What Got You Here Won't Get You There. Working Harder Is Not the Answer.

She called on a Sunday afternoon.

I hadn’t heard from her in over a year. A former client, a woman who had been CFO of a major international retail group before leaving to build her own consulting firm. Senior leaders at the highest levels were her target clients, and she was very good at the work.

Her first words: “I’m so sorry to call you on a Sunday. I know you’re busy. This won’t take long.”

It took two hours.

She told me about the consulting firm she’d been building. The support team that was growing but not fast enough. The husband she felt she was neglecting. The sleep she wasn’t getting. The exercise she had stopped doing. How she had left corporate life to slow down, and somehow ended up working harder than she ever had before.

Somewhere in the middle of telling me all of this, she started quietly sobbing.

And apologized for that too.

When more effort stops being the answer.

I have heard versions of this story more times than I can count. In my one-on-one work with senior leaders and founders, I have analyzed thousands of hours of coaching sessions to understand why it keeps happening to the most capable women in the room.

Here is the pattern.

When high-achieving women feel the gap between where they are and where they want to be, they work harder. When they feel intimidated in a room, they over-prepare. When they feel behind, they take on more. When they feel uncertain, they say yes to everything and no to nothing.

The effort is real. The exhaustion is real. None of it closes the gap, because the gap was never about effort.

Marshall Goldsmith called this what got you here won’t get you there. He was writing about corporate leaders, but it applies just as hard to women who built something of their own. Because for founders, the stakes feel personal in a way they never quite did in corporate life. It is not a job. It is proof. Proof that leaving was the right call. Proof that she belongs in the rooms she is now in.

So when it feels hard, she works harder. And the proof stays just out of reach.

What the Sunday call was really about.

She told me, almost as an afterthought, that a major potential client had reached out to her unsolicited and asked for a proposal. A meeting in London. In a month.

A dream opportunity landing in her lap at her lowest point.

And she was terrified. Not of the work — she could do the work in her sleep. Terrified of the room. Of sitting across from people at her previous level, people who, in her mind, were the real thing. And she was still figuring out if she was.

I flew to New York the following weekend. We worked the whole Saturday and Sunday. Late on Saturday, I asked her to tell me about the most scared she had ever been in her career. Not the second-guess moments. The real ones, where she genuinely did not know if she could do it.

She talked for a long time.

When she finished, I asked one question: what did you do?

She looked at me, and smiled slightly. “I did it anyway.”

Every single time, scared and uncertain and holding herself to an impossible standard, she did it anyway. For thirty years. That is not someone who lacks courage. That is someone who forgot she had it.

We spent the rest of the weekend building the record. Not performing confidence. Not pretending the nerves were not there. Just naming what she had done and who she had been when she did it. The evidence was overwhelming. She had been so focused on the gap she had stopped counting the ground she had already covered.

The outcome.

She went to London.

They told her she was the clearest, not the cheapest, option.

She got the contract. Five years.

What this means for you.

Here is what working harder was actually costing her. Not just the sleep and the exercise and the time with her husband. Those were the symptoms.

The real cost was this: every hour spent over-preparing, over-delivering, over-explaining was an hour spent signaling, to herself and to everyone around her, that she was not sure she was enough. And rooms feel that. Clients feel that. The people across the table feel that, even when your preparation is flawless and your credentials are impeccable.

Effort is not presence. Preparation is not authority. Working harder is not the same as showing up fully as who you are.

The gap she was trying to close with effort was not a capability gap. It was an identity gap. She was running the operating system of someone who still needed to prove herself, in a role that required her to simply be herself.

When you catch yourself doing the same thing, stop. Not because the work does not matter, but because the question at this level is not how much you can do. It is who you are when you walk into the room.

You already have the evidence. Start counting it.

If this resonates, I write about executive presence, self-trust, and what it takes to lead as a woman founder. Follow me on LinkedIn and Substack.

Further reading: Why High-Achieving Founders Stop Trusting Themselves — Ulrika Gustafson

Based on real client work. Details composited and changed to protect confidentiality.