A Story About Turning Vague Advice Into Something You Can Actually Do
Can you coach yourself into being heard at work? Yes — and if you’re the kind of person who needs a problem properly specified before you can solve it, you may be better at it than you think. Coaching yourself is not mysterious. It is asking a precise question, refusing your own easy answer, and testing what you find in the real world.
Let me tell you a story about a developer who was handed a piece of advice he couldn’t use — and did the one thing he always does with a badly written spec.
Donovan is a character I created — his situation will be familiar to anyone who has been told to “be more visible” and had no idea what that actually meant.
The Feedback He Couldn’t Debug
Donovan was thirty-four, a developer, doing the kind of essential work that goes unnoticed. The team depended on him. Few of them knew how much.
He was the one who understood how the whole system fitted together — not just his part, but where the pieces met, where they strained, what would break six months after a decision that looked harmless today. His code was clean. His judgement was sound. And in the meetings where the product’s direction was set, his voice was missing.
At his review, his manager put it kindly, but not in a helpful, actionable way. The manager meant well; the advice just had no handle:
“You need more presence in those meetings, Donovan. You’ve got to speak up more. Be more visible. People should be hearing from you.”
Donovan nodded, said thank you, and left the room unsettled — not by the message, but by how little he could do with it.
Have more presence. It was the kind of instruction he would have rejected instantly if it had come to him as a technical spec. It described the desired output and gave no mechanism. “Be more visible” was not a step you could take. It was a result, with the whole of the actual work missing from the middle of it — the same as being handed a ticket that said make it faster with no indication of what was slow, or why, or where.
You cannot implement “have more presence.” He’d spent a career refusing to pretend otherwise about vague requirements.
So he took the feedback home and did to it what he’d do to any underspecified problem. He sat down at his kitchen table and started breaking it down.
Specifying the Problem
He wrote the vague instruction at the top of a page, the way he’d log a badly written ticket. Then, underneath, he did what he always did: he refused to accept it as stated, and started asking what it actually meant.
“Be more visible.” Visible how? Visible doing what?
His first answer was the easy one, and he knew it was easy even as he wrote it: speak more in meetings. Say more things. Raise your hand.
He looked at it the way he’d look at a fix that treats the symptom. It was wrong. He’d been in meetings where he spoke and it changed nothing — he’d said the true thing, been talked over, and watched the decision go the way it was always going. More talking wasn’t the fix. If it were, he’d have fixed it years ago.
So he asked the harder question — the real one, the one underneath.
When I do speak, why doesn’t it land?
And here, because he was doing this properly and not letting himself off, the honest answer surfaced. When he spoke, he handed the room a conclusion. This won’t scale. That’s the wrong database. We’ll regret this. A verdict, delivered flat, with all the reasoning that led to it left inside his own head. He gave them the output and withheld the logic — and a conclusion with no visible reasoning is the easiest thing in a room to nod at and move past.
He wasn’t invisible because he was quiet. He was invisible because he’d been shipping answers with no source code — and asking people to trust a black box.
That was a problem he could actually work on. It had a mechanism. He’d finally specified it.
Running It Down
Once the problem was specified properly, Donovan did what he always did with a real problem: he traced it back through the cases. When had this happened? When hadn’t it? What was different?
The times my judgement didn’t land — what did they have in common?
The architecture decision, two years back. He’d known it was wrong. He’d said so — flatly, technically, “this won’t hold” — and been overruled, and it had failed exactly as he’d predicted, and no one had connected the failure to his warning. It taught him something he’d filed and never used: a conclusion nobody can follow is, to everyone else, indistinguishable from a guess.
And the rare times it did land — what was different those times?
There’d been one. He’d stopped a bad decision once — not by being technical, but by walking the room through what it would actually do to the people using the thing, step by step, until they could see it too. They’d changed course. He’d dismissed it at the time as not really his kind of contribution. Now, tracing the cases, he saw it was the truest thing he did: he doesn’t just see that a decision is wrong. He can see who it lands on, and walk people to it.
And why does this even matter to me — enough to sit here on a Tuesday night working it out?
