There's a sentence I hear constantly, and it always arrives in the same shape.

I'd need to do a course first. I'd need a few more years in this before I could go for that. I'd need the qualification, the certification, the second language, the thing on paper.

And every time, I ask the same question back. Who asked you for that?

Usually there's a pause, because nobody did. She set the requirement herself, she set it higher than anyone else would have, and then she failed her own test in private and told nobody.

Self-disqualification doesn't sound like doubt

That's what makes it so hard to catch. It sounds like rigour, and it sounds like someone being sensible about standards, which is exactly the quality that got her promoted in the first place.

She doesn't say I'm not sure I could do it. She says I'd want to be properly prepared before I put myself forward, and everyone in the room nods, because that's a reasonable thing to say.

The trouble is that the standard keeps moving. She gets the qualification and finds a new one. She gets the years and decides she needs the years plus something else. There's no version of the requirement that ever gets met, because the requirement was never really about capability.

It's about permission, and she's waiting for someone to give her permission she has already been given.

What happens on the other side of the table

I can say this with more authority than most, because I've spent twenty-five years in HR across seven countries and I've sat on a lot of hiring panels.

Panels don't sit there auditing credentials line by line. They're trying to work out whether this person can hold the thing they're being handed, whether they'll be sound when it gets difficult, and whether they'll be honest when something goes wrong. The paperwork is a filter at the very start and then it stops mattering almost entirely.

I've watched panels appoint people who were missing the exact qualification a woman elsewhere had decided was non-negotiable for herself. Not because standards were low, but because the panel was asking a different question from the one she was asking.

And in twenty-five years I've never once seen a panel reject a woman for the reason she rejected herself. The reasons people don't get roles are almost always about fit, timing, or someone else being further along in the same conversation.

She's failing a test that isn't being administered.

A different woman again

A different woman again, and a different shape of the same thing.

She had been running something substantial for years, and she wanted out of it into something of her own. Every time we got close to what that might be, she'd produce a reason it was premature. She needed to understand the market better. She needed a proper plan. She needed to have thought it through more.

What she actually needed was to say out loud that she wanted it, which she hadn't done to a single person, including herself.

The research was real work, and it was also somewhere to put the wanting so that it didn't have to be admitted.

Freedom is not independence

Most women in this position tell me they want freedom. When I ask what that looks like, about half of them describe something quite different. They describe independence.

Freedom is about the shape of your time. Room to think, control over what your week contains, the ability to say no without it costing you something enormous.

Independence is about not being answerable. Nobody above you, nobody able to remove what you've built, nobody whose decision determines your standing.

Those two feel similar from the inside and they build completely different lives. If what you want is freedom, there are versions of employment that give it to you and versions of running your own thing that absolutely do not. If what you want is independence, no amount of flexibility inside someone else's structure will ever satisfy it, and you'll keep wondering why the good job with the great manager still isn't enough.

A lot of women spend years pursuing one while wanting the other, and the credentials conversation is often what that confusion looks like from the outside.

You're answering the wrong question

Underneath all of this is a question that gets asked far too often and does a lot of damage.

What do you want to do with your life.

It's an enormous question, it demands a permanent answer, and it invites you to disqualify yourself immediately.

Faced with a question that size, a capable woman does the sensible thing. She decides she isn't ready to answer it, and she goes and gets another credential while she waits to feel ready.

What is this next period for

The question I'd rather you asked is much smaller and considerably more useful.

What is this next period for?

Not your life. This period, the next two or three years. Is it for earning, is it for rebuilding, is it for visibility, is it for being available to people who need you right now, is it for finding out whether the thing you've been circling actually holds up.

That question can be answered this month. It doesn't require you to know who you'll be at sixty, and it produces a decision rather than a research project.

Once you've answered it, most of the credentials fall away by themselves, because you can see plainly which ones serve the period you're in and which ones were only ever a way of waiting.

Where that question gets asked properly

If you've been collecting reasons you're not ready, the useful work isn't more preparation.

It's answering that smaller question honestly with somebody who has no stake in what you decide. That's what a Locate Session is for. Ninety minutes, online, and you leave knowing what this next period is for and what's actually required to do it.

It's USD 300, with a short set of questions after you book so I've done the thinking before you sit down rather than during.

Book a Locate Session here.