You refresh your inbox. Nothing.
You tell yourself it’s a slow patch. That the right client is coming. That your work speaks for itself.
But underneath that there’s a knot in your stomach that’s been there a while. Because the leads aren’t coming. The sales conversations are thin. And the money stress – that low hum of “what if this doesn’t turn around” – is getting harder to ignore.
Here’s what I want you to hear.
This is not a capability problem.
This is a visibility problem.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been in conversations with some seriously impressive women. Consultants. Coaches. Advisors. Women with decades of expertise, real results, and genuinely transformational IP.
Almost every single one of them said some version of this:
“I feel like the world’s best kept secret.”
And I recognise it every time – because the pattern is always the same. Exceptional women, afraid to talk too loudly about their work. Softening their message. Downplaying their experience. Then watching others with half the expertise fill their pipeline and charge fees that make them wince.
Not because those people are better.
Because those people are clearer.
There’s a story I keep coming back to. A woman once asked Pablo Picasso to sketch something for her. He did – then handed it back and said “That will be $10,000.”
She was stunned. “But it only took you five minutes.”
He looked at her and said: “No. It took me thirty years.”
You are not charging for the hour. You are charging for the decades. The failures that refined you. The strategies that didn’t work. The patterns you can now see in minutes because you have lived them.
But none of that matters if you refuse to stand in it.
Invisible does not mean incapable. It means unclear.
And clarity? That’s fixable.
Janine x