Being good at your job does not automatically make you the person someone thinks of when a new opportunity opens up. Being considered for something and being capable of it are judged separately by the people making that call, and closing the gap is a visibility problem, not a competence one.
Two different questions get asked about you
Egon Zehnder, a firm that has assessed executives for decades, built a framework for how organisations actually judge advancement potential, and it draws a clear line between two questions that get answered separately. One is how well you are doing your current job. The other is whether you show the specific signs of being able to do a bigger one, seeking out new experience, making sense of scattered information, connecting people to a direction, and staying with something hard without needing to be pushed.
Strong performance in your current role answers the first question well. It does very little for the second. That is the part most people, especially strong quiet performers, assume is automatic and is not.
The trait most likely to go unseen
Of those signals, the one that depends most on being visibly demonstrated, rather than simply present, is the one about connecting people to a direction. It requires being seen forming a view and bringing others along with it, which is exactly the kind of visible, in the moment behaviour that a quieter working style tends to produce less of, not because the capability is missing, but because it usually happens more privately.
This is not a confidence problem, and treating it as one misses what is actually going on. The thinking is there. What is missing is a moment where it became visible to someone deciding who to consider next.
Why your reputation gets there before you do
By the time a new opportunity is being discussed, an informal sense of who fits it usually exists already, formed from small, scattered impressions gathered over months, not from a single meeting. Whoever is setting up that opportunity is drawing on whatever version of you already exists in their head. If that version is thin, a strong application later does not fully make up for it.
Where to start
Pick one thing you are already working toward, and say one sentence about the direction, not just the task, to someone one level up. Not a pitch for a specific role. A plain statement of what you are trying to build and why, the kind of thing that gives someone a specific version of you to remember the next time something matching that direction comes up.
Do this occasionally, tied to real work, rather than once as a big announcement.
Reading who in your organisation actually shapes what gets offered to whom is something you can see better than any article can. What this gives you is what to make visible, once you know who is watching.
The research settles the question of whether you are capable of the next thing. What it cannot settle is whether the right person has seen it yet.