Hi Brooke,

I was reading your answer to a woman here regarding constructive feedback and the example you used from your personal experience about how your criticism was harsh towards your contractors work because it was clouded by the thought that they were charging too much and how there probably wasn’t much the contractor could have done to change your feedback.

I feel like I’m in a similar situation with my boss. After 3 years of working with him I feel like no matter what I do, he will never trust me. I was promoted to my job title by someone else, but was moved to his team later, and in so many words at my last performance review he told me in a nice way that it’s not that I’m not doing a great job, but I’ll never grow at the company because everyone else with my job title have more experience, education and are older by like 10-20 years.

Ultimately I want to start my own business, but decided to do that on the side this year so that I can take the financial pressure off being that I’m the breadwinner and have kids and would need to uproot our life and move somewhere else if I were to quit but not have income coming in.

Being that this will be my last year at my job, I set my impossible goal this year as getting promoted to director (a level above my boss) because I literally do think that’s impossible and I think it’s such a great opportunity to blow up self limiting beliefs in this last year of this work chapter of my life.

So my question is what thoughts can I change?

My parents have an insanely great work ethic and are religious, so they raised me to always to take the work given to me with a smile on my face, never complain and exceed expectations in everything and on time. Just keep putting value out into the world and God will bless you with the opportunities and the income. And I actually do really still believe that.

I genuinely feel like I have done this and always over deliver. But my results while good, have not really been mind blowing. I think my results have been very brick by brick. My boss has grown to trust me more over the years, yes it’s definitely better than what we started out with, but not really in any significant way. and I’ve definitely seen others breeze by and get promoted way faster.

I guess my question is – is showing up and being positive and over delivering in value and trusting everything else will work out the only thing? or is there more to it?

I got a little discouraged today because a well meaning coworker came up to me and told me that my boss is taking advantage of me and makes me do all this work all the time but will never promote me or give me opportunities to grow in my career. And while I don’t like to look at it that way he was describing it… I can’t help but feel like my results do kind of match what my coworker is saying.

Thanks! 🙂