The ladder, the discipline and the audience all line up
Everything here points the same way. Mars in Capricorn in the 10th house puts patient, unglamorous, entirely sustained effort into the part of life that keeps a public record, so what you build accumulates in full view and does not come apart.
Traditional astrology calls Mars exalted in this sign, and schools differ on what that is worth. This site reads exaltation as the best-behaved version of a drive rather than the strongest: nothing here is more forceful than elsewhere, it is simply aimed, patient and almost impossible to waste.
Authority that arrived because you carried things
Your standing was not awarded, it accrued: the problems handled, the years without a failure, the fact that your judgement has been right often enough that people stopped checking. That kind of authority survives reorganisations, which the awarded sort does not. It is also slow, and you have watched faster people pass you at least twice.
The plan that goes out further than anybody asked
You are working to a horizon nobody else in the room is using, which makes some of your decisions look strange in the moment and correct four years later. Say the timescale out loud when explaining a choice. Half the resistance you meet is people assessing a five-year move against a twelve-month frame.
Rivals treated as information
You assess competitors soberly, take what they do better than you, and feel remarkably little about any of it, which makes your rivalries oddly productive for both sides. The one contest you consistently lose is the likeability sprint decided quickly on charm and first impressions, and you will keep entering it out of a sense that it ought to be winnable. Cede those on purpose and steer everything you can towards contests settled on substance and duration.
Check that this is still your mountain
Your equipment works on any slope, so the choice of slope is the only decision that matters and it is the one you took a long time ago. Re-survey once every few years, in writing. Course corrections cost far less at altitude than arriving at the top of something you never chose does.
Apply two grades up before you feel ready
Your readiness threshold is set considerably higher than anybody else's, so by the time you consider yourself qualified for a role you have been capable of it for about three years. Nobody is going to correct that from outside. Apply while it still feels premature, on the specific grounds that your sense of premature is calibrated wrongly and has been the whole time.
Who you will be when you get there
You have thought carefully about the position and rather less about the person occupying it, and the climb shapes a character as surely as it fills a diary. Ask what the last ten years have made you like to be around, and ask somebody else the same question. The answer is available and you have never requested it, because the work has always been the thing being assessed.
Price the responsibility, not the tenure
You are paid for how long you have been somewhere rather than for what would go wrong without you, and the second figure is considerably larger. Nobody in the organisation is going to volunteer that distinction. Write down what you are actually accountable for, in one page, and take it into the next conversation instead of a record of years served.
Tell the competitor that they sharpen you
The rivals who improved you have no idea they did, because nothing in your manner communicates it and you have never said so. One plain sentence converts a competitor into the strongest ally on your board, and it costs you nothing you are currently using. Say it to the one who has been in your field the longest.
The household arranged around your ascent
Everybody at home has adapted to what your work requires, one quarter at a time, without any of it ever being agreed. That is how a decade goes past with nobody having consented to anything. Name the current phase and its end date out loud, and then honour the end date once, so the next one is believed.