Your delivery is flawless, your team leans on you, and the feedback is still "be more strategic." Done Working Harder shows you the small moves to make inside the meetings, emails and mornings already in your diary, so the people who decide finally see how you think.
"It combs my brain straight."
It's 9:48pm. The house has gone quiet and yours is the only screen still lit. There's an email in your inbox that belongs to someone on your team, and you know exactly whose. You answer it anyway, because explaining it to her tomorrow would take longer than doing it now.
Earlier that day you made a clear point in a senior meeting. You'd done the reading. You'd joined two things nobody else in the room had joined. Then came three seconds of quiet, and in that gap you heard a verdict. So you filled it. Another example, a softer version, a "what I mean is." By the time you stopped talking, your recommendation had turned into a question.
Then there's the sentence from your last review. Be more strategic. Said warmly, with no instructions attached. You went back to your desk and did the only thing you've ever known to do with feedback you couldn't decode. You worked harder.
"I know I'm capable of more than this." You've said it to a friend, or to the ceiling at 2am, and you meant every word. You still can't point at what's in the way.
If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. Your numbers are good. Nobody questions your delivery. When something's on fire, you're who they call, and you've been who they call for so long it has stopped feeling like a compliment.
That last part is the problem. I call it the Visibility Paradox.
Every time you show exceptional operational capability, you strengthen the case for keeping you exactly where you're already valuable. Your strategic thinking is there. Your delivery is standing directly in front of it.
The belief goes like this: deliver enough, carry enough, get it right often enough, and eventually they'll see you're ready.
It's a reasonable belief. It won you every role you've ever had. Your brain learned that being the one who gets it done pays off, got rewarded for it constantly, and has been repeating it without asking your permission ever since.
Promotion panels don't score effort, though. They score evidence. And for years you've handed them evidence that points one way: she gets it done, and moving her would be a risk. They aren't wrong about you. They saw exactly what you showed them.
Nobody on that panel has watched you think, because every spare hour went to the doing. Each late email, each crisis you absorb, each recommendation polished for one more week adds another line to the column marked "operational." The other column stays empty.
You've done the work on yourself. The program, the workbook, the competency framework where you rated yourself honestly and found you were already meeting most of it. The mentor who told you to back yourself. The 360 that said exceptional at delivery, could be more strategic.
You drove home from each of them lit up. By lunchtime Monday the inbox had eaten every good intention whole, and your brain drew a quiet, reasonable, wrong conclusion. The common factor here is me.
It wasn't you. The common factor was where the learning happened. Programs take you out of your day to reflect, which is sensible. But the pattern doesn't fire in a training room. It fires at 2pm on a Wednesday, in the half-second after your recommendation meets silence and before your mouth opens again. Two days off-site can't outvote a decade of Wednesdays.
The feedback fails for the same reason. "Be more strategic" gives your brain nothing to do on Thursday, so it works harder at what it already knows. More preparation. Another slide of context. Which looks, to the room, like more excellent execution.
For twenty-five years I worked inside organisations, in learning and development, then organisational development and complex change. Part of that job was designing the leadership development the organisation cared most about. I noticed early who got it. Roughly ten percent: the executives, the identified high-potentials, the people someone senior had already decided were worth the investment. I came to call them the golden inner circle. Everyone else was expected to work out the next level alone.
Then I was running a workshop and a woman in the room stopped.
She'd been overlooked for promotion for seven years. She was talented, and I don't use that word loosely. Her team was struggling, her confidence had gone somewhere she couldn't reach, and she'd arrived convinced she was the only person this had ever happened to.
For seven years she had tried harder. Taken on more. Carried the decisions her team should have made. Every review told her she was nearly there, and every year she went back and produced more proof.
I stood at the front of that room and saw what I'd missed while I was busy serving the inner circle. The proof was the problem.
So I turned everything I knew toward the women outside that circle. Done Working Harder is what coaching them taught me.
