The Hidden Cost of Waiting to Be Noticed in Your Career

What if working harder isn't the answer?

So many ambitious women have built successful careers by keeping their heads down, delivering exceptional work and believing that, eventually, someone will notice.

But what happens when they don't?

In this episode, I explore one of the biggest patterns I see in my coaching work: waiting to be recognised instead of taking ownership of your career.

Following one of my favourite Taking Control of Your Career webinars, I wanted to dive deeper into something that comes up time and time again. Women who are incredibly capable, experienced and committed are often overlooked—not because they lack talent, but because they've spent years believing their work should speak for itself.

The reality?

Being indispensable doesn't automatically make you visible.

And visibility isn't about becoming louder or turning into someone you're not.

It's about making sure the people who can influence your career understand the value you bring.

In this episode we also explore why so many women minimise their achievements, why self-advocacy feels uncomfortable, and how years of conditioning can leave us waiting for permission instead of creating opportunities.

I also discuss the research behind The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart—a brilliant book that explains why women are still taken less seriously than men and how unconscious bias affects our careers every day. If you've never read it, I can't recommend it highly enough.

Find out more about the book here:
The Authority Gap by Mary Ann Sieghart

In this episode we explore:

• Why working hard doesn't always lead to career progression
• The hidden cost of waiting to be recognised
• Why women minimise their achievements without realising it
• The difference between visibility, self-promotion and self-advocacy
• How unconscious bias and the authority gap affect women's careers
• Why staying invisible feels safe—but ultimately limits your opportunities
• How self-leadership changes the way you approach your career
• Practical ways to become more visible without becoming someone you're not

If you've ever found yourself thinking:

• "My work should speak for itself."
• "I don't want to come across as arrogant."
• "Someone will notice eventually."

...this episode is for you.

Ready to take control of your career?

If you're tired of waiting to be recognised and you're ready to create more clarity, confidence and momentum in your career, I'd love you to join us.

Taking Control of Your Career is a practical webinar for ambitious women who feel overlooked, underutilised or ready for more.

Or, if you're ready to go deeper, Reset & Rise is my signature coaching programme designed to help you reconnect with who you are, build confidence in your value and create a career that feels as good as it looks on paper.

You'll find all the links in the show notes.

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love you to subscribe, leave a review and share it with another woman who needs to hear this conversation.

