Staying Invisible Feels Safe… Until It Costs You Your Career

Have you ever been told:

'Just keep doing a good job and people will notice?'

For many women, that's exactly what we've done.

We've worked hard.
Delivered results.
Been reliable.
Supported everyone around us.
Taken on the extra work.
Stayed professional.
Stayed helpful.

And yet, somewhere along the way, many of us realise we're still waiting to be recognised, promoted, listened to, or considered for the opportunities we really want.

In this episode of Taking Control of Your Career, I'm exploring one of the biggest career myths women are taught:

That hard work alone is enough.

Because whilst staying invisible can feel safe, it often comes at a much bigger cost than we realise.

This conversation isn't about becoming louder, more self-promotional or turning yourself into a LinkedIn influencer.

It's about understanding what visibility really is, why so many women avoid it, and what happens when we spend years shrinking ourselves to fit expectations that were never designed to help us thrive.

We explore:

✨ What visibility is - and what it isn't

✨ Why women are often conditioned to prioritise being liked, reliable and helpful over being seen

✨ How the 'good girl' script follows us into our careers

✨ Why visibility feels risky, even when we know it's important

✨ The hidden cost of staying silent and ignoring your own voice

✨ How invisibility impacts confidence, career progression and self-trust

✨ The difference between contribution and recognition

✨ Why visibility is becoming a future career skill in a world shaped by AI, automation and organisational change

✨ What really happens in talent and succession planning conversations behind closed doors

✨ Practical ways to increase your visibility without compromising who you are

One of the biggest messages in this episode is this:

Visibility isn't about being seen. It's about being known.

Known for your ideas.
Known for your expertise.
Known for your contribution.
Known for what you stand for.

Because when decisions are being made about opportunities, promotions, projects, restructuring, succession planning or even redundancy, people can only advocate for what they know.

And if nobody knows what you think, what you're capable of or where you want to go next, you risk becoming invisible in conversations that directly affect your future.

I've spent over 25 years working in recruitment, talent and career development and I've sat in countless talent discussions where roles were removed, restructured or redesigned.

I've also seen entirely new opportunities created around people organisations wanted to keep.

The difference is rarely capability.

More often than not, it's visibility.

Key Takeaway

Staying invisible feels safe because it protects you from judgement.

But it can also protect you from opportunity.

The goal isn't to become louder.

The goal is to become more expressed.

To share your ideas.
To communicate your value.
To contribute to the conversations shaping the future.

Because your career shouldn't be built around hoping somebody notices.

It should be built around making sure the right people understand the value you bring.

Resources Mentioned

📖 The Authority Gap – Mary Ann Sieghart

📖 Work Like a Woman – Mary Portas

📖 Research from Herminia Ibarra on leadership identity and visibility

📖 Women Don't Ask – Linda Babcock & Sara Laschever

Ready For More?

If this episode resonated and you're feeling stuck, overlooked, disconnected from your career, or unsure what comes next, the first step is gaining clarity.

