Whose deadline are you actually working to?
Because when I sit across from the women I coach, leaders ranging from Senior to Director to C-Suite, the same pattern keeps rearing its head.
There’s a five-year plan for the next promotion.
A myriad of things that need to be completed before she can even attempt to put her hand up for the role.
An estimate of how all of the ways she needs to build the confidence, the executive presence she needs to master and the ability to speak with gravitas in the room.
She has a private countdown for when she’ll finally feel ready to make the move she’s been talking about and yet circling for eighteen months.
Let me tell you, she also has an astronomical number she thinks she needs to hit to be seen as worthy. By the way, she’s always overachieving on target.
When I ask where that timeline came from, the response often starts with “Well…” and then there is a pause. You know why? It’s because the timeline is rarely theirs.
It’s borrowed:
From a mentor who took a decade to get where she is and so she expects you to take that long too.
From an industry norm that’s not official but that everyone somehow agreed to follow.
From the man who’s been in the company since the noughties, who still hasn’t done it so he can’t quite understand why you think it’s going to be quick for you. (He’s actually not that good at his job, but he’s become part of the furniture.)
From misguided patience that someone sold to you as wisdom, when really it was just their insecurity.
We have been sold slow is safe and solid.
That’s not always true.
That’s a story sold to women which is dressed up as patience, as paying dues, as doing it properly. I don’t buy it and neither should you.
I was raised by women who just did the thing, who owned their power; the second something or someone stopped serving or respecting them, they recognised it and moved on. I’ve never asked permission to move, and I’m not about to start now.
Most of the women I coach didn’t grow up with that example. They grew up with the other story, the one about earning it the slow way, being overtly grateful for pittance, and if they’re in the room, their voice isn’t quite as valuable as others, so keep quiet and this one… know your place.
These are still running in the background of nearly all of their decision-making.
The question I always ask is whose timeline are you on? The follow-up? Who benefits from you being on that timeline?
You see, the timeline was never the point.
The timeline was a story someone told you to help you feel in control of something that terrifies most people: uncertainty.
A five-year plan feels safer than an honest admission that you don’t actually know how long this takes, because you’ve never done it before, and, truth be told, the organisation doesn’t have a proper process, so nobody really knows. You’ve never ever taken this risk before. There is no precedent for your exact next move. Which means there’s no real timeline for it either.
It’s like someone licked their finger, held it up to the wind and made a guess. It was made years before you got here, and you agreed to inherit without ever checking whether it fit or even if it was true.
I mean, let’s be honest, James arrived a year ago, and now he’s a senior leader – no one knows why (He’s not that good).
Why do you believe that you have to have it all together before you can make a quantum leap too?
OK, before we go on, let me spell out what I’m not saying, because this can get easily misconstrued. I am not telling you to rush. I’m not telling you to skip the learning, the reps, the hard conversations that build the muscles you’ll need later. Some things genuinely take the time they take.
A board won’t trust you overnight. Neither will a team you just took on. You’ll have to build relationships with peers, business managers and stakeholders.
But a lot of the waiting I see senior women doing has less to do with readiness and more to do with permission. This is something that you can take/give to yourself rather than wait to be handed on a silver platter.
I think about a client I worked with last year, sharp, credible, twenty years into a career that should have made the next step obvious. She’d decided, without ever quite admitting it to herself, that she needed another eighteen months before she could put herself forward for the role she actually wanted. When I asked her what would be different in eighteen months that wasn’t true now, she couldn’t answer.
The truth was that she’d never actually asked herself the question. She’d conditioned herself to believe that it had to take a long time. The timeline had been running around in the background of her mind for so long it had started to feel like fact rather than a limiting belief. She put herself forward six weeks later.
She got it the promotion.
I had another client who inherited 60% of someone else’s role when they exited the business. I asked her if she had received the relative increase in salary. Her response? “No, I’m going to wait 6 months to prove myself before I ask for more compensation,” WHAT!
I asked her why she thought she’d received the lion’s share of the work since it wasn’t the first project that she had been given to troubleshoot. She recognised in that moment that it was because she was outstanding at her work. So why should she wait to prove what she had already proved?
She was looking for proof to give herself permission to ask; she already had it.
That realisation set her on a journey to increase her package by £200,000 because she realised that she could take a leap outside of her organisation and get the title and compensation she deserved.
