She Wanted That Promotion. Losing It Saved Her Sanity.
The promotion she'd been furious to lose turned out to be the best thing that didn't happen to her.
A client of mine was passed over for a promotion, and she was angry about it for the better part of a year.
Not a quiet, simmering kind of angry.
The real thing.
Raging even!
She'd done the work, cleared the bar, watched the role go elsewhere, and she spent months seriously deciding whether to stay where she was at all.
When we first talked about it, leaving felt less like an option than a foregone conclusion she just hadn't acted on yet.
I want to tell you where she landed, because it is not where either of us expected.
The Verdict She Heard
When you're passed over, the mind does something fast and almost involuntary: it reads the decision as a verdict on your worth.
That's what she heard. Not "the timing wasn't right," not "the structure didn't allow it", but they don't value me.
Cue to painfully plucked eyebrows narrowing.
Every subsequent slight at work slotted neatly into that story.
The promotion hadn't just not happened.
For her, it painfully metastasised into proof of something she'd half-suspected all along, that the place couldn't see what she actually brought.
And here's the thing about that reading: from the inside, it's airtight.
There's no obvious evidence against it, because the evidence that would contradict it hasn't happened yet.
What the Year Showed Her
What she couldn't see, in the heat of being passed over, was what the senior role would have cost her.
As the life of her now more senior peer bore out, she saw that it cost.
It would have taken more of her, more hours, more responsibility, more of the kind of pressure that fills the edges of a week until there are no edges left.
And it was precisely in those edges, the time she still had because the bigger job hadn't swallowed it, that something quietly came back to life for her.
She reconnected with the part of her work she'd loved first and drifted from, the part that had nothing to do with titles and everything to do with why she'd chosen this field in the first place.
It re-energised her in a way no promotion had in years.
She found herself, to her own surprise, enjoying focusing on the detail in her field, and even her colleagues again.
Remember, she was no longer presumptively taking on responsibility for managing them.
Happy days!
After all, they were now more 'peer-adjacent' than they'd been just a few months earlier.
A year on, she said something I think about often: she was glad she hadn't got it.
She wasn't making the best of a loss in a 'grin and bear it' way.
She was genuinely glad.
The role would have consumed the very time and energy that had given her back the thing she most wanted.
Why This Is So Easy to Get Wrong from the Inside
None of this means being passed over is secretly always a gift. I'm not a Pollyanna and it's not.
Sometimes it's just a loss, and sometimes it's genuinely unfair.
But the reading of it; the instant verdict that a setback is proof of your diminishment is rarely the whole truth.
It's almost never visible as a misreading while you're inside it.
The relief, the opening for something else, the thing the loss made room for: those arrive later, and only if you keep enough of the bigger picture in view to notice them.
She did the harder thing.
She stayed angry for a while. After all, that part was honest and earned, but she didn't let the anger write the whole story before the rest of it had happened.
And the rest of it turned out to be the part of the story she'd have hated to miss.
If you've been passed over for something you'd worked for, and you're carrying the verdict it seemed to hand you, my free Women in Tech Promotion Playbook is the practical version of what I work on with women in exactly that spot.
How senior women get past being doubted, position themselves with the people who decide promotions, and stop waiting to be noticed for work that should speak for itself.
I also write about this kind of thing weekly in my newsletter (usually before I've worked out the tidy version).
If this resonated, I write about moments like this every week, the ones senior women in STEM recognise immediately and hadn't quite named yet.
Real stories, fresh client insights, and the conversation most people around you aren't having, or sharing.
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Welcome to my Blog
I'm Dr Suzanne Doyle‑Morris and I support professional women working in STEM.
Whether you’re seeking your next promotion, aiming for leadership, or simply looking to make your mark, this blog is created for you.
It's written for the ambitious woman in STEM ready to advance and succeed on her own terms.
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The Women in Tech Promotion Playbook
Your roadmap to advancement with balance.
The Women in Tech Promotion Playbook is a practical, evidence-based guide.
It's designed solely for ambitious women in STEM who want to advance their careers without burning out.
Drawing on over 25 years of coaching, research and consultancy, I outline five strategic steps that help women move from being overworked and under-recognised to confident, visible leaders.
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The Women in Tech Promotion Playbook
Your roadmap to advancement with balance
The Women in Tech Promotion Playbook is a practical, evidence-based guide designed for ambitious women in STEM who want to advance their careers without burning out. Drawing on over 25 years of coaching and research, I outline five strategic steps that help women move from being overworked and under recognised to confident, visible leaders.
