Twenty years of experience...

And the day they were made Director was the day they felt least certain of themself.

From the outside the promotion was a natural next step. They were respected, capable.

From the inside it felt like standing on ground that hadn't quite settled. They described it as unfamiliar, destabilising.

Not in a way that affected their performance. Just a persistent unsteadiness underneath their day-to-day.

What emerged, when we worked together, wasn't what they had expected.

It wasn't about capability. They had that. It wasn't about experience. There was twenty years of it. It wasn't even really about imposter syndrome in the way that phrase usually gets used — the fear of being found out, of not deserving to be there.

It was something far more nuanced and in some ways more significant.

In twenty years of building a career, nobody had ever asked them what kind of leader they wanted to be. What impact they wanted to create. What mattered to them about the role beyond doing it well.

They'd been so focused on becoming good enough to get there that they'd never taken space to ask what they wanted to do once they arrived, or who they wanted to be in doing it.

The promotion hadn't created that question. It just made it impossible to ignore any longer.

That's what the coaching gave them. Not confidence exactly. Something more useful, a direction that was their own. A sense of how they wanted to show up that came from inside the role rather than from a job description.

The unsteadiness didn't disappear overnight. But it stopped feeling like a problem and started feeling like information.

Twenty years to get there. And the most important work began the day they arrived.

When you got the promotion you'd been working towards — what question came with it that you hadn’t expected?

Twenty years of experience. And the day they were made Director was the day they felt least certain of themself.