A Story About Learning to Recognise Your Own Value — and Letting It Be Seen
Can I coach myself into being seen? Yes — because being seen starts with seeing yourself clearly, and that is something you can learn to do without waiting for anyone else to do it for you. You ask yourself the questions that reveal your real value, you find your own answers, and you act on what you learn.
Let me tell you a story about a woman who spent her career helping other people be recognised, and had never once turned the same skill on herself.
Ella is a character I created — her situation will be familiar to anyone who can see everyone’s value but their own.
The Woman Who Saw Everyone but Herself
Ella was forty-four, an HR specialist, and remarkably good at seeing what people were worth.
It was the heart of her work. She could sit across from someone in a development review and watch their real value surface — the strength they’d been underplaying, the contribution they’d never thought to mention, the thing they were genuinely brilliant at and had filed under “just my job.” She had a gift for it. People left her office standing a little taller, seeing themselves a little more clearly, because Ella had shown them something true about their own work that they’d been unable to see alone.
And in fifteen years of doing that for others, she had never once done it for herself.
Because Ella, too, had a role she was ready for — a more senior, strategic position where she could shape how the whole organisation developed its people, not just support it. She knew, in an abstract way, that she’d be good at it. But when she thought about making the case for herself, she froze. The clarity she brought to everyone else’s value simply wasn’t there when she turned to her own. She could see, in an instant, why a nervous colleague deserved recognition. She could see nothing at all when she looked at herself — just a fog of “I’m not sure I’m ready” and “who am I to say.”
She’d started to believe she needed someone else to do for her what she did for everyone else — a mentor, a champion, someone to sit her down and show her her own worth. What she hadn’t realised was that she already had the entire skill. She’d just never pointed it inward.
The Skill She’d Never Turned Around
The shift came on an ordinary evening, preparing for a development review with a member of her team — a talented woman who, Ella could see plainly, was underselling herself badly.
Ella wrote out the questions she’d ask her the next day. The questions she always asked, the ones that drew a person’s real value into the light. When did you solve a problem nobody had asked you to solve? What valuable thing do you do that you’ve never named as valuable? What’s the thing you care about most, underneath the day-to-day?
And sitting there, pen in hand, she stopped. Because she’d written, without thinking, the exact set of questions that would work for anyone — and it had genuinely never occurred to her, in fifteen years, to sit down and answer them herself.
So she did. Slowly, a little awkwardly, feeling faintly ridiculous, she turned each question on herself and made herself answer honestly — the way she’d never let a person in her office off with a vague reply.
When did I solve a problem nobody asked me to solve? The restructure two years ago, where she’d quietly redesigned how three teams worked together, prevented a wave of resignations nobody had even seen coming, and let it be recorded as “a smooth transition.”
What valuable thing do I do that I’ve never named? This — exactly this — seeing people’s worth and giving it back to them, which she’d always thought of as being nice rather than as a rare professional skill.
What do I care about most, underneath it all? That no one should spend their working life with their value unseen, the way she was, at that very moment, doing to herself.
By the end, she was looking at three stories she’d never told — and she’d assembled them for herself, with her own questions, exactly as she’d have done for anyone lucky enough to sit across from her.
What Ella Was Actually Doing
She didn’t have a name for it that evening. 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.
That is precisely what Ella had done. She hadn’t waited for a mentor or a champion. She’d taken the skill she used on everyone else — the honest question, the refusal to accept the vague first answer, the drawing of real value into the light — and she’d turned it on herself. The champion she’d been waiting for turned out to be a skill she already had.
And look at what it produced: not a pep talk, not forced confidence, but three true stories. A success she’d let be filed as something smaller. A failure — the failure of never naming her own worth, the very thing she’d spent a career helping others avoid. And a passion that turned out to be the reason she was so good at seeing everyone else: she couldn’t bear a person’s value going unseen. How she thinks, what she’s learnt, what drives her. The exact things that let a room finally recognise you — assembled by her own hand, from her own questions.
Ella already had everything she needed to be seen. She’d simply never thought to look.
Where This Skill Comes From, and Where It Goes
What Ella turned on herself that evening is the practice underneath everything at School of WorkLife. And it doesn’t begin with recognition, or with any single professional challenge. It begins with three deeper questions — the ones beneath all the others.
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 everything else grows from — the cornerstones of every kind of WorkLife challenge. Being recognised for your value is one of them. But the practice is the same practice, wherever you turn it: you ask, you answer honestly, you act.
And here is the part that completes Ella’s story — and points to where this work always leads. Once she’d recognised her own value, she went into that development review the next day and did what she’d always done for others, but differently now: not as someone performing a professional service, but as someone who knew, from the inside, what it costs to have your value unseen, and what it gives to have it named at last.
And then she did the thing she’d been unable to do for fifteen years: she made her own case. She put herself forward for the senior role, and told her three stories plainly: the restructure she’d quietly pulled off, the lesson of a career spent naming everyone’s worth but her own, and the reason she was so good at seeing people in the first place. The people deciding didn’t have to imagine whether she understood how to develop an organisation’s talent. She showed them, in three true stories, that she’d been doing it all along.
She got the role. And in it, she built something that outlasted her own recognition: she taught the people who worked for her to do what she’d learned to do — to turn the questions on themselves, to see their own value, and then to draw it out in others. She’d become, for a whole team, exactly what she’d once believed she needed someone else to be for her.
That is where being seen finally leads, and it isn’t only for people whose job is developing others. Once you’ve learned to recognise your own value, you can’t help but see it in the people around you — the colleague underselling themselves, the friend who calls their real gift “just luck.” You become, for them, what you’d once hoped someone would be for you. You learn to see yourself. And then you see everyone.
Can You Coach Yourself Into Being Seen? What Ella’s Story Shows
Being seen starts with seeing yourself. You don’t need to wait for a champion to reveal your value. The clarity you’d want from them is something you can learn to bring to your own work.
You may already have the skill. Ella could see everyone’s worth but her own — until she turned her own questions inward. The thing you do for others, you can do for yourself.
Ask, answer honestly, act. That’s self-coaching. The honest question, the refusal of the vague first answer, the true story underneath — and then doing something with what you find.
It leads outward. Recognising your own value is where it starts. Helping others recognise theirs is where it goes — and you do it best once you’ve done it for yourself.
Your three stories hold the whole of it. A success, a failure, a passion — drawn out by your own questions, assembled by your own hand. They are how you’re seen, and you don’t need anyone’s permission to find them.
You Already Have What It Takes to Be Seen
Everything Ella needed, she’d had all along — the skill, the questions, the value waiting to be named. She’d spent fifteen years giving other people the clarity she’d never turned on herself. The success she’d let be filed as something smaller. The failure of leaving her own worth unseen. The passion that was the reason she saw so clearly in the first place.
Yours are there in the same way — and so, most likely, is the skill to find them, whether or not you’ve ever thought to point it at yourself.
Continue the Work
And if you want to go deeper — recognising your three stories and the value inside each; giving that value a frame that fits, so others can finally see it; and turning the same recognition outward, to draw out the value in the people around you — that is what my new 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, placed in your hands, to work through in your own space and time.
GET THE RECOGNITION: Professional Self-Coaching for Being Seen for the Value You Create — Tell the Three Stories That Reveal the Strategic Value Hidden Inside Your Everyday Work — Make Visible What You’ve Been Doing All Along, So the Right Opportunities Can Find You
Work With Me: Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships.
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