• 9 to 5 Dilemma: PR + Promotions.

• Ok, So You Freaked Out.

• Upcoming Events & Releases.

• Dollyism.

First of all, let’s celebrate your promotion! You’ve worked hard to get here and that deserves a pause to acknowledge how far you’ve come!

I’m gonna hold your hand when I say this…

This is one of the toughest career transitions there is, friend.

Most people assume the hardest part is getting promoted. In reality, the harder part is what comes after: recalibrating how others see you when they’re still operating off an outdated version of your role and who you were.

I’ve watched this play out over and over again. Smart, capable people step into bigger roles and do what they’ve always done: work hard, be helpful, stay humble, deliver. And they find themselves in the same patterns they were in before the “change” and start blaming themselves for how others treat them. Ugh.

Here’s part of why that happens.

People love to compartmentalize and box us in. Not because they’re malicious (most of the time), but because humans rely on shortcuts to make sense of the world. Once someone learns “you = this role,” their brain stops actively updating the file unless something forces it to.

Layer in power dynamics, bias, relationship history, and organizational habits and suddenly that old version of you sticks around far longer than it should.

I was thinking about this a few weeks ago in a completely different context: the way people who knew you in high school sometimes talk to you like time stopped. No matter how much you’ve grown, changed, or evolved, they’re still referencing a snapshot from years ago.

Workplaces do the same thing, just with org charts instead of yearbooks.

But, unfortunately…

Performance alone doesn’t reposition you.

Doing excellent work is how you earn the promotion. But being seen in the role you now hold requires something different.

This is where career PR comes in, not in a flashy, self-promotional way, but in the same way any effective PR campaign actually works.

A good PR campaign doesn’t shout “LOOK AT ME”… it shoots signals over time to build trust.

It’s reinforced over time through strategic communication.

And it’s built around clarity, consistency, and placement.

In a career context, that looks like this…

📝 Your Career PR Checklist (Post-Promotion Edition)

Think of this less as “personal branding” and more as intentional repositioning inside a system that hasn’t caught up yet.

The goal isn’t to prove yourself or defend your credibility. You’ve already done that. The goal is to take back some control of the narrative and help others recalibrate how they engage with you over time.

1. Message: Are you clear on the shift?

Not just your title, but the substance of your role.

• Could you clearly describe what your focus is now, beyond what you used to do?

• Do you know what you’re directly accountable for versus where you influence outcomes?

• If someone asked, “What does success look like in this role?” would your answer reflect your current scope, or your former one?

This is more about internal clarity.

When you’re clear on what’s for you now, it becomes much easier to consistently reinforce that message without overthinking every interaction.

If your message is fuzzy, your signal will be too.

2. Signals: What are people seeing from you day to day?

Most perception is shaped by repetition, aka you repeatedly saying and acting in similar ways so that people begin to experience the change.

• Are you being pulled into execution because it’s expected, or because you step in automatically?

• Are you involved early in conversations, or once decisions are already underway?

• Do your day-to-day behaviors align with the role you’re in now or the role people are used to you playing?

People don’t update their view of you based on one conversation, but they will update it based on what they consistently see you do.

Our brains our wired for comfort so we’d all rather just go about our day like nothing changed. It’s “easy” for you to do the work, so you do it. It’s “easy” for your team and VP to keep behaving in the same way because it’s what they’ve always done.

3. Placement: Where are you showing up?

Promotions often change where your voice should be present, not just how it sounds.

• Are you visible in conversations where direction is shaped, not just work assigned?

• Are you spending time on problems that match your level of responsibility?

• Are you intentional about which meetings, decisions, and issues get your energy?

If you’re not receiving the invites from your VP, bring it up consistently in your 1:1’s when they start to pile their secondhand notes on you.

A few ways to bring it up…

4. Boundaries: What are you still holding onto?

This is where things usually get uncomfortable.

• What work are you still doing because it feels familiar, efficient, or safe?

• Where are you stepping in to keep things moving, even if it’s no longer your role?

• What might shift if you let someone else take ownership—even if they do it differently?

Every time you pick up work that no longer belongs to you, you reinforce an outdated version of your role, often without realizing it.

