You're not waiting to be read. You're waiting to be noticed.

Let me ask you something uncomfortable. Are you secretly waiting for the tap on the shoulder from your boss to tell you ‘You’re ready’ and silently praying that all your hard work will be noticed?

It happens more often than you think. 

Let’s get back to basics and define what’s really going on here - visibility, and our overwhelming urge to avoid it. I think we can all agree visibility is career-defining. It’s a lever we should all be, well, leveraging. But if we don’t acknowledge it, we can’t build a strategy around it - especially when it’s the last thing we want to do.

Visibility isn’t self-promotion. It’s not being the loudest in the room. It’s not a LinkedIn personal brand built on beige quotes and ‘I’m so humbled’ posts. Visibility is the deliberate, intentional practice of making your thinking, your expertise, and your presence known - in the right places, to the right people, through real conversation and genuine connection.

That’s it. So why does it feel like walking into a spotlight naked? What we don’t talk about is that most of us were never taught that visibility was ours to claim.

We were taught the opposite. Stay in your lane. Don’t be too much. Do good work and someone will notice.

I hate to break it to you - but they won’t.

I’ll be direct: visibility isn’t just a career strategy.

Speaking up, sharing a perspective, making your thinking known - these are acts of agency. And agency, for many women, is something we were subtly, consistently, quietly taught not to claim too loudly.

When we start our careers, it genuinely doesn’t occur to most of us to have strong opinions. We’re there to learn, to listen, to be useful.

Our value comes from what we do, not what we think. And so, the habit of self-editing becomes so deeply ingrained, we stop noticing we’re doing it.

 And then one day - often years in - we look around and wonder why we’re still waiting. Why the opportunities seem to land with other people. Why our contribution feels invisible, even when we know it’s there.

I want to talk about the identity piece here, because it’s where a lot of women I work with get genuinely stuck.

When I started stepping into this work myself - having opinions, being visible, saying uncomfortable things out loud, shock horror -disagreeing with other opinions (men) in the room I had a quiet identity crisis - who am I being right now, and does this actually feel like me?

In the workplace the ‘roles’ available to ambitious women have always felt quite binary.

You’re either the alpha - outspoken, direct, one of the lads, or you’re behind the scenes: brilliant, capable, keeping everything running while someone else takes the credit.

There’s very little cultural space for the version in between.

The woman who is confident and has strong opinions and takes up space and is still warm and collaborative and doesn’t need to perform a version of herself to do it.

So we people-please. We ensure we are likable. We hedge. We make ourselves easier to digest. We edit the opinion before it leaves our mouths, not share it all - And we tell ourselves that’s just being professional.

I met with one of my new clients for coffee a few weeks ago in London. We spent over an hour together, talking about her next career chapter, her aspiration to dial up her trustee portfolio and look to move into NED roles over the next 18 months.

It was energising to see her connect with her purpose and start to imagine her future. I then made the comment ‘great! What circles do we need to get you into’ I was thinking new networks, access to these opportunities.

With that her whole body language changed. I could see her visibly shrink at the thought of 'being visible'. The thought of ‘getting out there’ filled her with dread. Unknowingly masking the sense that she needed to stay small, stay quiet, and work without drawing too much attention to herself.

Let me tell you this client was exceptional at her job. Her thinking was sharp, her experience was significant. She couldn’t remember a time when being seen had felt safe and this had been eroded further still by the work environments she’d been navigating over the years.

I remember myself how I used to just not say anything at all. 

The reason visibility feels exposing isn’t a confidence problem. It’s not something you can fix with a mindset shift or a networking strategy. It runs deeper than that. Women having agency - a voice, a view, a real presence - has historically made people uncomfortable. And we absorbed that discomfort. We internalised it as something being wrong with us, rather than something being wrong with the system.

Recognising that doesn’t make it disappear overnight. But it does change the question.

It moves it from ‘what’s wrong with me?’ to ‘what story have I been handed - and do I still want to live by it?’

That is where the real work begins.

Sally and Natalie