Why Hard Work and Credentials Still Keep You Stuck (And What Actually Moves You Up)

If you've been at your current level for too long, it's a symptom that you're not legible to the individuals who hold the key to your future. Most people believe that in order to get to their next level that they need to focus on the missing skills. So they go out there, collect certifications to up-skill. And skills are important because skills allow you have the competence that's necessary. But at the executive levels, competence is a price of admission. It's a commodity. And if you are focusing on up-skilling, but you haven't yet become the person who can do the right things, what that means is you haven't developed the altitude of identity that's required to hold that role. In other words, you're trying to hold a high altitude role with a low altitude identity. And to those above you, you are a high value operative, but you're not yet one of their peers. You are suffering from strategic illegibility. And until you close that gap between your own output and that executive frequency, you will remain an inhabitant of that middle tier, regardless of your effort. So today, we're going to talk about how to move beyond performance and also take a look at the four pillows of executive legibility. You're listening to Career Revisionist, the podcast where ambitious professionals pursue mastery, breakthrough in visible ceilings, and accelerate into leadership. And now to guide you on the journey. Dr. Grace Lee, neuroscientist, executive mentor, and your trusted voice and career leadership. Pillar number one is congruence. Most leaders act under something called the aspiration falsie, the belief that in order to become an executive that they have to first start to act like one. And most leaders suffer from this form of dissonance. It really is a form of cognitive dissonance. For example, when you desire to become a vice president and you act like a vice president before you are a vice president. And as a result of that, it creates a lot of identity drag. Think about it. You are spending a massive amount of energy trying to act like an executive without having that title and not becoming one. And as a result of that, it creates, and it is the recipe for imposter syndrome. And as a result of that, your actions in acting like an executive without being one is creating a situation where the out your outward actions are not matched. They're incongruent with your internal self-concept. And it's a behavioral mask, a persona that we put on. We place a mask over our persona and we behave like somebody that we know we are not yet. And the senior leadership team can see that this is a performance. So if your internal self-concept is somebody who is a striver or somebody who is a fixer, somebody who goes out and solves the problems, then you will necessarily and inevitably emit a frequency of labor rather than a frequency of leadership. True advancement, on the other hand, is governed by the law of internal equilibrium. And the principle is this. It's that identity precedes property. And here's what that means. It means that you cannot hold the title. The title represents the property because you desire that property. You want to have that property, which is the title. So you cannot have the title until you emit and embody the frequency. The frequency is the identity. So in other words, identity comes first and then you can have the property. So how does it happen that identity precedes property? It's because people do not react to what you say, but they do react to the certainty in which you convey it. And our entire external world that you are observing around you, the experience that you're having is merely a reflection of your internal world. And you see, when you are incongruent, your thoughts are disorganized and they are scattered. Your communication is clustered. There is over-explanations and there is a subtle seeking of validation. And you see, all of this is not a speech habit, but it is an audible sound of a lack of self-congruency. Congruence is the total integration of your thoughts, your words, internal and external, and your actions. You see, the title does not prefer the power. The power is the prerequisite for the title. And you do not get promoted in order to change who you are. You get promoted because of the person you've already become. And to bridge that cap, it would be wise to dismantle your professional presence. And it all starts with the way you occupy your own mind. The second pillar we move to is signal. The biggest tragedy of the mid-level professional is that you have been conditioned to believe that your value is a function of your exertion. But at the most senior level, the executive levels in organization economics, labor is a cost to be minimized. But why is it a certainment? Is an asset to be leveraged? Why? Because in behavioral economics, we are inherent. It's our default load that we look at and assess other people very quickly to conserve mental energy. So if you are caught in the minutia of the day today, the micro routines of the day to day, you are signaling that you have a high tactical density. And as a result of that, you appear to your senior leaders as someone who is very caught up and their mental bandwidth is full diving into the how. And therefore, it seems like you have no room for the why. To shift that signal away from tactical density, it is wise to embody a certain type of weightlessness where you have an ability to influence complex dynamics and complex situations by one single calm decision instead of a thousand frantic actions. Because here's the truth. The seasweet is not looking for the person who can work more hours, but they are looking for the individuals who can protect the organization from hours being wasted. Broadcasting the right signal is only half the battle. I mean, you could broadcast wise discernment, but you lack