Every Promotion Left Me Feeling the Same
Three promotions in six years, each one supposedly a fresh start, and each time I found myself, within a few months, right back in the same exhausted, overextended, quietly resentful state I'd been in before the last one. Different title, different scope, unmistakably the same feeling. What I Assumed Each Time Every time, I assumed the previous role had simply been the wrong fit, or the team had been the problem, or the timing had been off — reasons specific enough to explain away the pattern without ever naming it as a pattern. A New Title, the Same Old Habits What I never examined was that I brought the exact same habits into every new role: saying yes by default, avoiding the conversation where I'd ask for support, quietly absorbing whatever nobody else picked up. Three different jobs ran the identical experiment with the identical inputs. Why I Kept Missing the Common Thread Each promotion came with enough genuinely new content — new team, new stakes, new problems — that it was easy to mistake the recurring exhaustion for something the new role had specifically produced, rather than something I had specifically brought with me each time. What Finally Made It Visible Sitting down after the third one and comparing all three transitions side by side — not what each job was, but what I actually did in the first ninety days of each — made the repetition impossible to miss. It wasn't the roles. It was me, running the same script with a different job title attached each time.
Meet Ori — built to help you see the script you keep running, since the next title change won't rewrite it for you.
Part of The Recognition Library →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai
This is an illustrative composite, not a real member account.