Burying Brilliance. Then Unearthing It.
How a Director of Innovation stopped hiding behind his résumé — and started landing C-suite opportunities.
I met Jason on a bike.
He was a triathlete used to flat Midwest roads, and we were somewhere with serious climbing and serious descending. First day out, he was white-knuckling every descent — gripping the bars, braking too hard, fighting the bike.
By the end of the week, he was descending at 45 miles an hour.
That's not a metaphor. But it became one.
The Pattern
Jason had the kind of credentials that make people assume everything's fine.
Top-shelf MBA. Leadership roles at major corporations. A track record of strategic thinking and big operational moves. He'd even gone off to build something of his own — a business partnership that looked, from the outside, like it was working.
It wasn't working for him. The partnership couldn't support two people, and Jason took a director role at a large healthcare corporation — their innovation department — while the business quietly continued without him.
So he was living in two worlds.
Publicly, still the entrepreneur. Internally, starting over somewhere new. And in the gap between those two identities, something had gone sideways.
He was self-conscious. Wondering how he was being perceived. Holding back in meetings because he felt like he hadn't earned the right to speak yet. Doing the very things that were keeping him small — and blaming his environment for the smallness.
He'd tried to work through it on his own. Couldn't get traction. Eventually, he called.
What Was Actually Happening
Jason thought his strengths were his résumé. The degrees, the titles, the accomplishments.
Those things were real. They just weren't him. They were what I'd call cash register strengths — scannable, credentialed, forgettable. They lived in the past and didn't say anything about how he actually moved through the world.
What made Jason genuinely brilliant was something different: the way he asked questions.
He had a rare instinct for inquiry. He could pull things out of people that they didn't know were there. He saw situations from angles others missed. He had a natural capacity to find paths through complexity.
But he'd buried all of that under the accolades. And in burying it, he'd also buried his agency. He'd become a passenger in his own career — waiting to be recognized rather than showing up as someone worth recognizing.
He wasn't broken. He was running an outdated operating system.
The Work
We got quiet. Deliberately, strategically quiet.
Our sessions weren't about fixing Jason — they were about finding him. Asking a lot of questions. Sorting the real strengths from the résumé strengths. Identifying what he actually wanted to do in the world and how he wanted to leave each interaction.
We worked on a few specific things:
He stopped identifying as a displaced entrepreneur. That identity was costing him presence in the role he was actually in. We redirected that energy toward showing up as an engaged, accountable driver — not a passenger waiting for permission.
We redefined what creativity meant for him. He'd never thought of himself as creative, but his way of asking questions was his creativity. We named it, owned it, and started putting it to work.
We got him back in motion. He'd been stuck, socially and professionally isolated from his network. We started rebuilding that — conversations with old colleagues, classmates, people he'd lost touch with. Small moves that compounded.
And we worked on the shift from self-consciousness to self-awareness. Those two things feel similar but operate completely differently. Self-consciousness creates noise. Self-awareness creates signal.
What Changed
The shift showed up in his work before he could fully see it himself.
His 360 feedback came back glowing — his colleagues and leaders noting how helpful, creative, and professional he was. He described it as "a self-reinforcing upward spiral that just kind of naturally occurred."
That's not magic. That's what happens when the drag comes off.
He started getting noticed for C-suite adjacent opportunities. Chief of staff roles — positions where a senior executive needs someone who can hold the complexity of an entire organization and help them move through it.
That's what Jason's instincts were built for. He just needed to stop hiding them.
In His Words
"Working with Bryan has been one of the most meaningful professional investments I've made. Over several months, he helped me access a deeper level of clarity, confidence, and self-awareness that continues to shape how I lead and show up in my work.
I moved from relying on external validation to operating with a more grounded, values-driven presence. I began navigating career decisions with clarity, communicating my value more effectively, and building confidence in how I lead through influence.
It's so funny — it's like a self-reinforcing upward spiral that has just kind of naturally occurred."
— Jason, Director of Innovation, Healthcare Corporation
If This Resonates
If you've been doing all the right things — hitting marks, showing up, staying busy — but something still feels stuck, this might be your pattern.
Not broken. Just running old software in a new role.
The work is identifying what you've been burying — and building from there.