Because waiting to be noticed isn't a career strategy. Taking ownership is.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Hello and welcome back. I am recording this off the back of the most taking control of your career webinar last night, right? My goodness, those moments make me feel alive. I love one-to-one's and I've said this hundreds of times, right? But when a group of women, normally strangers, come together and they share, right? Because the guard down comes down as soon as they connect and they articulate how they feel, it is just amazing. If I could literally bottle that, I bloody word. It's amazing. So, anyway, hot off the press. I wanted to do a deeper dive on one of the topics that we discussed, which sell under the patterns that we see in female careers, and the one that comes up in the most in the conversations I have, right? And it is this belief, right, that if we work hard enough, somebody will notice, right? We all sit there under the parapet, okay, not putting our heads above it, working our asses off, hoping that someone will recognize the contribution, right? And not from like this kind of like pick-knee energy perspective, but because we are doing just that. We are working our asses off, and we want someone to see the effort and the commitment. And for someone who's going to go and see our potential and reward us all for this hard work, right? And conditioning has a huge, huge part to play here, right? We know all this work I do and all the kind of research I've done on, you know, gender inequity and gender, you know, career, female career advancement and development over the years. You know, from my work, all of this stuff is so, so interconnected. And conditioning plays a huge, huge part here, right? We are taught and conditioned not to draw attention to ourselves. We are taught and conditioned to keep our heads down, get on with it, and that good old kind of you know, good girl card, right? And that is to be seen and not heard, or in this case, not seen at all. Right. So for so long, right, that is exactly how so many of us have built our careers. And this is why I challenge that what has got us here, what got us to this point in our career, is not going to get us where we need to be, right? And that is these kind of behaviors of like, you know, don't make a fuss and don't be difficult to work with and be likable and you know, deliver great work and be a team player, all of this stuff, right? And I think that we honestly believe if we do all of those things, surely the opportunities are gonna come, right? We are made to believe that workplaces are neutral and career progression is linear. Now it is for some men, not all men, but mostly men, right? But the problem is that many of the women I work with have done exactly that, right? They've worked incredibly hard, you know, they've built strong careers, they've delivered results, they've taken on the extra responsibility, they've become the reliable one and the dependable one, which means they become indispensable, which makes everyone feel great, okay, but not the, you know, not the one that gets promoted, right? So if you are indispensable but not extraordinary, right, and being the safe pair of hands, right, is not what gets you noticed for career development, okay? And it doesn't, you know, automatically equal development opportunities. So if we now throw into the mix, just for a bit of good measure, the fact that we as women tend to minimize what we do, right? We say things like, oh, you know, that was just nothing, or that wasn't anything exceptional, or I was just doing my job, right? We want to portray this image of I've got this all under control rather than I achieved this. And here's the thing, right? I know that women don't even realize they're doing it. When I bring it up in these sessions, right, I get a lot of nods and I go, I get a lot of, oh my goodness, I do that. But it's so part of our makeup, right, that we don't even realize we're doing it. And one of the exercises I do with clients is to ask them to tell me something that they're really, really proud of in their career. And what then happens is something really, really fascinating because they they come alive. They tell me about projects they've saved and accounts and saves and you know, processes they've transformed and all the brilliant stuff, like you know, solving problems, leading complex bits of change. But then they almost immediately minimize it by boy, no, anyone could have done that. Or well, it wasn't just me, you know, it was kind of the whole team, and I just played, you know, a small part. And I've always sat there thinking, would a man say that? Honestly, he he wouldn't, right? Or he would be telling everyone who would listen about the impact that he had. The number of times I've had a client stop and say, you know, and I've had to stop them and say, Can you hear what you're doing? Because we become so uncomfortable at owning our achievements that we diminish them, right, almost before someone else gets a chance to do so. And then we wonder why people don't see our value, right? The irony, ladies, is bloody heartbreaking. So the a very thing that we're trying to avoid, right, which is appearing arrogant, and I'm putting that in inverted comments, speech marks, right? Often results us in becoming invisible in our careers. So I want to ask you a few questions, right? How many people know what you are capable of? Do you even know what you're capable of, right? Many women are incredibly visible to the people that rely on them, but invisible to the people who can change their career trajectory. And that is very, very different, right? And I think one of the biggest myths in career progression is that visibility is all about self-promotion. It isn't, right? It is simply making sure the right people understand the value that you bring, right? The contribution of your ideas or your sharing of projectives, you know, perspectives, you know, having opinions. And I mean, you know you have them, right? We all have opinions, but are we sharing them? And I also want to, whilst I'm on a bloody roll, to call out a few other things here, right? Because this