I think that might be best. You have to balance your nature with some challenge. Not try to be someone you are not really meant to be but also you need to challenge yourself to be the better you not just vegetate, stagnate. Regarding promotions, advancement and pay raises. You can't be a door mat and get walked all over but you should not have unreasonable expectation or make unreasonable demands. Pay needs to keep up with inflation even if you don't get promoted or take on more responsibility. If you do not get cost of living increases you need to see why. Pay not keeping up with inflation is a downward spiral.

If you are not advancing, not getting promoted is that because there is no room for succession. No open positions to advance into.

At one point in my career I looked around the workplace and figured out that there was no advancement coming. I was a staff engineer, mid level engineer, recently one of my coworkers (the one with the most time in grade) was promoted to lead our group when our group lead retired. He was just a couple years older than I was and unless he had a fatal car accident or something similar he would be in the position for a decade. He was not looking to move higher or go anyplace else.

I took my next chance to talk with our director about my assessment of that and any possibilities for advancement in his organization. He agreed with my assessment and said he promoted the other guy because it was really a three way coin flip between me, him and one other and he picked who he picked just because of seniority since we are mostly equal technically.

I asked the director if there would be any hard feelings if I look for a transfer or other opportunities. He said there would be no hard feelings and he thought I should look for a better opportunity.

I found one and moved, turns out less than a year later he, the director, transferred as well, he was topped out, dead ended where he was too.

Sometimes the people in your direct chain of command can't do anything for you or the best thing they can do for you is let your go.

Later in my carrier I was a manager (my least favorite job). We were downsizing. For years there had been very few promotions for anyone and the raise pool was tiny. To give the less senior people any sort of meaningful raises the senior people got no raise not even a cost of living increase. With a 3 percent raise pool, the money I could use to give a senior engineer a 3 percent raise I could take and instead double the raises for 2 or 3 associate engineers. In a layoff environment this is an easy choice. The senior engineer is not going to quit, he is just trying to hang on until his retirement. The junior engineers need to be incentivized to stay, if they left I was not going to be allowed to replace them.

In a growing business the tables are turned as when I was hiring I need to incentivize the senior engineers to stick around and train the new people we were hiring and if some new hires quit we had a pipeline of applicants and I could hire to replace anyone who quit. The junior engineers did not get equal pay raises, the best got more (and sometimes a promotion) the others less.