, female, brown, so not what you would expect in those high-powered positions. And it took me at least 10 years to figure out that those were my superpower.”
As a hand-picked bodyguard at the Pentagon, she found that her non-threatening appearance put potential threats at ease, reducing confrontations. “Nobody expected me to be the bodyguard,” she said. “So my team actually had the least number of use-of-force incidents.”
