Success & Leadership

The More Successful You Become, the More Valuable Your “Yes” Becomes. 

𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘮𝘢𝘺 𝘣𝘦 𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘶𝘪𝘯𝘦. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘮𝘢𝘺 𝘣𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘦𝘥. 𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘣𝘦𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘴𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘰𝘰𝘮?

There is an interesting paradox that arrives with professional success. The more established you become, the more invitations find you. What nobody tells you is that your success also makes your attention, reputation, relationships and credibility increasingly valuable to the people doing the inviting.

That changes how leaders should read the flattering email.

It may begin with somebody saying they have followed your work. They know about the award, article, promotion or organisation you have spent years building. Perhaps a prestigious publication, broadcaster or institution is mentioned. For a woman who has fought to have her expertise recognised, particularly a Black woman or woman from a culturally diverse background, this can feel less like flattery and more…

 You Were Right. The Room Moved On Without You.

If you are a high-performing woman already leading, building a business, navigating your next career chapter or rising into greater responsibility, SistaTalk 30: Claim the Room is designed to help you turn the expertise you already possess into greater influence, so your ideas are heard, your judgment carries weight and your contribution has a stronger chance of shaping the decision while it is still being made.

That matters because you may already recognise the moment when expertise and influence separate. You raise a concern in a meeting, explain the evidence and identify what could go wrong, but the conversation moves on. Twelve minutes later, somebody else raises essentially the same issue and suddenly the room stops to consider it.

Your assessment may be described as “thorough” while somebody else's is called “strategic” or you introduce the idea only to watch another…

You May Not Need Another Career Move. You May Need to Stop Carrying the Wrong Things.

High-achieving women are rarely short of capability. What they are often short of is strategic space. 

The organisation keeps discovering you can carry more, the rescue, the difficult client, the mentoring, the quiet holding of institutional memory. From the outside it looks like an influence. 

From the inside it can become career clutter.

Responsibilities, expectations and behaviours that once proved your value but now occupy the capacity required for the next chapter.  

What If Playing Yourself Down Is Actually One Of The Reasons You Became Successful?

There is a contradiction hiding inside the careers of many accomplished women. Some of the behaviours we now describe as “playing small” may once have been precisely the behaviours that allowed them to advance. Keeping your head down, working twice as hard, carefully choosing when to challenge authority and learning how to read a room were not necessarily signs of low confidence. Sometimes they were highly developed strategies for navigating power.

For Black and women of colour, that distinction matters. 

Long before terms such as code-switching, emotional labour and stereotype threat entered mainstream leadership conversations, generations of women were teaching their daughters how to survive environments in which intelligence did not necessarily guarantee recognition and visibility did not necessarily guarantee safety. “Don't show off.” “Don't give them ammunition.” “You will have to work twice as hard.”…