Partner Success StorY
You're not done. You're just done playing small.
How a Senior Communications Leader Stopped Hiding and Reclaimed Her Confidence
Situation
A senior communications leader came into coaching at what looked, from the outside, like a stable moment in a long career. After twenty-three years in public service, she was a recognized subject matter expert and the person her organization reached for when something important needed to get done right. She had a team that relied on her, relationships with senior leadership going back years, and a role that had recently expanded to give her more visibility and scope.
She was running on empty, and had been for a long time.
Several years earlier, during a period of political turbulence, a senior department leader had called her directly and screamed at her over the phone blaming her for a communications failure that had its roots in two offices that never aligned on policy. When it escalated, her leadership who made the policy call declined to intervene. She froze during the call. When the berating was done, she was shaking and struggling to breathe. And then, as she would describe it years later, she internalized the whole thing as if it were hers to carry. About six months later, she took medical leave for depression.
She came back from leave and kept doing good work. But somewhere in the years that followed, the version of her that had walked into rooms and taken up appropriate space had gone quiet. In her place was someone who edited emails for colleagues rather than sending her own, who handed off briefings she should have delivered herself, who stayed in the background and had gotten practiced at telling herself that was fine.
By the time she reached coaching, she had convinced herself the only answer was to leave the role, the organization, maybe the field. She came in with a job search agenda, a career assessment, and a working theory that she just needed a clean break. What became clear, fairly quickly, was that the job search was getting ahead of the real problem.
Solution — What We Did Together
Over nine months, four things needed to happen, and each one made the next one possible.
Untangling what had actually happened.
The early sessions were about getting the story straight. What she had lived through wasn’t a professional failure but was a system failure, one in which she had done exactly the job she was asked to do and then been left exposed when the politics shifted. We worked through what she was carrying, where it had come from, and what it actually said about her capabilities versus what it said about the environment she had been in. That distinction, which had blurred badly over the years, needed to be clear before anything else could move.
Discovering what she was actually capable of.
Using an assessment and structured exercises, we mapped her interests, motivations, and skills — many of which she had quietly stopped claiming. She had been thinking of herself as a communications generalist, and a narrow one at that. What the work surfaced was something considerably broader: a long track record of managing complex, multi-stakeholder events and initiatives, a genuine instinct for organizational systems and change, and a depth of experience that looked quite different once she stopped filtering it through years of accumulated self-doubt.
Rebuilding her presence incrementally.
Rather than pushing for a dramatic reset, we worked in small, deliberate steps identifying the specific behaviors she had retreated from and returning to them one at a time. Send the email to the senior leader yourself, rather than having a team member do it. Attend the meeting rather than sending someone else. Deliver the briefing instead of handing off the notes. Each of these was small enough to feel manageable and meaningful enough to produce real evidence. She was also introduced to a simple motivational framework built around autonomy, competence, and relatedness as a way of evaluating what to take on, and what to let go.
Stepping into the role she had been avoiding.
Midway through the engagement, her organization asked her to serve as acting deputy director, a high-visibility role she would have turned down a year earlier. She said yes. The early weeks were demanding: long days, a steep learning curve, budget responsibilities she’d never held before. But she stayed with it. By the time the assignment ended, she was easily running senior meetings and strengthening relationships across the organization. The role she had been afraid of turned out to be one she was made for.
"I now feel like I am in control… I’ve heard from people that they’ve seen a difference."
Personal Transformation and Results
By the final session, she had gone from planning her exit to not needing one.
She had gone from describing herself as dying a slow death at work to leaving the office at 5:30, exercising regularly for the first time in years, and sleeping without the low-grade dread that had followed her home for so long. Work was no longer something she was trying to escape. Instead, it was something she was doing well and, occasionally, enjoying.
At work, she had grown into her expanded role in a way that felt earned rather than performed. She was interfacing with senior leadership directly and positioning herself as the strategic advisor she had always imagined being. She was managing her team with a directness she’d lost somewhere along the way: setting expectations, giving feedback, going to bat for people in the ways her own supervisors had once failed to go to bat for her. Her colleagues noticed. Her director noticed. She noticed.
Whether or not she decides to leave, she’ll be able to run a job search from a position of genuine steadiness, exploring options with curiosity rather than urgency, building relationships before she needs them, and holding out for something she actually wanted rather than the first thing that would get her out.
The career she thought she had to leave turned out to have more in it than she realized. And she turned out to have more in her than she had been willing to claim.