the ability to scale that across a larger landscape than you will break under the pressure of that rule. Which leads us to pillar number three, which is scope. To understand why your current pace is holding you back from our promotion, let's look at Calibri's law, which is the natural law about metabolic scale. In any living system, as the weight, as the mass of an organism increases, its metabolic rate per unit of mass must decrease. A mouse, which is very small, has a frantic, rapid heartbeat and a high metabolism because it was designed for localized movement, really quick localized movement. And elephant, on the other hand, has a very slow rhythmic heart rate and a very slow metabolism because it was designed for resilience with that weight and covering a smaller, larger area. And why am I telling you this? Because in an organization, many leaders try to scale their scope by diving deep into a managerial metabolism, running faster, working on more projects, solving more problems, high metabolism. But an executive is a different species of organism to use that by that analogy. And if you bring a frantic pulse to the weight of that executive rule, then you will have a systemic collapse because of the nervous system and how your nervous system orientation is. And if you cannot slow down your operational pulse, while increasing your strategic mass, then you are biologically unsuited for the rate of that executive leadership role. And you are, by its very nature, as systematic risk. The most powerful forces of nature, the ebb and flow of the tides, the might of the ocean, the changing of the seasons, think all of these move with a deliberate, unstoppable slowness. So it's good to learn from that. And it is wise to trade that dopamine hit from getting that quick win, trade that with the gravity of long-term leverage. Now you might be asking, well, how do I do that? That's impossible for me to cover in a 15-minute video. But I can tell you where to start. Number one, start by expanding your time horizons from quarters to decades. And the number two, start by expanding your space horizons from just focusing on thinking about your team or department to the big picture of the entire enterprise ecosystem. And once you have mastered the rhythm of that executive, you move from merely occupying space to governing it. And you stop being at the center of the work and you start being the architect of the outcome. And there's two options for you to be able to achieve that type of a frequency. The first option is you can try to figure out how to reverse engineer that by looking at the people around you who've been promoted to positions that you desire. Your second option is to work with someone who can coach you on a proven system on how to achieve that. Someone who has helped thousands of other professionals to achieve the same. And if you choose that second option, then click on the link below this video and speak to one of my trusted career advisors. It is just simply a conversation to understand your situation, what are your growth goals? And what is the next level for you? And if it is the right fit, then you'll have my eyes and ears on your situation, on your goals, and my team of coaches will be working along with you as well. And once we do that, you will have the step-by-step curriculum on how to have identified. the entity precedes property and also had to think at a higher level of altitude. So click the link below and I look forward to working with you on the inside. Prilo #4 is stewardship. The final shift is the shift from possession to stewardship. An operator operates under the assumption that they own everything. They operate under the assumption that they own their team, they own their team budget, they own their operations and they own their role and so on. As a result of it, they protect what they own, they hoard it and it's rooted in a mindset of fear. The fear that any direct loss of control is also a loss of value. And as a result of that, it really prevents the organization from breathing. A steward, on the other hand, understands that they own nothing. But instead, they know that they are untrusted with the governance of an asset. For example, you do not own the role, you are untrusted with the governance of that role over a certain period. Stewardship enables the shift from being that indispensable hero to being that architect who builds systems that will thrive independently of your constant intervention. Because you see, if the department, the team and the projects of everything under the department, if you were to leave, if you were to go on vacation, if you were not to be present, and if as a result of that, the team would collapse, then you haven't built a high performing team. You've built a dependency and a dependency is a low altitude output. Stewardship requires that you make decisions from the perspective of the future and of your future self. And that's exactly what allows you to structure the ecosystem in a way that it continues to generate value, even after you've moved on to your next level of altitude. And this altitude model, right, congruency, signal, scope, stewardship, this altitude model is not a checklist. It is a mirror where everything that's going on the inside of you gets mirrored and reflected back into the outer world. Stop trying to convince the organization that you're ready for the next level. Because if you're still operating at that managerial pace in terms of tactical density, hoarding control, then you're effectively signaling to stakeholders that you cannot handle the weight of that role. Align your internal frequency first, then shift your signal from labor to wise discernment, slow down your metabolic pulse, and then demonstrate stewardship of the future. Because when your altitude is aligned with the vision of where you want to be heading, then your readiness is no longer a question that needs to be debated.