is, you know, from a previous podcast, you know, all the stuff is kind of multi-layered, right? But visibility isn't just avoided by women, it is actively avoided, right? And this is not because we lack ambition, it's not because we lack capability, is because we have learnt that visibility comes with a risk, right? And before anyone listening thinks this is simply a confidence issue, it's not, it's absolutely not, right? There's this most amazing book written by Mary Ann Seacart, who talks extensively about the authority gap. And if you haven't read it, I might put it in the show notes actually. I'll put it in the show notes. If you haven't read it, go and bloody read it. I've seen her speak twice, she's amazing. But what I love about this research, right, is it make it so validating because it makes you feel like, oh, I wasn't going crazy. That stuff actually does happen, right? Because this research consistently shows that women are interrupted more, challenged more, questioned more, and taken less seriously than their men counterparts who say and do and behave in exactly the same way and say the exact same things, right? So women are often expected to prove competence, right, whilst men are assumed to have it. So if you ever sat there in a meeting sharing an idea, right, and you've watched it land like a lead balloon, and then five minutes later heard someone else repeat it and get a great applause, you are not imagining things, right? If you're ever spoken over, dismissed, overlooked, or left out a conversation that you should have been part of, you are. These in isolation can feel quite small, but when they're compounded, you can see the impact they have on a career. I'm also going to put another little story in here because this literally happened yesterday, right? And it's been bugging me ever since. But so I've been approached to do some associate work for a consultancy who um go into businesses and help solve their problems. So basically, I'm going in to help them with um, you know, inclusion work, gender equity work, um, you know, uh team development, you know, career management, etc. etc. Right. And I was sat on this call, and there must have been about, I don't know, 25 of us on this call, and everyone, and and I have to say his name then. Glad I won't say his name. This guy who's running this practice um was like kind of introducing everyone, and then you had that kind of had to introduce yourself. What really made me laugh is the introductions of all his male, you know, the men, were like really long. And he's done this, and he's done that, and he's done this. And then when it came to me, because I've only like three or four women, and I was like, I wonder what he's gonna say about me. And he said something like, and I just you know, I've known Sally for a long time, and she's such a lovely um woman, and I've seen her career soar because we've made this I mean I've known this guy for like 20 years, right? And it's just so amazing what she's doing with the business. I'm like, is that all you've got to say to me about me? Serious, anyway. I was freaking furious, but it's just even the perception, the perception that I wasn't, you know, I don't know, I don't even know where I'm going with this. I'm probably needed to take this bit out. But anyway, I just want to say, right, and when I was walking to the school yesterday, I didn't think about it. I was like, did that actually just happen? So let's go back to visibility, right? Visibility, I think, feels risky, right? Because for most of us, it hasn't always been rewarded, right? Sometimes it's been punished. If we think and recognize that as a pattern, right, we can stop making it mean something about us. So we can stop telling ourselves, you know, I'm not confident enough, I'm not ready, I'm not even more experienced. And instead, and I think this is where the reframe comes in, it's it's instead asking, you know, what would visibility look like in a way that feels authentic to you, right? Because I don't think it means you've got to be louder and becoming someone you're not, and it certainly doesn't mean you have to become this performing monkey on LinkedIn, right? But I do think it is centered around this kind of notion of self-leadership and being willing to take ownership of your career rather than hoping someone else will, right? And I think it's also recognizing that no one is thinking about your career as much as you are, right? Your manager isn't, HR isn't, your organization isn't, you know, it doesn't mean that they don't care. It simply means that they've got their own priorities. And whilst I think so many of us are sitting there waiting to be recognized, other people are actively creating opportunities and building relationships and sharing ambitions and making themselves known. So I think it's something that we need to double down on, right? And think about it, not from a place of kind of self-promotion, which is like kind of look at me, but the self-advocacy, which is around that the value that you bring, right? So think about this. Think about the cost of remaining invisible in your career, right? Think about what it's going to cost you in terms of money, what it's going to cost you in terms of opportunity, um, what it's going to cost you in terms of confidence, even, right? And so the question I want to leave you with today is you know, where in your career are you relying on being noticed instead of making yourself known? Okay. Because I think, you know, being chosen and choosing are a hundred percent not the same thing. And, you know, the women I think who take control of their careers eventually stop waiting for that recognition and start actively creating the opportunities for themselves. So if this resonated, which I very much hope it did, um come and join me at the next uh webinar, free webinar taking control of your career. It's on the 13th, uh, 13th, it's on the 16th of July, 7 p.m. Um, in it we'll be exploring why so many of us, you know, feel overlooked or stuck or disconnected. And more importantly, ladies, the only thing you can expect from me is how and what to do about it. So hopefully see you there. Um, and have a great day.