#69 | Does Your Promotion Strategy Lack Influence? Here’s How To Fix It Right NOW

Have you ever wondered why being overlooked at work can feel so much more painful than it “should”?

In this Wednesday science episode, Caroline breaks down the psychology and neuroscience behind feeling undervalued at work. From the real brain-based pain of being excluded to the attribution gap that causes invisible work to stay invisible, this episode explains why your reaction is not overdramatic, irrational, or a confidence problem. It is a deeply human response to a workplace dynamic many women know all too well.

You'll:

• Understand the science behind why being overlooked at work genuinely hurts and affects motivation 
• Learn what the attribution gap is and why hard work alone does not guarantee recognition 
•  Discover a simple, practical way to start making your contribution more visible without feeling performative 

Play this episode to understand what is really happening when you feel undervalued at work and learn the small shift that helps you take your agency back.

New episodes are released every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings.

Stuck, simmering, or onto something juicy? I want to hear it. Drop me a line at caroline@inspireyourgenius.com - I read them all.

And here is the Spotify Playlist to accompany UnShakeable Her.

This podcast explores resilience, imposter syndrome, and credibility while unpacking how boundaries, conflict, and feedback shape the way we handle pressure, influence, and guilt at work. It also looks at promotion, work-life balance, people pleasing, decision making, and visibility, offering honest conversations about how to grow professionally without losing your confidence or yourself.

Transcript

Caroline Esterson (00:01)
Welcome back to Wednesday, our science day. If Monday's story felt a bit close to home, good, that was actually the point.

Caroline Esterson (00:14)
Welcome to Unshakeable Her, where we believe that building your confidence and influence doesn't require a personality transplant, just a few resourceful little habits and someone in your corner. That someone is me. I'm Caroline Esterson. Let's get into it.

Caroline Esterson (00:31)
Before we get into it, here's what you're gonna get from today's episode. Firstly, peer-reviewed science that explains why being overlooked at work genuinely hurts and why your reaction to it is completely rational.

2.

clear understanding of the attribution gap, why invisible work stays invisible and why working harder just isn't the fix you need. And three, the language to talk about this stuff to yourself, to your manager, to the colleague who keeps saying, just put your hands up more.

We talk about science because just believing in yourself more is not a strategy.

We talk about the science because just believing in yourself more is simply not a strategy. even though many people I know are often told this by well-meaning partners, parents or friends. And yet when you understand what's

happening in your head and why that absolutely is a strategy. So Wednesday science, let's get into it.

There's a researcher called Naomi Eisenberger, a social neuroscientist at UCLA, and her team ran a study where they put people in a brain scanner and had them play a virtual bull tossing game. Midway through, the other players stopped including some people. Now, it was just a game, just pixels on a screen, but the...

But what was interesting is the brain lit up in the same region that processes physical pain.

So what does this tell you? Being left out or overlooked, being passed over, being invisible, registers in the brain as a threat, not metaphorically, neurologically. So when Frankie sat in that all hands meeting, watching Tom take credit and felt that horrible hollow, what is even the point feeling? Her nervous system was responding to a real threat signal. That was human.

Recognition being seen for what you do triggers dopamine and oxytocin. These are the same chemicals involved in reward, bonding and motivation. So when you feel consistently undervalued, you're essentially running on a recognition deficit. Your brain is waiting for the signal that your effort matters and it's just not forthcoming.

Over time, that affects your motivation, focus and willingness to go above and beyond. It's no wonder. You might start to wonder why you even bother. That's not you being negative. That's your brain doing a completely rational cost benefit analysis. The effort is high and the reward signal is absolute. The effort is high, the reward signal is absent. Recalibrate, recalibrate.

And here's where it gets interesting and possibly a bit uncomfortable. Because when the recognition doesn't come, your brain doesn't just feel sad about it, it responds to it.

There's a psychological phenomenon called reactance. The brain's pushback when it feels its sense of worth or autonomy is being threatened. And the way it shows up in adults who feel chronically undervalued isn't rage or confrontation. It's withdrawal, quiet, incremental, completely understandable withdrawal.

The idea you would have previously pitched in a meeting? You sit on it. Why put it out there when nobody's paying attention anyway? The thing you used to volunteer for because you were good at it and you knew it? You let someone else pick it up.

extra mile you used to run automatically because you cared, because your standards wouldn't let you not, you stop at the finish line. It's the adult professional, completely plausible deniability version of that child who stops trying in class because trying and being ignored feels worse than not trying at all. If my effort isn't being seen anyway, why am I bothering?

And here's the cruel twist that makes this a spiral rather than just a reaction.

