The High Performers Who Keep Getting Passed Over

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-apSiwIvf9Q

“I didn’t even realize that I wanted this promotion until someone else got it.”

That came up when I was talking with Brittanni Hendricks on Midlife Remix, and she hears some version of it regularly from high performers. I keep coming back to it because it names what happens to the executives I coach, who have managed their own wanting for so long that, when it surfaces, someone else is already in the role.

It’s part of a larger pattern. The person is hitting numbers and carrying more than the team knows, yet stays put while peers get the promotion, and when they ask what’s going on, the feedback comes back vague, something about being more strategic or more visible. What the manager is picking up on usually has nothing to do with the work.

Brittanni, in her twenties, straightened her curly hair and dyed it blonde to fit into the corporate world. She said what she was actually doing was damaging her hair on the outside and her soul on the inside. My dad was Japanese, my mom is German, I’m married to a Black woman, our kids are biracial, so I understand the complexity of navigating being different. Plenty of executives learned the same, that being valued meant showing up as a certain kind of acceptable.

Over time, it becomes harder for others to see you as the leader you actually are, because you’re using so much energy managing how you come across. The people making decisions about you don’t always know what they’re reacting to, and years of strong execution accumulate without translating into the next role. Research on code-switching shows the cost compounds, because the attention spent monitoring for signs you don’t belong eats into the executive function you need for the next role.

Brittanni moves her clients from clarity into courage, which tracks with how I think about this: that identity comes before strategy. You don’t push past the fear of being found out with willpower; you look at the assumption that who you are is either too much or not enough, try a more honest sentence in a meeting, and notice the ceiling doesn’t fall in.

Listen to the full conversation with Brittanni on Midlife Remix, where she also talks about adult ADHD diagnosis and the fear of success in people who remember what it cost to get here. Find it on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and the Coaching Metta Substack.