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For the first decade of my career, I had a strategy.
If I wanted to be taken seriously, I needed to be the best at what I did. High-quality, irrefutable work. Trusted. Relied upon.
So that’s who I became.
I read everything. I over-prepared for every meeting. I made it my job to never be caught without the right response.
And it worked — for a while.
But somewhere along the way, the strategy started costing me in a way I could feel, but couldn’t quite put my finger on.
I’d leave meetings feeling drained instead of energized. I’d sit in conversations where I had the answer and somehow still feel unvalued.
I’d watch people who knew less than me get pulled into bigger rooms.
Maybe I needed more confidence?
“Remember, being valued and being rewarded are two different things.”
So I worked on my executive presence, my posture, my voice, my framing. I got mentors and others’ advice. I networked and had lunch chats.
I kept hearing:
Be visible. Speak up more. Fake it till you make it. Take up more space.
But none of it moved the needle.
Because the problem was never my confidence. It was my strategy.
I had built a whole career on being the most reliable person in the room. And reliable is exactly where it left me.
Here’s what took me years to see:
Being trusted with the work is not the same as being chosen for what’s next.
Credibility is earned by performance. But the next opportunity isn’t handed to the most prepared person — it’s handed to the one whose thinking is trusted.
The room can rely on your work without ever knowing what you actually think.
And when stakeholders are deciding who gets the next opportunity, what you’ve built matters less than whether they can see where you’d take it.
When was the last time someone in a decision-making room heard your thinking process — not just what you’d prepared?
The work that got you here was real. The reliability was real too.
But the leader who comes next isn’t the most prepared person in the room.
They’re the one the room already trusts to shape what happens next.
“Remember, being valued and being rewarded are two different things.”
Carla Harris
Senior Client Advisor at Morgan Stanley
