Advocating for Yourself at Work Before You Feel Ready
There’s a moment in most early careers where you realize something important:
Doing the work well isn’t always enough.
In Week 5 of the AdaMarie Career Accelerator, Camille Smith opened with a truth many people learn the hard way: no one is automatically tracking your goals, your growth, or what you want next. Not because they don’t care, but because they can’t read your mind.
Self-advocacy starts there.
One of the clearest takeaways from Camille’s session was that self-advocacy is not a personality trait. It’s a skill. Something you build over time, often in small, uncomfortable moments—asking a question in a meeting, expressing interest in a project, following up when something matters.
And like any skill, it gets stronger with use.
The second takeaway was about clarity.
A lot of people feel stuck because they’re asking for “more” without defining what “more” actually means. Camille pushed the group to be specific. Not just wanting growth, but naming it. Leading a project. Increasing compensation. Expanding scope. When you can clearly say what you’re working toward, it becomes much easier for others to support it and much harder for opportunities to pass you by unnoticed.
The third takeaway was about consistency.
Advocacy isn’t a one-time conversation. It’s a pattern. Following up. Staying visible. Building relationships beyond your immediate manager. Camille shared how having relationships across leadership—not just within your direct reporting line—can open doors, especially in moments where your work might otherwise go unseen.
Because in reality, opportunities often go to the people who are consistently expressing interest, not just quietly doing good work.
What made this session stand out wasn’t just the frameworks. It was the honesty. The acknowledgment that advocating for yourself can feel uncomfortable, especially if you’re worried about how you’ll be perceived or whether you’ve “earned” the right to ask.
But the throughline was clear: you don’t wait until you feel fully confident to advocate for yourself. You practice until confidence starts to follow.
If you want to go deeper into Camille’s frameworks, real-time examples, and the live coaching moments from this session, the full replay is available inside the AdaMarie Network.
Join to watch the full session and connect with a group of peers navigating the same early and career-changing moments together.