These are stories about someone finally checking whether the schedule was real, rather than waiting for confidence to arrive on cue at the appointed time.
The women who accelerate, the ones who make in eighteen months what looks from the outside like a five-year leap, aren’t doing anything mystical. They haven’t found a shortcut nobody else knows about.
What they’ve done is stop waiting for a feeling to arrive before they act. They’ve stopped waiting for a stack of irrefutable evidence to be curated. They’ve stopped waiting for someone else’s permission.
They’ve noticed that the feeling of being ready almost never precedes the readiness itself. It follows it.
You become someone who can do the thing by doing the thing, not by waiting until you feel like someone who already could. You take the leap.
This is the part that gets left out of most conversations about ambition: the path was never as linear as you were told it was. It’s what they call a squiggly career. Nobody’s career actually moves in the tidy upward diagonal that’s shown on the organisational progression slide deck.
It moves in bursts and spurts.
Then, there are long flat stretches where nothing seems to be happening on the outside, followed by a compressed window where everything seems to happen at once and what you were building in silence becomes seen and loud.
The compression is real. I’ve watched it happen, in my own life and in the lives of the women I work with, more times than I can count. You have eighteen months of unglamorous, invisible groundwork, then a six-week stretch where three years of “normal” progress escalates because the conditions, the ambition, the feeling finally lined up and the person was ready to move… and then they did.
Here’s the thing about that compression, though: it only happens for the people who were willing to move before someone else’s timeline said it was time.
Compression is what preparation looks like when it meets someone who refuses to keep waiting for the calendar to hand her permission.
So let me ask again, more specifically this time.
What’s the move you’ve been sitting on because some version of “the right time” hasn’t arrived yet?
Is it the conversation with your board about what you actually want next? The application you’ve drafted three times and never sent? The idea you’ve mentioned to exactly one trusted friend and nobody else, because naming it makes it real, and real is frightening?
What’s the thing where you’ve settled, without ever writing it down or saying it to anyone, another year, another qualification, another target achieved, another sign you’re waiting for before you’re allowed to move?
Look honestly at where that timeline came from. No, no, no, no, no, not the reason you give for it. The number itself. Did you arrive at it through evidence about your own capability, tested and specific, or did you borrow it from someone whose path had nothing to do with yours?
I hear you, you want to know what this looks like real time, right?
Well, practically, this starts small, because you need to build the muscle of movement through exercising it. So here goes:
- Pick the one thing you’ve been giving an invented deadline- that ambition that you have sitting at the bottom of your to-do list because you’ve told yourself it needs more runway than it actually does.
- Set a date this month, not next year. Give yourself a real deadline, one you chose yourself, because it does something an inherited one never will. It forces you to find out what you’re actually capable of rather than guesstimating, and most women I work with discover the gap between the two is far smaller than they’d been led to believe.
- Tell one person who will hold you to it. Ask them to keep you accountable, plan check-ins and do them
- Then go for it – hook, line and sinker. Trust that you are worthy, capable and have your own permission to make it your reality.
- When you’ve done it with one thing, pick another and repeat.
Because here’s what I know for certain, after years of watching this up close: the distance between where you are and where you’re going is not fixed. I have watched many a woman wait, only to be left out and left behind. This distance flexes based on how much of it you’re willing to close yourself, right now, rather than waiting for circumstances to close it for you. Because often when you wait too long, you lose.
You can collapse time and distance, carefully and thoughtfully. You don’t need to pretend years of experience don’t matter; you simply need to refuse to add an invented timescale on top of the incredible work that you have already done, delaying your next level.
Most women I know are not short on capability. No siree Bob, every woman I have worked with has been Brilliant, with a capital B. The problem is that they are carrying an extra year or two of waiting that nobody asked them to, and even if someone did, they adopted that nonsense as their own.
Purpose moves faster than false patience, and false patience is really fear. That’s the difference between the women who accelerate and the ones who stay exactly where they are for another twelve months, 2 years, 5 years, 10 years doing the same work, having the same conversation with themselves, telling themselves the same story about not being ready yet.
You get to decide when it’s time, not your mentor’s old timeline, not the industry average, not someone else’s caution that they’ve projected onto you calling it wisdom.
Here’s my final thought: if nobody had ever told you how long this was supposed to take, if you just decided that you were going to make what you want happen, happen, what would you already be doing?
… now go ahead and do it!
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