Coach Lakshmi

You are the most liked person in your team. And the least likely to be promoted.

I know that lands hard. But stay with me.

She was the person everyone wanted on their project. The one who made difficult stakeholders manageable. The one who smoothed the tension in every room before it became a problem. Her manager loved her. Her peers trusted her completely. Her skip level thought she was wonderful.
And in three consecutive promotion cycles, someone else got the role.

Not because she was not capable. Because the story being told about her in those rooms was: she is great where she is. Warm. Reliable. Easy. And none of those words are promotion words.

Here is the shift that nobody talks about.

Being liked means people enjoy working with you. Being respected means people think of you when a hard decision needs to be made. One keeps you valued. The other gets you promoted.

The women who make this transition do not become cold or difficult. They do not stop being human. They just add one thing that changes everything.

A point of view they are willing to hold under pressure.
They stop smoothing every disagreement and start naming what they actually think. They stop saying yes to protect the relationship and start saying no when no is the right answer. They stop adjusting their tone to make everyone comfortable and start trusting that their discomfort in the room is worth something.

That shift does not happen overnight. But it starts with one moment. One meeting. One thing you say clearly instead of smoothing over.

🎯 If you are ready to stop being the most liked person in the room and start being the most respected, DM me FREE COURSE.

Your manager thinks you are a great performer. Not a future leader. And you have been too busy delivering to change that.
She did not set out to be known as the safe pair of hands.

It happened one yes at a time. One smoothed conflict at a time. One problem solved quietly at a time. She was good at everything and visible for none of it in the way that actually mattered.

And by the time she realised the story being told about her did not match who she actually was, it had already been told in three promotion discussions without her.

Here is what most mid-career women do not know about their own narrative.

It is not built in your performance review. It is built in the moments between meetings. In how you are described when your name comes up informally. In what your manager says when someone senior asks about the talent in their team. In the story three people above you would tell about what you are ready for right now.

And if you have not been intentional about that story, someone else has written it for you.

The good news is that narratives are not permanent. They are just unchallenged perceptions. And perceptions change when you shift what you are known for, who knows it, and how consistently you show up at the level above the one you are in.

You are not starting from zero. You are starting from misread. And misread is entirely fixable with the right strategy.
DM me READY and let’s rewrite what they think you are capable of.