Complete my Career Clarity Form and let's start understanding where you are, what's keeping you stuck, and what your next chapter could look like.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello, welcome back. Welcome if it's the first time that you're listening to Taking Control of Your Career. My weekly ramblings and musings and client wins and client insights from someone who has been coaching women in their careers for what feels like an absolute eternity. It's probably a bit about eight or eight years or so. I've worked in the recruitment industry for over 20. And so this is my world, okay. Understanding why women move roles, why they don't move roles, what the key um instigators are, what the things are that kind of hold them back. Um, and it's something I'm obviously very deeply passionate about because it genuinely is my life's work. So I want to talk about something today that I have been putting a lot of content out about recently over the socials. So I don't know if you follow me on Instagram or LinkedIn or neither. I'll tag how you can do if you've just randomly come across me on um whatever podcast platform you're listening to this on. But I talk a lot about visibility, okay? And it is such an important and it's such a rich topic. I could literally talk for eternity on this. But I just thought, because I've been doing a lot of content on it and I've had a lot of people DM me, send me what you've got on visibility. I want to hear more. What do you mean by that? How can I start working on it myself? Isn't it it's it's attracted a lot of engagement? I'm like, there's got to be a wider conversation that we have around this. So I just thought, right, let me take to long form and not just kind of clickbaity, I don't know, posts that you put on LinkedIn or Instagram to grab people's attention and to share your knowledge and wisdom. But let's go long form on this and let's really kind of delve into it and see, you know, so you can kind of see where my thinking starts from and stems from in this. Um, it is, like I said, a rich rich topic. So there's lots of different kinds of facets and kind of layers to it. But hopefully it will help. So um essentially, I think the problem and the I don't know, the problem statement that I am trying to talk about is visibility is one of those things, okay, that as women we are told we need more of, okay, whilst, and this is the like the juxtaposition, right? Whilst simultaneously being conditioned to avoid it, right? And that is that this visibility, I believe, isn't around really being seen, okay, it's about in a career capacity, it's about being known. And actually, I might tag this in here. I've got an amazing friend who runs a personal branding agency, actually, and called Known for. So, Jodie, big shout out to you. I'm gonna tag you in this actually, uh, because her business is called known for, okay. Um, and she's incredible, by the way. So if you want some real help with your personal branding, seek Jodie out and follow her. I just love her vibe and energy anyway. She's good fun. Right. So, but visibility is about what you're known for. So, what do you think? What do you contribute? You know, what do you care about? Um, which yes, does you know entail you having an opinion about something. But if you think about this in the kind of career capacity, like work environment, it's about what you challenge, what you build, what you're trusted with. Okay. And the biggest myth women are sold is if you work hard enough, someone will notice you, right? And honestly, it is a big myth, right? Sometimes they do, but very, very often they don't. The people getting the opportunities, right? And I say this, I might get this tattooed on me somewhere, and not the ones who are most capable, right? They're the ones whose capability is visible, and there is a distinction between those two different things, okay? So, what we need to challenge is what visibility actually means, okay? Because when we say the word visible, we immediately think things like self-promotion, arrogance, LinkedIn influences, bragging, attention seeking, becoming someone we're not. And this is why it is almost immediately rejected as even a concept that they would think about doing, right? But I'm here to tell you and hopefully show you over however long my ramblings are going to take to come out of me today. But it isn't about being the loudest, right? It isn't about constantly talking about yourself, performing confidence, and becoming like a personal brand robot. And Jody will tell you all about this. It's all about authenticity, right? Visibility is around it's about sharing ideas, right? It's about being in a position where you speak before you're like a hundred percent certain about what it is that you're gonna say. It's letting people know that you're interested in certain topics or you know, the certain direction the businesses are going in. It's absolutely being associated with that expertise, but there's no point being an expert about something or in something if no one knows anything about it, right? And I think as well, there's this real um, you know, the coming together of building relationships that you do when you are more visible. It's raising your hand up and it's being part of conversations that shape decisions. And I think that bit, and we're going to go into this in a bit more detail, but I think that bit is so vitally important because that is so intrinsically linked to job satisfaction, career satisfaction, career alignment, um, all of those things, you know, being part of those conversations that shape decisions, right? And