"I've been in this role for two years" feels like evidence, but it's actually just a clock. Readiness for the next level is about what you're already doing, not how long you've been doing the current one.
A genuinely useful test: are you already, informally, doing meaningful pieces of the next role, without the title, and often without being asked? Someone ready for a senior role is often already the person others come to for judgment calls, already thinking about problems beyond their formal scope, already operating with more independence than their title technically requires. The promotion, when it comes, is usually a formal recognition of something that's already true, not the thing that makes it true.
The promotion rarely comes before the behavior. It comes after, as recognition, not as a starting gun.
This is uncomfortable because it means waiting for the title before acting like you have it is usually backwards. It also means the honest self-assessment isn't "do I deserve this", it's "am I already operating at that level, in ways other people have noticed, or only in ways I feel privately."
List three things someone at the next level up does that you don't currently do. Be honest about the gap, not "I could do that if given the chance," but "am I already doing a version of that now." If the list is mostly things you haven't started, that's not a character flaw, it's just information about where you actually are.
External signals matter here too, and they're worth taking seriously rather than dismissing when they don't match your internal timeline. If you consistently get feedback that you're "not quite there yet" without a specific, actionable reason attached, that vagueness is itself information, ask directly for the specific gap, rather than assuming it's political or unfair. If the feedback does come with something concrete, that's the actual roadmap, more useful than any amount of self-assessment.
One thing worth being honest about: readiness and opportunity are two different things. You can be genuinely ready and still not get promoted, because there's no open role, no budget, or the timing is wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with your performance. That's real and worth naming to yourself clearly, it changes the right next move from "prove I'm ready" to "find where the readiness can actually be used," sometimes on a different team, sometimes somewhere else entirely.