Introduction
Welcome to The Overachievers Podcast, for those times when achieving everything is still not enough.
You’re very good at what you do, and the people who have worked with you know it. How many people beyond them know it, though, and whose job did you assume it was to tell them?
For the first couple of decades of your life, somebody was always assigned to find your work and mark it. Then the arrangement changed, and nobody mentioned it. Through the story of Priya, a specialist consultant whose clients all came by referral until the people sending them moved on, we look at the gap between how good your work is and how known it is.
In this episode, we explore the difference between waiting to be noticed and choosing to be visible, why the most capable people tend to hold the strongest belief that good work gets found, and why the cost of that belief arrives so late you rarely see it coming…
Key Themes
- The day the marker left the room
- Who has been carrying your name
- Waiting to be noticed versus choosing visibility
- Why the best work waits longest
- The cost nobody ever tells you about
Timestamps
- 0:00 Whose job it is now
- 2:14 When someone marked your work
- 4:51 Priya’s fifteen years of referrals
- 8:24 What a stranger finds about you
- 9:37 Waiting or choosing to be visible
- 13:02 Four reasons the rule survives
- 16:01 Whose job you’ve assumed it is
- 18:33 A question to take with you
If You Prefer Video
Connected Blog
Nobody Is Marking Your Work Anymore
Every client came by referral, until the people sending them moved on. Here is why good work stops travelling on its own, and whose job it is now.
Related Blogs and Episodes
Authority versus Arrogance
Afraid of sounding arrogant, so you water down what you know? Authority and arrogance are two separate settings. Here is why that matters.
Episode 018 – The Visibility Barrier
Discover why visibility, not marketing, holds overachievers back, and how to be seen without risking burnout.
Episode 031 – When The Inner Critic Sounds Like Wisdom
What if your most strategic-sounding decisions are actually being made by fear? Discover how the inner critic disguises itself as your best thinking.
Transcript
This is the Overachievers Podcast for people who want success without the burnout. You’re very good at what you do. The people who’ve worked with you, they know it. So here’s a question you may never have asked yourself. How many people beyond them know it? And whose job do you think it is to tell them? Welcome to the Overachievers Podcast with Keith Blakemore-Noble. Because success shouldn’t cost everything. Hello, welcome back. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers Coach.
In the previous episode, We looked at confidence and why it tends to turn up after you’ve acted rather than before. Ruth and her Monday morning meeting, for example, if you caught that episode. Today, I want to look at a different gap. Today in episode 41, we’re looking at the gap between how good your work is and how many people actually know about it. We are looking at the visibility gap. It’s the start of a topic that I want to spend a little bit of time on over the next few episodes, and that is being seen. And by that I mean something fairly ordinary: whether the people who could use what you do have any way of knowing that you exist. And I want to start off with a question that sounds simple.
Why do so many capable people expect the quality of their work to take care of the rest? And before we get into all of this, if you haven’t already, please do follow or subscribe on whatever platform you’re listening to this. It’s the easiest way to make sure that all the future episodes find you rather than the other way around. Let’s start a long way back. Think about how recognition worked for the first 20 or so years of your life. You did the homework, you handed it in, someone marked it. You sat the exam and someone whose job it was to read every word you’d written. The result came back with a number on it. A report went home and if you’d done well, the people who mattered found out and you never had to say a thing.
University, if you went there, it worked the same way. Your work was submitted, it was assessed, and it was graded. And hey, in your first job, there was usually a manager, an appraisal, a review. For 20 years, give or take, there was always someone whose job it was to find your work and to market it, which means that Without anyone ever teaching you it, you learned a rule. Do the work well, the work will be found. And for a long time, that rule was true. Then at some point, the arrangement changed. Maybe you started your own business, maybe you became a specialist, or maybe you moved into senior work where nobody checks your homework anymore.
Maybe you even changed the field altogether. I know I certainly did. Whatever the route, you arrived somewhere where there’s no one to mark your work. No one is assigned to read your work and report back on it to the wider world. Even inside an organisation where someone still reviews what you do, their brief is now to assess the work rather than to tell anyone about the work. So here’s the shift that nobody announces. The marker leaves the room, but nobody tells you that they’ve gone. And from that point on, your work stays exactly as known as you make it.
