I had a call last week with a client. Let's call her Salma.

Salma is in one of those leadership development programs, the kind a company puts its high-potential people into. Someone senior nominated her for it. She was picked out of a very large group. On paper, she is doing everything right.

Early in the call she told me the program had given her an assignment, and she was a little embarrassed about it. The assignment was simple. Write down where you want to be in one year. Three years. Five. Ten.

She opened the document. She stared at it for two evenings. She wrote nothing.

I asked her what happened when she tried.

And she said the strangest thing. She said, "I don't actually know. I have never had to decide this before."

Here is what I mean by that. Every role Salma has now, she got because someone noticed her and pulled her into it. A manager tapped her. A mentor moved her. A senior leader said "I think you're ready" and she was. For fifteen years, the next thing arrived because someone else decided she was ready for it.

So she got very, very good at being ready. At being the obvious person to pick.

And now a blank document is asking her to be the one who decides. And she genuinely does not know how, because she has never done it.

I said, "Salma. You are excellent at being chosen. That is a real skill, and it is most of why you are sitting where you are. But it is not the same skill as knowing what you want. And nobody is going to hand you that second one."

She got quiet. Then she said, "So I've kind of been waiting this whole time."

Yeah. She had.

Here is why I'm telling you this.

A lot of high-achieving leaders are running the Salma pattern and would never call it that. She is not passive. She is not unambitious. She is the opposite. She has been picked over and over precisely because she is excellent.

But somewhere along the way, being picked quietly became the plan. The next move always came from outside. So she optimized for the thing she could control, being ready, being impressive, being the obvious choice, and stopped doing the harder, quieter thing, which is deciding for herself what she actually wants and moving toward it without waiting for the tap on the shoulder.

And the tap slows down. It always does. The higher you go, the fewer people are above you to do the picking.

Salma has been ready for a long time. She has also been waiting, and she did not know it until a blank document sat open on her screen for two evenings.

/Ulrika