I think that is really, really important for us to kind of make that distinction. So let's go back a bit a step. So let's kind of, you know, we've hopefully kind of defined, if you like, what visibility is. Let's go back a step and move into why women avoid, and I probably should say why women actively avoid visibility, right? Because I think this is where the conversation gets really interesting, right? We don't we don't avoid visibility because we lack ambition, right? Genuinely, we don't lack ambition, okay. We avoid visibility because visibility feels unsafe. And as girls growing up, right, we are rewarded for being agreeable and helpful and reliable and not causing problems and fitting in, right? Making life easier for other people, this kind of good girl script, right? And the problem is that those behaviors get heavily rewarded throughout our lives, right? In social settings and school settings, in friendship groups, right? At school, you know, even in our early careers, we are praised for being a team player, not being any trouble, always willing to help, being dependable, and then suddenly this shift comes at more senior levels than in our career, where suddenly the rules have changed, right? The rules have changed before our very eyes, and we're now expected and often criticized if we don't show the behaviors that influence and channel and challenge and advocate for others and negotiate and people who have a point of view and people who lead, right? And no one has really taught us how to transition into this D phase, right? And it's impossible really because we are walking this typerope, right? And this typerope is, you know, and the research repeatedly shows that women are judged differently when they display the same leadership behaviors as men. Okay, so women who self-promote are often viewed more negatively, who meant to be the same. And this is something that researchers explore extensively, right? There's an amazing research piece on this by a lady called Irish Bonnet and Hamina Umbera. I can never say her name. You know what I'm like saying names, I'm terrible. Ibarra, okay, but it is that we learn and we are learning and we are adapting and we have been conditioned to stay visible enough to perform, but not visible enough to threaten, to be labeled as difficult, to outshine, my goodness, God forbid, outshine anyone else, and also not visible enough to be criticized. Okay, this is the typerope, and you will hopefully be acknowledging this as you're listening to this. And that typerope creates these career-long patterns of shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. I had two incidences, incidents, case studies, what can I call them? Two moments, right, of career coaching that I had this week, two separate people on the same day, interestingly. And it's interesting because I was talking to them about kind of where they are, they're coming into the program, they're both signed up, which is great. So we're having this kind of like um uh initial, I call it a clarity call. It's like this kind of initial call to like kind of see where we're at and they see specifically what support they need. And I think that bit is really important because yes, we've got the program, and the program works, right? People work through the program and they absolutely have that transformation. But the ones who then up for the kind of one-to-one support with it, it's really important to understand that each individual's journey is different. People come to the program, they come to coaching for very different and personalized reasons, right? But it was in what was interesting as I was talking to them about their career history, right, is they were very quick, like almost immediately, to tell me what they didn't do, what they thought that their capabilities and their limitations were without me prompting, right? I just asked a very, very open question, right? And I obviously let individuals talk, I think it's important to do so. And I'm obviously then kind of getting a measure in terms of like where are they at in terms of their mindset, where they are at in terms of their kind of self-worth and their confidence level, and you know, what baggage are they bringing to the table that we're going to need to kind of work through and kind of uncover? But it's fascinating that I just asked the same questions of everyone, right? How the initial response is one of minimizing self-deprecation. I don't, I do this, but I don't do that, that, and that. Like, and that's not the question I asked them. And so you can see how this kind of shrinking behavior is so hardwired into what we do, it's almost our first response. Now, I then go and ask a second or third question. Obviously, I probe and do what I need to do, and do what I do, should I say, and it's amazing how when I just ask a different question, how the response then starts to become in terms of ah, okay, I see what you're doing. And we we almost kind of immediately go into this kind of reframe and flip. But I think the point I'm trying to make is our immediate response is to shrink, right? And these are career-long patterns, right? But um, let me sorry, I always go a bit off on a bit of a tangent when I start talking about client examples, but I think it's important because I kind of see this every day in my work, right? So let's go back to this visibility piece because most visibility conversations, if you like, stop at will visibility get you and helps you get promoted. True, right? But what I think we need to acknowledge and understand and recognize there's a much deeper truth to