I have had a lot of these conversations lately. Different people, different industries, different countries. And underneath, the same few sentences keep surfacing.
I want to share them, because if you are carrying one of them right now, it helps to know you are not the only one. And because each of these sentences is almost never about what it sounds like.
“Is it me?”
Usually said a few weeks after a layoff nobody chose. It sounds like a verdict on your ability. It almost never is. When I walk back through the story, the pattern is the environment, a new leader who wanted their own people, a company already changing shape. You did not become the problem. You became the person it was easiest to move.
“No one sees what I do.”
You are not overlooked because you are not good enough. You are overlooked because your worth has never been put into words the deciders can repeat. Worth does not get noticed. It gets communicated. That is a skill, not a personality.
“I don’t know what I want.”
Often this is not indecision. It is over-adaptability. You have spent a career taking whatever came and making it work, so brilliantly that you never had to choose. The not-knowing is the bill for never being asked.
“I was happy there. But for the wrong reasons.”
This is the quiet one. Comfort, familiarity, knowing exactly who you are in that room, all real, all worth something. But sometimes we call it happiness when it is really just the fear of finding out we could have more.
Here is what ties them together. Not one of these is a competence problem. Every one of them is a translation problem, the gap between what you are actually worth and what the world can currently see.
That gap is the whole of my work.
“This doesn’t just set me up for the next move. It positions me for the next 10 to 20 years.”
Sophia, Comms Chief of Staff
Which sentence are you carrying?