Do you actually want it?
A few years into my corporate career, promotion became the thing I measured almost everything against. Performance ratings, the next role, the next level – these were how I knew whether things were going well. It felt clear, even obvious. Of course you pushed for the next rung, of course you built your case, and of course you said yes to the things that got you noticed.
Then I had children, and somewhere in those years the clarity started to blur. I still wanted to progress – that part hadn’t changed – but I’d also started to want other things that didn’t always sit comfortably alongside it, things like more time, more presence, a job that didn’t eat the edges of everything else. The part of me that wanted to keep pushing and the part of me that wanted something different were both real, and I didn’t do a very good job of giving either of them a proper hearing. I kept moving forward on the same trajectory I’d always been on without ever properly asking myself whether it still fit. That’s something I’d do differently now.
The question that tends to get skipped
Most of the content about promotion is about how to get it – how to build your case, navigate the process, make yourself visible to the right people. That’s all genuinely useful, but it assumes you’ve already answered the more fundamental question, and in my experience that question often gets skipped entirely or answered too quickly.
Do you actually want it? This particular promotion, at this particular point in your life and career – is it genuinely what you’re working towards, or is it just the next thing on a path you’ve been on for so long you’ve stopped examining it?
The two patterns I see most often
When it comes to promotion and progression, I tend to see people in one of two places. The first is the autopilot pattern – moving steadily towards the next level because that’s what you do, because the organisation expects it, because it would feel strange to stop. The goal hasn’t really been examined recently. It’s just there, like a destination on a map you stopped questioning years ago.
The second is a hesitation pattern – something has shifted, whether that’s life becoming more complex, a role that felt less right than expected, or simply a growing sense that what you thought you wanted and what you actually want might not be quite the same thing. Sometimes that’s because your definition of success has evolved over time without you fully recognising it. Here the question isn’t how to get the promotion, it’s whether you actually want it at this particular point, in this particular shape.
Both patterns carry a cost if they go unexamined. Autopilot can take you somewhere you didn’t really choose. Hesitation, left to itself, tends to make the decision by default rather than by design.
Why do you actually want it?
When I ask clients this question directly, the first answer is often fairly surface level. When we keep going, what tends to emerge is something more specific and often more interesting – the real reason behind the goal. The most common ones I hear are some combination of:
- Impact and purpose – making decisions that matter rather than feeding into someone else’s
- Recognition and fairness – a role, a platform, and a pay packet that actually reflect the value you’re already delivering
- Autonomy and choice – more say over where you spend your time and energy in a way that’s sustainable
- Financial security – giving yourself and your family more options
- Growth and mastery – stretching into work that plays more to your strengths
- Role model and legacy – being the kind of leader you’d have wanted earlier in your own career
Understanding the real driver matters because it changes both how you approach the goal and how you evaluate it. If what you’re really after is more autonomy, it’s worth asking whether the next level actually delivers that in your organisation, or whether it comes with more constraints than you’re currently imagining.
The assumptions worth testing
Many of the stories we carry about the next level were formed a while ago – from things we’ve heard, from watching people above us, from assumptions built on incomplete information, some of which are accurate and many of which aren’t, or are no longer true in the way they once were.
“More seniority means more hours and more pressure” is probably the assumption I hear most often, and it’s worth testing rather than accepting as given. It’s often partly true – the accountability does increase, and there are usually periods that are genuinely more demanding. What people don’t always anticipate is that the next level can also bring things that help absorb that pressure, such as more ability to delegate, more control over your own diary, and more say over where you direct your energy. A client I worked with had been talking herself out of a step up for the best part of a year on exactly this basis, and when she sat down with a handful of people already at that level and asked them directly, what she found didn’t match the picture she’d built up. The demands were real, but so was the degree of autonomy she hadn’t expected, and on balance the equation looked quite different from the inside than it had from the outside.
Other assumptions worth looking at honestly – whether you’re actually ready (readiness tends to grow in the doing, and you may be further along than you think), whether the version of the next level you’re imagining bears much resemblance to what it actually looks like today, and whether promotion is even the right route to what you want right now. Sometimes the more useful first step is stepping back and thinking more strategically about where you’re heading before deciding what comes next. Sometimes a lateral move, a scope change, or a project that builds the right kind of evidence matters more in the short term than the title itself.
Yes, not yet, or genuinely not now
Once you’ve looked at the why and tested the assumptions, the path usually becomes clearer, though not always in the direction you expected, and the thinking doesn’t always move in a straight line. What tends to change is that you’re making a more deliberate choice rather than drifting towards or away from something.
Sometimes it’s a clear yes, and the question shifts to how to make the best possible case. Sometimes it’s not yet – the goal is right but the timing or the groundwork needs more attention first. Sometimes it’s genuinely not now – not as a failure of ambition, but because where you are and what you want don’t quite align with the trajectory you’d been on, and recognising that is actually a useful thing to know rather than something to push through.
Whichever of those feels closest, a useful starting point is to write down your honest answer to two questions – why you want this, and what you’re currently assuming about what it involves – and then ask yourself how well-tested those answers actually are.
If you’d like to think it through with someone who works on exactly this kind of question regularly, I’d be glad to have that conversation. It’s often the quality of the thinking before the action that makes the biggest difference.