this, right? Which is the cost. So the cost of not being visible, if we attach it to promotion, right, or career development, whatever, the cost isn't just the salary, the promotion, the seniority, the recognition. The cost is the self-abandonment, right? So every time we don't share an idea, we don't challenge a decision, we don't say what we really want, we don't go for that opportunity, we don't express that ambition, right? We are reinforcing a message to ourselves that is my voice isn't important, and eventually that stops feeling like a behavior and it starts feeling like a personality. And it's interesting because I was having an amazing conversation with someone randomly on the beach at the weekend after a few bottles of rose, and we were talking about our businesses, and she said to me, The finding my voice bit is because she's marketing her own firm, is the bit that I've had to do the real work on, and it's just so powerful, I think, and so encouraging and so empowering to see someone kind of have that awakening, you know, mid-career. Um, it's it's beautiful to see. But I think the fact that she acknowledged that actually that's the work that she needed to do. She had been so silent and so quiet. She didn't trust what she wanted to say and say about her own business. And actually, when that comes back, when that voice comes back, that's where you know I talk about the clarity, the confidence, and the momentum, but that's when you you authentically feel confident because you're like, I am actually speaking my truth. And that doesn't mean you have to like burn everything down and offend everyone. This is actually just what you think and feel about things, right? Because if we've gone through this conditioning where we are reinforcing this message that my voice isn't important, like I said, what then happens is this kind of feeling that it then becomes your personality. So we begin saying the you know, the off the shelf, right? It's like freaking carbon coffee, right? I don't like being visible. I'm not really, I'm not me, I'm not leadership material, or I'm just not confident, right? And in practice, in reality, right, if you think about it, um, I want you to think about it like a rash, right? You have a rash, you think I've got a rash, actually, you've got something going on in your testing that's going to cause them a rash, right? So we are we look at it as like this kind of surface level, right? But we underneath it, right, in our guts, we have been practicing in invisibility for years, okay? So something else I think is really important for us to be able to navigate and acknowledge, right? And this is by some amazing research by someone called Linda Babcock. She talks about non-promotable work, right? So this is the office housework, the invisible labor, right? This is like the note-taker and the organizer and the emotional, you know, shock absorber, the helper, the fixer, the one who smooths things over. And this is the work that keeps organizations running, right? But rarely gets acknowledged or rewarded. And we as women are disproportionately expected to do it, okay? And because it's because essentially, you know, we're visible for being helpful, and that because of that, because we are visible for being helpful, the ones that are holding all the shit together basically, and the one kind of mopping up after one getting everything done, because we have this kind of like motherly role, right? We then become invisible for leadership, and that in itself, I believe, is like a really important contradiction to explore, right? So we need to be thinking about this as visibility and it becoming a vital part of our career survival, and I want us to think about it as a skill, a skill that we are going to master, because trust me, we are amazing at picking up new skills, right? And this is not because we need to become a brand, right, or an influencer, but because the world of work is changing before our very eyes, right? AI is changing, automation is changing, organizations are restructuring constantly. And when businesses start asking the question: who do we keep? Who do we invest in? Who do we move into a new role? Who represents the future of this organization, right? The conversation isn't around who quietly did a good job, right? The conversation is around the people who are known, the people who have influence, the people who shape thinking, the people that are trusted, the people that are remembered, right? And this is why, and I've seen this play out so many times. My last corporate role, I was fortunate in advertising commas to work in the HR department. And having worked in ops for the prior 20 years, 20 plus years of my career, right, I found it eye-opening, staggeringly eye-opening. How how many talent conversations were had? It was a business that was constantly going through restructures, right? And I've seen firsthand how roles were removed with barely a discussion about the person doing them. And I've also seen new roles, entirely new roles, created around people they wanted to keep, right? And that is really, really important. And it's really important that we understand what role that we play in that from a self-advocacy perspective, right? To make sure that we are in the discussions of the people who want who are going to be a future part of this organization, right? Um, so I think one more thing I'd want to add is that, and this is a lot of the work that we do within Reset and Rise. Many of the women I work with who come into the space are almost kind of waiting, right? They are waiting. So it's almost like kind of this, if you