It can keep getting better year after year after year and stay precisely as known as it was the day the marker left. That, my friend, that is the visibility gap. The distance between how good your work is and how known it is. And the strange part is how many very capable people are still waiting for the first to close the second. I mean, let me tell you about Priya. The shape here could well sound, feel familiar. Priya is a specialist consultant. She’d been doing work for 15 years or so, I believe.
Her area is a fairly narrow corner of regulation that most people have never heard of and an area that the business who need it could not operate without. Every client she ever had came to her by referral. Every one of them rates her highly. Ask them and they’ll tell you she is the best they have worked with, and they mean it. She’s never really had to look for work. A finance director would mention her to a counterpart in another firm, an operations manager would move companies and bring her along, her name travelled from one satisfied client to the next to the next, and the work kept arriving. And if you asked her about it, She would have said she lets the work speak for itself. She’d have said it with a certain pride too, because she watched plenty of people in her field talk a great deal more than they delivered, and she had no wish to be any one of those.
Then, over a couple of years, things began to thin out. Her work was as good as it had ever been, But the people around it, they were changing. The operations director who’d sent her half a dozen clients retired. Another long-standing contact moved into a role where he no longer met the kind of business that she works with. A third one left the industry altogether. Nothing dramatic, nothing drastic, just the phone simply rang a little less. Didn’t feel dramatic until something happened that made it clear. A prospective client was given her name.
It was a good fit, exactly the sort of work that Priya does best. So, as anyone would, they looked her up. What did they find? A 2-line profile, a job title, and nothing at all that Priya had ever said, written, or thought in her own name. no view of her out on the field, no sign of how she approaches a problem. 15 years of expertise, and from the outside, almost no trace. So obviously they went with someone else, someone whose thinking they could actually see when they searched them. And Priya only found this out by chance sometime later. What stayed with her afterwards was a realisation.
About the phrase that she had been so proud of. For 15 years, a handful of people had been doing the speaking on her work’s behalf, and she had mistaken their voices for the work’s own voice. She had markers all along. It’s, as it turned out, several of them. They just never had the title. And as each of them moved on, Nobody was assigned to take their place. She had assumed the work would keep traveling on its own when in fact it had been carried every step of the way. Let’s pause here because I would like to invite you to try something.
Imagine for a moment someone who has never heard of you, And imagine that they are handed your name. Now, you’re a good fit. They’re a good fit. They’re the kind of person you’d most like to work with or work for. They’ve been handed your name and they go and look. They search you on the internet. What do they find? And whatever they do find, How much did you put there yourself? Here’s another one. If you found that first one easy to answer, here’s another question.
Who has been carrying your name so far? The people who mention you, people who recommend you, the people who put you forward. Who are they? And more importantly, Where will each of them be in 5 years’ time? So let’s, let’s, excuse me, let’s give a name to what’s going on here because there are 2 quite different positions and from inside, yeah, they are really hard to tell apart. The first is waiting to be noticed and the second is choosing to be visible. Before we go any further, I want to be clear about something. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting your work to speak for itself. It’s a rather decent instinct, actually. It comes from a respect for the work and usually from a healthy dislike of people who, who are all talk and fail to deliver. We all know those sorts of people, right? Priya’s instinct to let her work speak for itself was in principle a good one.
The trouble is what the instinct takes for granted. Waiting to be noticed rests on the idea that somebody somewhere still has the job of finding you. It hands the task of being known to other people. The clients who recommend you, the manager who puts your name forward, the colleague who mentions you in the right meeting. And while those people are still around, well, it works well. What makes it so hard to spot is that from the inside, waiting to be noticed feels exactly like getting on with the work. I mean, Priya was never just sitting waiting by the phone. She was busy.
She was fully booked and doing excellent things for the people who valued her. If you had suggested she was waiting for anything, she’d look at you as though you’d lost the plot. Choosing to be visible, that starts from a different place. It accepts that the job of being found passed over to you the day the marker left the room, whether anyone told you or not. And it treats that as a decision that you make on purpose rather than something you hope other people will keep doing on your behalf. Choosing to be visible, hey, it can be very small, a few sentences in your own name about something you’ve noticed in your field or a view offered somewhere where the people who might need you could come across it. What makes it a choice is that you made it rather than leaving it to whoever happens to be passing your name around. There’s a simple way to see which of these 2 approaches you’re taking.
