She Spent Three Years Waiting to Feel Ready. Coaching Taught Her She’d Been Ready the Whole Time

What was actually in the way — and what happened when she stopped waiting for permission she already had.

She framed it as a development question.

That was the first thing I noticed when we started working together. Every time she described why she hadn’t stepped into the VP role yet — why she’d held back from something that was genuinely available to her, that her organization had signaled clearly it wanted her to take — she framed it in terms of what she still needed to build.

What skills did she need to develop? What experiences was she missing? What gaps was she carrying that a more qualified person wouldn’t have?

The framing was so consistent and so reasonable-sounding that it took a few sessions for me to understand what was actually happening.

She wasn’t describing gaps. She was describing distance. The specific distance she had been maintaining between herself and the level of leadership she was capable of — and the way she had been making that distance feel like wisdom.

The Questions That Opened Things Up

In our second session, I asked her something different than she’d been asking herself.

“What if you’re already ready — and you’re not stepping forward for a reason that has nothing to do with readiness?”

She went quiet for a long time.

Not the quiet of someone who doesn’t have an answer. The quiet of someone encountering a question that reorganizes something. You can feel the difference.

What emerged over the following weeks was not a skills inventory. It was older and quieter than that — a story she’d been carrying about who gets to lead at that level. Who deserves it. Who belongs in those rooms. A belief, never explicitly examined, that had been quietly functioning as a gate for years.

It felt like humility from the inside. From the outside — from where I was sitting — it looked like an identity that hadn’t yet caught up to her capability.

The Distinction That Changed Everything

I want to be careful here, because this distinction matters:

The belief wasn’t that she couldn’t do the job. She knew she could do the job. Every piece of evidence in her career confirmed it. Her manager knew it. Her stakeholders knew it. Her peers knew it.

The belief was more subtle than competence. It was something closer to: people like me don’t just step into rooms like that. Not because they’re not qualified. Because the stepping itself, the confidence of claiming the space, of deciding you belong there before someone officially tells you that you do, requires a sense of identity that her experience had never fully built.

She had developed everything necessary to do the work of a VP. She hadn’t yet developed the identity of someone who inhabits that role as a natural extension of who they are.

That gap — between capability and the identity that permits you to claim it — is the thing I mean when I talk about the identity gap. It shows up consistently in the leaders I work with who are ready and waiting instead of ready and moving. And it responds to a specific kind of work that skills development alone can’t address.

What We Actually Worked On

We didn’t work on her presentation skills. We didn’t build a development plan or identify stretch assignments. We didn’t prepare her for behavioral interview questions or map out her executive communication style. We worked on her story.

Specifically: the story she’d been telling herself about who she was in relation to this level of leadership — where it came from, how long she’d been running it, and what it would mean to choose a different one.

That work is not dramatic. It doesn’t feel like a breakthrough when you’re in the middle of it. It feels more like a slow adjustment of something that’s been slightly off-center for a long time — a gradual reorientation that shows up first in small moments and then in larger ones.

She started raising her perspective in rooms where she’d previously deferred. Not because we’d practiced it — because she’d examined the belief that her perspective was less legitimate than the others in the room and found it wanting.

She started taking up more space in senior conversations. Not performing confidence, but showing up from a more settled sense of her own authority.

She stopped qualifying everything. Not because she’d learned a communication technique, but because the qualifications had been coming from a place she’d now looked at directly.

The Moment I Knew Something Had Shifted

About four months into our work together, she described a meeting she’d had with her senior leadership team.

A decision had come up that she had a strong opinion about — the kind of opinion she would historically have offered carefully, hedged, with a lot of “I might be wrong about this” framing. Instead, she’d stated it directly. With reasoning. With confidence. Without the apology of excessive qualification.

The response surprised her. Not because it was positive — because it was received as normal. As if this was how she operated, the way it had always been.

“I don’t think they noticed anything different,” she said. “But I felt completely different inside.”

That’s the work. The inside change that eventually becomes invisible from the outside — because the outside catches up and becomes consistent with who you actually are.

She stepped into the VP role four months later. Not because we’d finished some prescribed program, but because she had stopped organizing herself around a story that was no longer true — and the stepping felt natural in a way it hadn’t before.

In our final session, she said something I’ve thought about many times since:

“I kept waiting to feel ready. I didn’t realize I was waiting for permission I already had.”

Who This Is For

I’m not sharing this story because it’s dramatic. It isn’t, really. There’s no crisis, no single revelation, no moment where everything changed at once.

I’m sharing it because it describes something I’ve seen across clients in finance, technology, healthcare, consulting, and government — something that doesn’t have a clean name in most leadership development frameworks, and that I think costs capable people far more time than it should.

The pattern is: a genuinely ready leader, who has done the work, who has the evidence — who keeps not moving because something in their relationship to themselves hasn’t yet aligned with what their evidence suggests.

That gap is real. It’s also entirely closeable. And it doesn’t take three years.

What it takes is someone who can ask the right questions — not about what you’re missing, but about what’s in the way of what you already have.

If you’re reading this and something is resonating — if you’ve been in that waiting place longer than the evidence suggests you should be — I want you to hear something directly:

The permission you’re waiting for is yours to give. And you don’t have to find your way to that on your own.

Antoine E. Burrell, Sr. is a Senior Engineering Manager at Cloudera and the founder of Alpha Bravo Professional Coaching, a Co-Active coaching practice for technical and executive leaders. He works with leaders who are ready — and helps them stop waiting to claim it.

Ready to close the gap? Visit alphabravocoaching.com or connect on LinkedIn. First conversation is always free.