Nobody around you sees the withdrawal as a response to feeling undervalued. They just see someone who seems less engaged, less committed, less like the person they used to rely on, which means the likelihood of you getting recognition gets even further away, which deepens your withdrawal. Can you see what's going on here? And it makes the visibility problem that you had even worse. And the person who started this whole cycle, the capable, committed

a genuinely excellent person who just wanted to be seen doing good work becomes less visible in exactly the way that matters most. It's a classic spiral. And let's dig into this a little further. There's a cognitive bias called the fundamental attribution error. In short, people tend to overestimate their own contributions to shared work and underestimate others.

There's a cognitive bias.

And before we go any further, this isn't about bad intentions. It's important to say that clearly because what makes us feel unseen doesn't necessarily make someone else a villain. The fundamental attribution error isn't malice, it's just how brains conserve energy. We have the most access, of course, we do to our own efforts. We see ourselves preparing, worrying, fixing things behind the scenes at nine o'clock at night, carrying the mental load of a project long before it enters the meeting room.

We don't see that in our colleagues. We can't. Most of the time we haven't even got time to guess at what our colleagues are doing.

So Tom or whoever your Tom is, isn't the villain. He genuinely might believe he drove that project forward. His brain has given him full access to his contribution and partial access to yours. That's just a brain doing what brains do. The issue is that invisible work stays invisible unless someone makes it visible. And the research is clear. People who advocate for their own work, who name what they've done and why it matters calmly and specifically,

consistently rated as more competent and more promotable because the work was registered.

You could be the most capable person in the building. You could be the most capable person in the building. We say this time and time again. If you're not legible, if your contribution isn't visible to the people making decisions, it will be attributed to someone else or to the ether. And it's not fair, but it's not going away. And here's something I wish someone had told me much earlier, because the natural response to this moment, and I'm not judging anyone here because I've actually been there.

is to seethe in silence. And seething in silence has a way of curdling. It becomes bitchiness with a trusted colleague over coffee. It becomes a running commentary in your own head or a low-level resentment that makes you feel terrible and changes absolutely nothing. None of that is helpful and it doesn't move you forward. The only person it's really hurting is you.

The moment that actually changes thing, the moment agency arrives is the moment that you're prepared to step into the void and say something, not confrontationally or accusationally. But if you think about, but if you think about Frankie and Tom, it might look something like this. Hey Tom, I noticed you didn't mention my role in the project and I see things a little differently. I'm wondering if I haven't made my contribution clear enough. Can we talk?

it. Non-combative, just calm curiosity. You're not accusing him of anything, you're giving him the information his brain didn't have and you're giving yourself the agency that seething in silence never could. That is your two millimeter move hiding inside what feels like an impossible conversation and I promise you, I really do, the conversation is almost never as hard as the silence that preceded it.

Let's do a quick detour to the segment I love because I want to name this clearly. Not all invisibility is a personal visibility problem.

Some organizations have performance systems that structurally undercount certain types of work. Things like coordination on boarding, institutional memory, that's a big E, and emotional labor. The things that make everything run smoothly and nobody measures. Some managers are better at advocating for certain team members than others. And those patterns aren't random.

Feeling undervalued is sometimes about a skill you can develop and sometimes it's about a system that wasn't built with you in mind. Both can be true at the same time and we need to be honest about both because the solution to the first is a personal strategy and the solution to the second is either escalation, advocacy or exit. And here's the thing, once you see the structural side of this and you're not just navigating it for yourself, you're positioned to influence it.

You can be the person to call it out and the person who built something better. That's most more thing that's cultural change and it can start with you. We'll get into how to tell the difference on Friday.

So let's get into action

as you know, I love those who act.

It's no good patting yourself on the back for understanding something. Understanding is merely the starting point. It's not your finish line. You need to take action to make a difference.

and we're here to make that as easy as possible. So the two millimeter difference for today is the shift from assuming your work is visible to actively making it visible.

not asking you to turn

that person

sees sees everyone into every email, just a tiny consistent consistency is key intentional practice of narrating your impact.

At the end of your next working day, before you close the laptop, write three bullets. What you move forward, what the impact was and who needs to know. You don't have to send it to anyone yet, just write

you. Two millimetres every week compounding.

And on Friday, three specific ways to take that further

without it feeling awkward, without anyone even noticing you've

Right, that's Wednesday. Your brain on being overlooked. It's not soft and it's not in your head. It's a real neurological and systemic reality and you deserve to understand what's happening to you. So Friday, we're bringing the energy. We've got a song that I think you'll be singing at yourself in the mirror by the weekend and three specific practical non-cringy little moves you can start this week.

Caroline Esterson (12:17)
That's it from me today on Unshakable Her. If something landed, share it with a woman in your world who needs to hear it. She probably won't say so. She'll just be really glad you did. I'm Caroline Esterson and you are completely entirely unshakable.

Caroline Esterson (12:38)
see you Friday.