Think back to the last time somebody new found out about your work. Who made that happen? How did they find out about you? If the answer is almost always someone else, a referral, a recommendation, someone putting you forward, then however busy you are, you, my friend, are waiting. Now, you can wait very successfully for a long time, right up until the point at which the people that you are relying on Move on. Which brings us to the question underneath all of this: why do capable people expect their work to close the gap on its own? Why? I think there are 4 reasons and they all stack upon each other. The first is when the rule was learned. You picked it up young and then it was confirmed over and over for the best part of your first 20 years. Every exam, every report, every review all said the same thing: a rule rewarded that consistency. And a rule that rewards that consistency stops looking like a rule and starts looking like just how the world works.
The second reason, and this can be a little uncomfortable, the rule worked best for the people who were best at the work. If you were good at school, the marking system served you beautifully. The better your work, the more reliable— the more reliably it was found and rewarded. Makes sense, right? So the people with the strongest work tend to hold the strongest belief that the work gets found. The very competence that makes them worth finding is what persuaded them that they’d never need to help anyone find them. Hmm. The third is that the rule looks like a virtue. Letting the work speak for itself, that sounds modest, that’s modesty.
It sounds like integrity. And to a lot of people, putting yourself forward, it sounds like something that less able people do to make up for the work, which is why the rule ends up guarded by your values. And that’s about being protected by your values. It’s about the best protection that any belief could possibly have. Questioning it feels like questioning your own decency. The fourth one, the fourth reason, timing. The cost of the visibility gap arrives late and it arrives invisibly. Referrals, they thin out slowly, and the people who looked for you and found nothing, hey, they never tell you.
Nobody sends a note saying, hey, I searched for you, I only found 2 lines, so I went somewhere else. Priya only heard by accident. Most people never hear at all. So the evidence that the rule has stopped working It’s exactly the evidence that you are least likely to see. The rule looks intact right up until the people who’ve been carrying your name have moved on, and then by then that visibility gap has been growing for years. So hey, what do you do with all this? Well, this is where it should be easy to reach for a plan or a posting schedule. But I would rather offer a few shifts in how you see it instead, instead of just giving you yet another posting schedule, yet another social media plan. What I’d like to suggest instead is start by noticing whose job you’ve assumed it is.
Just that, just that. The next time you catch yourself thinking, the right people will hear about my work eventually, Ask who exactly you’re expecting will tell the right people about your work. When you’ve done that, count the carriers. Name the handful of people who have carried your name in recent years. Most people find the list is shorter than they expect and a lot more fragile because, hey, people retire, people change roles, people change industries. Now, none of that is a reflection on you. None of that’s a reflection on you, but it does affect you, and it affects whether or not you get found. Notice how little it takes for the job to change hands.
Priya didn’t need to become someone else or turn into one of the people she’d always found a bit much, because what was missing was simply anything at all in her own name. The step from nothing to something is the one that matters most, and it is usually far smaller than people think. And hey, last of all, go easy on yourself about how you got here. I mean, nobody told you that the marker had left. You followed a rule that was true for a couple of decades, 2 decades of that rule being true, and then suddenly the marker left. Nobody told you. The gap is simply what happens when a rule outlives the arrangements that made it. Seeing the gap, seeing that the gap is yours to close, that’s a very different thing from blaming yourself for not closing it sooner.
You didn’t notice it sooner. That’s all right. Notice it now. And celebrate the fact that you can notice it and you can start to work to close that gap. Of course, once you see that the job is yours, there is an obvious question. If closing the gap can be that small, why does putting your hand up feel so uncomfortable for so many people? That is where we are going in the next episode. Why being seen feels risky. We’re going to look at what is actually at stake when you put your hand up and why it’s rarely the work that’s at stake.
Meanwhile, I’m going to leave you with a question. Think about the people who know how good your work is. How many of them found out because you told them and how many found out because somebody else told them? That’s something to ponder on and think about over the next few days. If any of this feels familiar, it really would help me a great deal if you leave a review or a rating wherever you are catching this episode. Hey, that’s how other people find the show, which is rather fitting for this episode. It also lets me know which episodes work, so I know the sorts of things you’re looking for. Also, please do share it with somebody whose work deserves to be far better known than it is. I bet you’ve probably got somebody in mind already.
You’re thinking, I know exactly who needs to listen to this. Pass it to them, help them out. And if you haven’t already, hit follow or subscribe so that you are here to join me for every episode. Talking of every episode, head over to KeithBN.link/TOP You’ll find all of the episodes, find this episode, you’ll find the show notes along with some additional resources. I am Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers Coach, and I will be your guide as we explore a healthier way to succeed.