like, visibility versus validation, right? It's almost like I will be visible when, right? And that is when they feel confident enough or qualified enough or ready enough or expert enough, blah, blah, blah. I mean, fill in genuinely your own blank. But there's this kind of unwritten rule that they have to do that before then they become visible. But I'm here to challenge, and this is the support that we offer, right? It's the other way around. It is the visibility that creates the confidence, right? And confidence is built through expression, contribution, evidence, through seeing your ideas land, right? And you know what is well, and I think this is really interesting, you know, again, having been in many of these rooms and having many of these conversations, and you know, probably at times being quite outspoken, is sometimes you will share an idea, your idea is kind of poo-pooed, right? For want of a better phrase. Is that even a phrase? Do you know what I mean? What I mean by that is like it's like kind of thrown out, like, okay, so great, great, but that's not going to work because, but that then, your way of thinking, right? So my contribution, my um, you know, my contribution to that conversation, my idea, then sparks something else else off in someone else that then has legs. But they wouldn't have had that idea if I hadn't have come up with my idea in the first place. So I want you to think about it. And I think we feel quite exposed, like, well shit, well, what everyone thinks is a bad idea. But they might think it's a bad idea, but then that might then go on to a good idea, which you can then contribute. Yeah, do you know what? Actually, Pete, I hadn't thought about that. But now when you say it like that, I see where your brain is going and your thought process. Could we then consider X, right? So I just want us to get like more comfortable with like just having conversations, right? Conversations as opposed to my idea has got to land and it's got to be the one that people take forward, right? So there's loads and loads of books and reading and you know, referencing that we can kind of you know put into this, loads of research that I've done on, you know, a lot of reading I've done around in, I've talked before, and I'll I'll link these um books in the show notes. But like the authority gap is great for those um who want to do more kind of work on you know the voices that are heard, believed, and remembered, and how we are um pitted um and how we're treated compared to our male um uh counterparts. Work like a woman, I will definitely get that tattooed up. Do you know what I'm coming across? Someone's got loads of tattoos. I actually haven't, but it's just this is stuff that I really stand by. Work like a woman by Mary Porter is absolutely amazing. Um, and it's really you know, it's it just gives, I think, a lot of um, it just gives a lot of kind of depth and understanding and what I call like the nodding dog around. You know, you feeling validated for the work for how you have worked in your um career and why a lot of this stuff kind of makes sense. So I think those things are really, really important. But I think really to summarize, if you like, you know, we've got to think about why we're staying invisible, right? And what are we trying to protect ourselves from, okay? And if that is external validation judgment, then we can move through that, right? Because our careers are a little bit more important to that, right? Um, I think we need to understand and do the work on what visibility means for us. We need to recognise and acknowledge the cost it is having on us and our careers. And when we then put the layer of the future of work and what our roles could look like in the future, do we want to be part of those conversations? Do we want to be part of that influence? Do we want our careers to be relevant? And do we actually want the acknowledgement for the work that we do? Yeah, I think we probably do. Do we, and I would imagine that a lot of you are feeling very resentful and very kind of, you know, misaligned to the work that you're currently doing? And actually, do you think sharing your voice and your opinion would actually help that? Um, I think it probably would. Does some of this work and some of this kind of visibility challenge make you question whether the role that you're in, the career you're in, the company you're working for? Um you have to excuse me, my dishwasher is going off in the background, but I'm not going to be distracted by that. Um the boss you're working for isn't actually where you want to be right now, probably. And actually, if we looked at visibility as a skill as opposed to behaviour trait, do we think that we could work on it and improve? I think we probably could. Um, so hopefully this has helped. Lots of questions there for you at the end. Um, I don't know how long I've been going on for, but I've actually really enjoyed getting that off my chest. Um, so if you want to get involved with Reset and Rise, you know to find me. I'll put it in the show notes. Um, LinkedIn, Instagram, um, booking for a clarity call. Let's figure out what visibility means for you, where you are at the moment. Let's rank yourselves at a one to ten, right? What does visibility mean to you? How could you be authentically visible? How are you going to get yourself, you know, two, three points up that chart in the next couple of months? And what actions are you specifically going to take? Because self leadership, my friends, is the way we're going to get there. Um, but see you next week for more of the same. Um, have a good weekend.