You work harder than almost anyone else in the building, and you carry more than most people will ever recognise, so this is not a criticism, it is permission. The career you keep picturing, the one where people actually understand the weight of what you carry and pay and promote you accordingly, is not being withheld from you by your boss, your company, or bad timing. The biggest thing standing between you and that career is you. But guess what? That is actually the best news you could hear, because it means the whole thing is within your control and always has been.
There are four habits doing the damage to personal and executive assistants around the world, and none of them are about talent, because your talent was never in question. Fix these and watch what happens…
1. Stop describing your job like it’s no big deal
Listen to how you answer the next time someone asks what you do, because if it comes out as “I manage the diary, book the travel, sort the inbox,” you are selling yourself short without meaning to, and that is an easy thing to catch once you know to look for it. That is a task list, not your job. Your job is the judgement calls you make in seconds, the political situations you read and manage daily, the risk you carry on your executive’s behalf, and the decisions you make with half the picture under real pressure, and none of that comes across when you shrink it down to a list of chores. It is not your fault that nobody ever taught you another way to say it, but it is within your power to change it, starting with the very next time someone asks.
Start using language that actually matches the level you operate at, commercial language, senior language, the kind nobody is going to hand you but that you get to claim for yourself. The room around you will not catch up instantly when you do, and that is genuinely okay. Somebody has to move first, and you are more than capable of being that person.
Five things to try today:
- Rewrite one line of your professional bio using outcome language instead of task language, so instead of “manage the diary” you write “protect and optimise an executive’s time to maximise commercial output,” and notice how much more accurate that feels.
- Take one decision you made this week and write down what you actually weighed up to make it, because that thinking is the part nobody sees and the part that proves your value.
- Answer “so what do you actually do?” in one sentence that names business impact rather than your calendar, and practise it until it feels like second nature.
- Look at your LinkedIn headline with kind but honest eyes and ask whether it reads like a serious operator or an admin function, then give it the upgrade it deserves if it needs one.
- Cut “just” out of your vocabulary this week, because you did not just sort the offsite, you ran it, and you deserve to say so.
2. Stop treating the big stuff like it’s small
You have gotten so good at your job that the extraordinary now feels ordinary to you, and that is a lovely reflection of how skilled you are, even though it works against you at the same time. For example, organising an offsite is a serious undertaking with budget, logistics, stakeholders and reputational risk attached to it, and the fact that it sits comfortably within your remit does not make it small, it simply makes you good at handling big things.
Everything you run is a project, and thinking of it that way changes everything. Managing a person is a project, managing events is a project, managing relationships across a business is a project, and each one carries its own scope, stakeholders, risk and deadline, exactly like the projects your colleagues in other departments get promoted for leading. You get to call it that too, out loud, starting now.
Try this test: if someone in another department did something ‘normal’ to you and would think that it deserved recognition yet you treat it as just ‘part of the job’, that recognition gap usually is not modesty, it is you underpricing your own brilliance, and you are allowed to stop doing that.
Five things to try today:
- List everything you are currently running and relabel each one as a project, with its own scope and stakeholders.
- Take the last “small” thing you organised and map out everyone it actually touched, and let the size of that list surprise and delight you a little.
- Ask someone outside your team what they think your hardest task is, and notice how it compares to what you would have said about yourself.
- Keep a running log of every project you deliver, because you will need it for your next pay review, and future you will thank present you for writing it down.
- Take one task on your list this week and write it up as a proper project brief, with an objective, stakeholders, risks and a success measure.
3. Stop accepting “we don’t have any budget” as a final answer
“We don’t have any budget” does not mean there is no money, so please stop taking that at face value and be confident in knowing that there is a distinct and often huge difference. No company spends money without seeing a return on it, and that is simply how business works, not a judgement on you or your worth.
It is not your job to expect an automatic yes, but it is absolutely your job to become someone whose requests get taken seriously, because you are ambitious, proactive and driven to make things better, and that reputation is what genuinely moves people to say yes, far more than luck or timing ever will.
If you say no to opportunities before your boss has even had the chance to, you end up doing the job of blocking your own progress on their behalf, when really, asking is exactly what signals the kind of ambition that makes people want to invest in you.
Here is a number to carry with you: the average executive business coach charges between £35,000 and £80,000 a year to coach one executive, so £500 for a course or £400 for 12 months of professional membership with The Assistant Room is genuinely nothing set against that. If part of you has been telling yourself your company cannot afford it, that is probably less about reality and more about giving yourself permission not to ask, and you deserve to ask anyway.
Five things to try today:
- Build the business case before you ask, using one paragraph on what the investment gives back rather than just what it costs.
- Ask for the specific thing, with a number attached, instead of a vague “can I go on some training.”
- Find what your organisation actually spends on leadership development or coaching and keep it in your back pocket as your comparison point.
- If the answer is no, ask what would need to change for it to be a yes next time, and write the answer down with care.
- Make one ask this week that you would normally have talked yourself out of, and trust yourself to carry it through
You’ve got this
Nobody else is coming to move you out of your own way, and while that has always been on you, it is also the most empowering thing about all of this, because it means you already hold everything you need. The career you keep picturing is not waiting somewhere out there for permission to exist, it is simply waiting on you to stop blocking it, one honest shift at a time, and you are more than ready to do that.
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