Your description of your niche isn’t setting you apart. People can’t refer to you because they can’t say in one sentence why you specifically are the person for the job.

Your firm's marketing team can rewrite your profile page. It cannot build your positioning -- that requires someone whose sole focus is your branding, not the firm's.

You network in rooms that are easy to gain entry into, but either the decision-makers are not there, or you hesitate and don’t approach.

Your firm can identify the right conferences. It will not teach you how to identify specific people to approach and workshop what to say.

If you didn’t approach those people at the conference, you’re not going to tell the firm and you’re not going to learn how to handle it differently next time.

You are so concerned with sounding “salesy,” that you hesitate to ask. When you learn how to ask in ways that center the client, you are viewed as authoritative and generous — which wins business.

Your firm can teach you pitch structure. It cannot help you find your own version of the ask, the one that sounds like you and leaves you beaming.

Learn how to protect and document your contributions in ways that are come across as strategic, not territorial.

Your firm has no incentive to teach you this. The people who could teach it are employed by those who benefit from the status quo. It’s a conflict.

Your firm's BD team is excellent at what it does. Client research, conference nominations, pitch decks. None of that is the problem.

The problem is the conversation happening right now about your trajectory -- it happens in a room you're not in. No internal resource will advise you about the partner claiming your credit, the leadership void no one is naming (but you can fill), how to give feedback to someone fragile and how to manage up.

That know-how lives outside the firm’s walls. So does the woman who figured out how to navigate it.