A few ways to frame it:

5. Consistency: Are you letting this take time?

Repositioning, unfortunately, takes time. Sometimes months or years because the behaviors and actions in your organization are so deeply engrained. This is especially true if you “grew up with the organization”, meaning you started early career and have spent 5-10 years there. Those roots are DEEP and take a long time to unwind.

• Are you staying steady even when it feels awkward or invisible?

• Are you trusting that repetition not perfection is what shifts the narrative?

PR is a long game, so give yourself grace when others keep defaulting to the same behavior. It’s not you, it’s them and they need continual reminders that things have changed.

☕ The Closing Thought

If you’re in this phase right now…

You are capable.

You are qualified.

And you deserve to be respected.

You just happen to be in one of the most uncomfortable (and important!) career transitions there is.

Sometimes, people can’t shift their ways or perceptions of us and it becomes time to move on to a new organization with a fresh, blank page where your past actions or identities are no longer visible.

The move from doing great work to being seen at a new level requires more than effort. It requires intention, language, and the willingness to let an old version of yourself step aside.

And if it feels awkward, slow, or disorienting, you’re probably doing it right.

Okay, So You Freaked Out.

I’ve been hearing a version of the same thing from a lot of people lately:

“Work is taking me to places I never thought I’d go.”

Meetings feel tense. Conversations feel loaded. Everything carries more weight than it used to. There’s less room for nuance, fewer places to exhale, and a constant sense that something might go sideways at any moment.

Work has become a pressure cooker.

And honestly? Some meetings feel less like collaboration and more like a Real Housewives reunion (if you know me, you know I’m always going to pop a Real Housewives nod somewhere!)… raised voices, talking over one another, subtle (and not-so-subtle) blame, dramatic pauses, and that unspoken feeling that something is about to explode.

Everyone’s on edge. Everyone’s defending something. And no one’s quite sure how it got this intense.

When pressure builds long enough, even the most regulated, thoughtful people eventually crack.

People are losing their patience in meetings. Snapping at colleagues. Saying things sharper than they meant to. Walking away thinking, That wasn’t me.

If this has happened to you:

This doesn’t automatically mean you’re unprofessional, unstable, or bad at your job.

It means you’re human inside a system that’s been running hot for too long.

There’s a difference between understanding behavior and excusing it. Context explains what happened, but it doesn’t remove responsibility. But it does help us respond with clarity instead of shame.

Most people don’t “lose it” because of one meeting. They lose it after months of accumulated pressure, unspoken tension, unclear expectations, and the quiet labor of holding things together while everything feels uncertain.

What makes this harder is that work doesn’t leave much room for nervous system overload. You’re still expected to be composed, articulate, collaborative, no matter what’s happening internally, even when the room feels emotionally charged and the stakes feel absurdly high.

So when a moment slips out through raised voices, tears, frustration, it can feel terrifying. Not just because of what happened, but because of what it might mean about how you’re seen now.

I remember a particular time personally during COVID where I stepped outside of my body with the CEO. We were talking about a particularly charged and sensitive situation and I knew what was fair and just wasn’t going to be his decision.

We were on a Zoom call and I was vibrating. I felt this burning everywhere and then it came out like word vomit. I yelled, I cried. And he sat there stunned.

If you’ve been there lately, this isn’t the end of your career and it’s not the end of the world. Lord knows we have way more impending doom outside of the four walls of work.

Here’s the reframe I want to offer:

One moment does not define your entire professional identity.

What matters more is what happens next.

Repair is a leadership skill—whether you have the title or not.

That might look like acknowledging the moment without over-apologizing. Naming that the pressure got the better of you. Resetting expectations. Or simply showing up differently in the next interaction and letting consistency do the work.

It also means being honest with yourself about what your system is trying to tell you.

If everything feels like an emergency, your body will treat it like one.
If there’s no release valve, something will eventually give.

The goal isn’t to never react. The goal is to notice sooner, repair faster, and stop pretending that constant intensity is sustainable.

If work feels like it’s pushing you to an edge you don’t recognize, that’s information, not a personal failure.

You’re allowed to take that information seriously.

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