That one he answered fast, and it surprised him. Because a system built badly makes life harder for the people who rely on it every day — and those people are never in the room where it gets decided. Somewhere back, he’d decided someone in that room ought to be thinking about them.
Three cases traced. Three things he’d known and never articulated — a failure that taught him how he works, a success that showed him what he sees, and the reason he does any of it. Not advice from anyone. His own data, finally read properly.
What Donovan Was Actually Doing
He didn’t have a name for it. But it has one.
Self-coaching is the ability to guide yourself through every part of your WorkLife journey — through stable times and times of change and uncertainty. It is asking yourself the questions that bring clarity, finding your own answers, and acting on what you learn.
Look again at what he did at that table, because it is a method, not a mood — and it is one you probably already use, in whatever work you take seriously.
He refused the problem as stated. “Be more visible” was an unusable spec. Rather than pretend it was actionable, he broke it down until it named a real mechanism. That is the first move, and it’s the one people skip — they accept the vague instruction and then feel bad for not managing it.
He refused his own first answer. Speak more was the symptom-fix, and he knew it. The answer that mattered was the one underneath, and he made himself keep going until he reached it. The first answer is the rehearsed one. The second is the true one.
He tested it against the real cases. He didn’t theorise about himself. He ran it against the evidence — when it worked, when it didn’t, what was different — the way you’d isolate any bug. His conclusions were earned, not guessed.
That is the whole of self-coaching: a precise question, no acceptance of the easy answer, tested against real life. Donovan already had the temperament for it. So, in all likelihood, do you — everyone does, in the domain they take seriously. The move is turning it on yourself.
And notice what it produced. Not a personality transplant, and not “more presence.” Three stories — how he thinks, what he’s learnt, what drives him — which turned out to be the exact thing that had been missing when he spoke. He’d been shipping conclusions. Now he had the reasoning to ship with them.
The Next Meeting
A week later, a decision was forming that Donovan could see was wrong — the kind he’d normally have flagged flatly and watched sail past.
This time he didn’t ship the verdict. He shipped the reasoning with it.
“Before we lock this in — can I walk you through something? I’ve watched us make almost exactly this call before. Two years ago I said an approach wouldn’t hold, and I was right, but I said it as a flat ‘this won’t work’ and we did it anyway and it cost us months. So this time I want to actually show you what I’m seeing — here’s who this lands on, and here’s the point where it breaks.”
The room didn’t move on. It turned to him.
He wasn’t more senior that day, or louder. He was the same developer, with the same judgement he’d always had. He’d simply stopped handing the room a black box, and started showing his working.
Within a few months, Donovan wasn’t the quiet one they’d forgotten was in the room. He was in the meetings that mattered because his manager had put him there — the “more presence” the review had asked for, arrived at not by talking more, but by finally letting people see how he thought.
Where This Started, and Where It Goes
What Donovan turned on his own problem is the practice underneath everything at School of WorkLife. It begins with three questions, deeper than any single meeting.
Can I guide myself through this? That’s self-coaching: asking yourself the questions that bring clarity, finding your own answers, and acting on what you learn.
Can I choose my own direction? That’s self-directing: deciding where you’re going, rather than waiting to be steered.
Can I be someone worth following? That’s self-leadership: becoming, for yourself first, the person whose judgement you’d trust.
Those three are the ground the rest grows from. Being heard in a meeting is one application of them. The practice is the same, wherever you turn it.
Continue the Work
And if you want to turn it on exactly this — making your expertise into a voice a room listens to; finding the three stories that carry how you think, what you’ve learnt and what drives you; learning the moment to speak so your judgement shapes the decision instead of arriving after it — that is what my third Professional Self-Coaching resource is for. The thinking, the sequence, the questions and the frameworks a coach would bring to hours of one-to-one work, laid out to work through in your own space and time — the way Donovan worked through his, at his own kitchen table.
Get the Seat at the Table — Professional Self-Coaching for Strategic Influence Tell the Three Stories That Turn Your Expertise Into a Voice People Listen To
Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships.
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