Not applause, but work worth signing
It is not applause you are after, whatever people assume. It is that the work has to be worth having your name on. Pluto in Leo in the 6th house puts the whole question of significance into ordinary daily tasks, so anonymous or careless work costs you more than it costs anybody else.
The Leo colouring came from the period, not from you: Pluto crosses a sign over decades and everybody arriving in that window carries the same seriousness about mattering. Your birth time placed it in the 6th house, and that is the individual half. It aims the need for significance at routine and the body, which is why the small daily standard matters to you far more than the title does.
The test is doing it well when nobody sees
The recurring situation is work that will never be attributed and never inspected. You will still do it properly, and you will also feel the absence. That combination is the actual exercise here: continuing at your own standard without any external return, for long enough that the standard becomes genuinely yours rather than a performance.
Read as fussy, running on pride in the work
Colleagues see somebody who will not let a shoddy version go out and think you are difficult about details. What is true is that your name is attached to it in your own accounting whether or not it is attached publicly. Say that once. It converts a reputation for fussiness into a reputation for standards.
Where the pride sits in a routine
It sits in the craft of the ordinary: the handwriting, the tidy file, the process you run better than the person before you. That is a real and unfashionable satisfaction. It also makes being managed badly genuinely painful, because a careless instruction is received as a judgement on your work rather than as an oversight.
A standard that does not require an audience
The version of this that works is a private benchmark, held for its own sake, in work nobody will ever look at. That is what turns the need for recognition into something durable. Choose one recurring task and do it to a standard nobody has asked for, indefinitely, and tell no one.
Full output all week, then nothing
You hold the performance together from Monday to Friday and then collapse into a weekend that repairs almost nothing, and the cycle has been running long enough to look like your natural rhythm. It is not. Take a trough in the middle of the week instead, deliberately and at a fixed hour, since the weekend has never once been long enough to settle the debt.
Excellence in a role nobody watches
Much of your best work happens in positions where quality is invisible until it fails, and you have been holding standards that were never required of you. That is worth making visible once. Write down what would go wrong if you did it at the level the role actually specifies, and show somebody the difference.
Pride located in the craft, not the rank
You have put your self-respect into how well the work is done rather than into what position you hold, which is unusual and considerably more stable than the alternative. It also means a run of poor output damages you out of all proportion. Separate a bad month from a verdict on yourself, in writing if necessary, since the two fused early and have never been prised apart.
Underpaid for the standard you keep
You deliver considerably more than the rate covers and you have never once raised it, because raising it would mean admitting you were counting. Count. Write down the difference between what was specified and what you supplied over a year, and take that number rather than an argument into the next conversation.
They see the doing, not the effort
Relatives receive your competence as effortless, because you have never once let them see what it costs, and the family's expectations have now been set at that level for years. It is a situation you built and it can be corrected. Let one thing be visibly difficult this year, out loud and without apology, and let everybody adjust the picture they have been working from.