Ten years of promotion. Then nothing.
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Hello Friend!
Emma stopped getting invited.
Not officially. No one told her. She just noticed she was the last to know. The strategy conversations happened without her. Decisions got made. And then, at the eleventh hour, someone would loop her in to help “implement.”
By the time she sat across from me, it had been months of this. She wasn’t sleeping. She’d lie awake replaying the day, hunting for the thing she’d done wrong, then wake up more tired than when she went to bed.
The worry rode along into every meeting. Ten years of a career that only ever moved up, and now a wall she couldn’t explain, and a question she couldn’t shake.
“Maybe I’m not as good as I thought I was?”
She’s a Director. Corporate life expected her to walk in with the strong, unshakable veneer and hold the room. And she was holding it. Right up until her voice cracked mid-sentence. She stopped. We both just sat with it.
Here’s what she already concluded: it wasn’t her.
She had the track record. The rapid promotions. The experience. So it had to be them. Her boss wasn’t listening. Her peers weren’t inviting her. The executives kept changing direction every other week.
And she wasn’t wrong. Those things were real. And every single one of them was outside her control.
You’ve heard me say it before. Competence gets you noticed. Trust gets you chosen. Emma had spent a decade proving she was capable. What she hadn’t noticed was that capability had stopped being the question anyone was asking.
So I drew two circles.
One circle: Things I Can Control. The other: Things I Can’t Control. Where they overlap: Things I Can Influence.
Then I asked her to fill them in.
The “can’t control” circle filled up fast. Whether the execs hold a direction for more than a week. Whether her boss listens. Whether the meeting invite shows up. Whether people like her. Whether they like her ideas.
The “can control” circle was harder. Because that’s the honest one. That’s where I asked her to map her own behaviors and how she shows up. Things that actually make someone Unignorable.
Whether she’s easy to work with, or whether there’s friction in her energy and her words. Whether she can unlearn the moves that won ten years ago and quietly cost her now. Whether she brings people along through real conversation, or hides behind slides. Whether her curiosity just satisfies her intellect, or truly earns her connection with others.
Then came the part that can change everything for most of us. Where we put our energy and time.
I asked Emma to commit her hours in one specific order. The things she controls, first and most. The things she can influence, less. The things she can’t control, none.
Read that again. No time on whether people respond. No time on whether they like her. No time on whether the angels sing for her idea or someone else’s.
The blame game feels like doing something. It isn’t. It’s pouring your best energy into the one circle where you have zero leverage.
We all carry a story arc of constraints. Obstacles that sit between us and the thing we want most. That part is universal. The question is never whether the obstacles are real. It’s how much of your life you hand to the ones you can’t move.
Your Unignorable Move: Draw the two circles this week. Fill them in honestly. Then look at where your hours actually go, and drag them left, toward the things you control.
I keep coming back to something Emma said near the end of our first coaching session. She told me she’d spent a year furious at everyone else. So much so that it deflected her from asking what she could change.
So I’ll leave you with what I asked her.
What’s living in your “can’t control” circle right now that’s quietly running your week?
Your coach,
Chris
P.S. Want to know exactly which behaviors are sitting in your circle of control that might be costing you influence and credibility right now? That is what the Are You Unignorable scorecard is built to show you. You’ll get instant results with a PDF emailed to you with specific tactics you control and can implement starting today. It’s free. And it’s yours. Click here to get started!
