BlueSky Lisa

What would you call the thing that's actually stopping you from being seen?

One of my clients once thanked me for something I'm honestly not sure I did: "highlighting the Imposter Syndrome." I don't put much stock in that phrase as a diagnosis. Plenty of good research questions whether it's a real thing at all, rather than an ordinary moment of doubt with a catchy label attached.

What we actually worked on wasn't naming a syndrome. It was naming a habit: staying quiet in the room even when she had the answer, letting someone else's confidence stand in for her own competence.

That's a specific, observable thing. Not a condition. Something you do, which means it's something you can stop doing.

What's the specific thing you do, not the label for it, that's actually keeping you quiet?

Reach for the Sky,
Lisa

Are you good at your job, or does it actually fit you? Most people have only ever answered the first question.

One of my clients put it this way after we finished working together: "It gave me clarity for my next steps and helped me define my career goals more clearly. I understood that while you can do many things, if they don't match your strengths and values, it will drain a lot of your energy."

You can be competent at something for years, get promoted in it, be relied on for it, and still feel the wrong fit the whole time. Competence doesn't tell you anything about fit. It just tells you that you can keep going.

So the real question isn't "am I ready." It's simpler and harder: does this still fit who you are now, not who you were when you took it on?

Reach for the Sky,
Lisa

I have been quiet here for a couple of weeks.

My beautiful, kind mother died on 8 August, and between then and her funeral on the 17th, this was not somewhere I had it in me to be.

I was very lucky to be able to fly from Switzerland to Australia to be with my family, and I am deeply grateful that I could be there.

What I will say here is that grief does not run on the schedule you would prefer it to.

I am back in Switzerland now. And one of the things I am looking forward to is a small conversation I run every so often: the BlueSky Leadership Roundtable.

No pitch. No framework to sell you.

Just a small group of professionals talking honestly about what is actually going on for them: in their organisations, in their leadership, and sometimes just in themselves.

The next one is Thursday 10 September at 8:30am CEST. If that sounds like a conversation worth your time, details and application are here: https://programs.blueskycourses.com/roundtable

Reach for the Sky,
Lisa

A client asked me last week: how do I know when to push back, and when to just let it go?

It's not really a tactical question. Every senior professional I work with can read a room, they know how to choose their battles on paper. What's harder is the moment itself, when something happens and you have half a second to decide whether this is worth spending your capital on.

Push back too often and you become the difficult one, the person whose objections stop landing because there are too many of them. Let too much go and you slowly disappear from the decisions that matter, quietly training the room to expect your silence.

Neither extreme is wrong on its own. What matters is whether the choice is actually yours, made on purpose, or whether it's just the pattern you've fallen into because it's easier than deciding each time.

Has push back or let go, in this exact case, actually been chosen? Or has it just become the default?

I'd love to hear how this resonates with you.

How much of yourself should you adapt to fit the culture around you?

When I began working in Swiss banking, I was Australian, often one of the only women in the room, and learning to operate in an environment very different from the one I had grown up in.

So I adapted.

I became more careful and measured. I paid attention to how decisions were made, who was listened to and what leadership was expected to look like.

Some of that adaptation was valuable. It helped me understand the organisation and work effectively within it.

But over time, I also realised that adapting too far can come at a cost. When you become overly focused on fitting the culture around you, you can lose some of the qualities that make you effective in the first place.

For me, that meant reconnecting with my directness, trusting my own judgement and becoming more comfortable leading in a way that felt natural to me.

I didn't stop adapting. I became more conscious about what I adapted and what I chose to retain.

That distinction made me a better leader.

Where is the line for you between adapting to an organisation and losing too much of yourself?

For years at UBS, in addition to line roles, I also led transformation projects where I had no formal authority over the people I needed to move.

These were change projects, initiatives that ran across divisions, across functions, where the people whose work I needed didn't report to me and had no reason on paper to prioritise what I was asking for.

I remember sitting in a planning meeting, watching a colleague from another business area quietly deprioritise something I'd asked for three weeks earlier, and realising I could either escalate it - and burn the relationship - or work out why it hadn't happened and start again.

I chose the second one. Most days, still would.

What I learned in those years is that influence without authority isn't really about tactics or clever persuasion. It's about earning enough trust and clarity that people choose to follow, because they can see what you're building and want to be part of it.

Is the issue really that you don't have the authority? Or is it that you haven't yet given people a clear enough reason to choose you?

I'd love to hear how this resonates with you.

"How do I become more visible without sounding self-promotional?" is one of the questions I hear most, almost word for word.

Is it really fear underneath that? Or is it a value quietly being protected, humility, maybe, or fairness, the belief that good work should speak for itself?

Is self-promotion actually the same thing as visibility? Talking about yourself, and making sure the right people have accurate information about your work, might not be the same thing at all.

If they're not the same, which value do you think being visible would actually breach?
Looked at honestly, would it really breach that value, or does it just feel that way?

I'd love to hear how this resonates with you.

Reach for the Sky, Lisa

Most of the professionals I work with are already over-performing. That's rarely the issue. They deliver, they're reliable, they get it done, and somewhere along the way that became the whole of their reputation.

"What got me here isn't working anymore" is how one client put it to me. She wasn't wrong about her work. She was right that hard work alone had stopped being the thing that moved her forward.

Here's what I've noticed: reputation isn't something that happens to you as a reward for effort. It's something you decide, and then build, on purpose.

So the real question isn't "am I working hard enough." It's "what's the reputation I actually want, three years from now, and am I doing anything today that builds it."

A couple of questions worth considering:

What are the three words you'd want people to use about you in three years?
Is anything you're doing this week actually building toward that, or just toward getting through it?

I'd love to hear where this lands for you.

Reach for the Sky, Lisa

I was at a leadership retreat in Connecticut once, in a room full of very senior bankers, listening to a man named Marshall Goldsmith.

He said something I'd never heard anyone say in all my years in corporate life: when you change your own behaviour, other people change how they respond to you.

I sat very still. Around me, people were taking notes and moving on. I couldn't move on. I'd spent most of my career adapting, to the room, to the circumstances, to whatever the environment seemed to want, working harder and louder to fit it. I had never once tried changing my own behaviour to change how the environment responded to me.

By then I had a title, a salary, a team, a track record across three continents. On paper, it was all working.

It took two years from deciding to leave to actually leaving. Two years of retraining as a coach alongside a senior executive role, and being honest with myself that walking away from a Managing Director salary takes real courage, whatever else is true.

I left before I turned fifty.

It didn't stay tidy after that. Two years later I said yes to a CFO role, which is an entirely different story. But that retreat is where it actually started. One sentence, in a room I nearly wasn't paying attention in.

Reach for the Sky,
Lisa