A personality test can tell you how you think. It rarely tells you where your value actually lies. For professionals weighing a promotion, a change, or simply feeling overlooked, that distinction matters more than it first appears.

By mid-career, most professionals are not short of self-awareness. What they are short of is clarity, specifically the kind of clarity that comes from having someone look at the whole picture with them and help bring order to what can feel like an overwhelming amount of noise. That is my job, and it is one I take seriously.

People still want to read a human being on the page. They want to sense a voice, a perspective, and evidence that someone has thought carefully about their own story. That is a quality that cannot be automated.

You have built genuine capability and it is not being recognised at the level it deserves. You are showing up well in most situations but something is inconsistent, and you cannot quite put your finger on what. You are capable of more and you sense it, but without the language or the framework to articulate it, the gap stays where it is.

A redundancy process does not simply remove a role. It disrupts identity, routine, visibility and momentum all at once. For many experienced professionals, the hardest part is not the paperwork or even the job search. It is the internal noise that follows. The research bears this out. Mental Health UK's 2025 Burnout Report found that fear of redundancy and job loss directly damages self-confidence in 44% of those affected.

I have been asking this question a lot lately, not even in interview settings, just in conversation. “What are your strengths?” And more often than not, people pause, hesitate, or give an answer that feels half-formed. That tells you something. It is not a lack of strengths. It is a lack of clarity on how to express them.