When you stop reaching for more in the exact moments you normally would, the room finally gets a chance to see how you think.
Here's why. Every reach for more, whether that's the second explanation, the rescued email or the extra week of polish, adds to the evidence that you get things done. It shows the room nothing new. Leave the space unfilled and something else becomes visible.
In the book I use the picture of a dance floor and a balcony. You're the best dancer in the building, and the people deciding where the room goes next are upstairs. Nobody thinks to ask whether the best dancer would rather be up there.
The move that gets you upstairs fits in one line. Say it. Stop. Let them think.
It works in the meeting. It works on the email that belongs to someone on your team, which stays with them. It works on your two sharpest hours, which go to the work that needs your best brain before the inbox opens. Nothing gets added to your week. You can't add a subtraction.
The Strategic Leader Within Method™ is a matched set. On one side are the 20 Try Harder Traps, the automatic responses that keep a capable woman's thinking hidden. They come in three broad shapes: do more, explain more, think more. On the other side are 102 Power Moves, each built to meet a specific trap in the specific moment it fires.
It works because it goes after the cause rather than the symptom. Your skills were never the problem. The problem is a learned response that runs before you've consciously decided anything. Catch it in the moment and choice comes back, no willpower and no personality transplant required.
You don't need all 102 moves. You need the right one at the right moment.
The first three are things you do inside your working day. The last three become true about you because the first three held.
"It combs my brain straight."
Mia was an experienced learning and development professional who'd been encouraged to apply for a Change Lead role. Someone who'd watched her work thought she was ready. She read the job description and could have written most of it herself.
Then she hit one line: deep expertise in change management practices. That phrase took over. When I asked how confident she felt about the interview, out of ten, she said three without having to think.
I asked her one question. What if it said deep expertise in human behaviour?
Her face changed before she spoke. "Oh! Eight. Definitely an eight."
Nothing about her capability had changed, and nothing about the role. She'd spent her whole career in human behaviour. The phrase had been standing between her and her own record, and once the lens moved, she walked into that interview from a different place.
Jay, coaching client. Highly capable, deeply committed and constantly available, Jay had become the person the whole floor routed its problems through. I gave her one Power Move: make yourself unavailable. She created windows in her week when she couldn't be reached, and held them. People solved more without her. Decisions that had been waiting for Jay started being made by the people who'd been waiting. She didn't become less supportive. She became strategic about when her support was required.
A client carried six words from her father for more than thirty years. She'd brought home an A-minus and he said, "An A-plus would be better." Every polished recommendation and every rescue since had been an answer to that sentence. I gave her permission to get a B.
Sue-Anne Higgins is an Australian leadership coach and the creator of the Strategic Leader Within Method™. She spent more than twenty-five years inside organisations in learning and development, organisational development and complex change, much of it designing development for the people an organisation had already chosen to invest in.
Then she turned that experience toward the women it had been passing over: mid-to-senior leaders in corporate roles doing excellent work while staying unheard at the strategic level. She has spent more than 600 hours coaching, with 50+ one-to-one clients and 226 group coaching clients. Every trap and every move in the Method came out of their weeks.
Her mission is to positively impact one million people by changing communities from the inside out, one woman at a time. One leader who stops rescuing, protects her best hours and lets her recommendation land changes the working lives of everyone around her, and then their home lives too.
Picture the version of your week this book is built to produce. Your two sharpest hours go to the work you were hired to think about, and the inbox waits. Problems that belong to your team go back to your team and stay there. Your recommendation lands the first time you say it. And when your name comes up in a room you're not in, the people who decide describe how you think, not only what you deliver.
Same job. Same team. Same hours. A different sentence about you.
They've watched you get it done for years, my lovely. Done Working Harder shows you how to let them watch you think.
Your delivery is flawless, your team leans on you, and the feedback is still "be more strategic." Done Working Harder shows you the small moves to make inside the meetings, emails and mornings already in your diary, so the people who decide finally see how you think.