Feeling Stuck in Your Career? Why It Happens & What to Do

One thing I hear a lot from friends and clients alike is, “I feel stuck in my career.”

Some of them think they want to leave but can’t seem to make the decision. Some have absolutely no idea what they want to do next, they just know they don’t want to keep feeling the way they do. And sometimes they are convinced their job is the problem, but when we start looking more closely there are similarities of issues in other areas of their life as well.

This is a feeling I understand well. A few years ago, I knew I wanted to leave my corporate career and build my own business. I had spent more than 20 years in corporate, achieved more than I had originally imagined I would, held senior leadership roles and reached a point where I had a very clear sense that I had done what I wanted to do there.

I wanted to support more women, build something of my own and create a career that felt more aligned with the life I wanted. But unfortunately knowing that did not make the decision easy.

At the time, I was a single mum, I was only a year out from finishing my cancer treatment, I had a mortgage and a son to support, and my life had been structured around earning a certain amount of money every month.

My corporate career had also provided me with an enormous amount of security over the years. It had been there through divorce, illness and some very difficult periods of my life. I knew how to be successful in that world, other people saw me as successful in that world, and if I’m really honest, a lot of my identity and self-worth had become attached to it too.

So while one part of me knew exactly what I wanted, another part of me could produce a very convincing list of reasons why I shouldn’t do it.

• What if the business doesn’t work?

• You have a secure role.

• Other people would love to have your job.

• Shouldn’t you just be happy with what you have?

• Do you really want to give all of this up?

And then there was the one that sat underneath a lot of it: What if I failed, what would people think?

I was moving from senior corporate leadership into coaching, and I was very aware that some people were going to look at that decision and wonder what on earth I was doing (my parents included). I had spent years building a reputation and a career that made sense to other people. Now I was considering walking away from it to become a life coach. It felt risky financially, professionally and personally and so I got stuck….

Sometimes feeling stuck is really an attempt to find certainty

Looking back, I can see that I wasn’t only trying to make a career decision. I was trying to solve for certainty. I wanted to know the business would work before I left. I wanted to know I would enjoy doing it before I gave up a career I had spent two decades building. I wanted to know I could make the financial side work and eventually earn what I needed to earn. And I wanted to know that if I did end up going back into corporate one day, I wouldn’t see that as evidence that I had failed, and ideally that nobody else would see it that way either.

Basically, I wanted the decision to come with a guarantee, but of course, it couldn’t.

But because I kept believing I needed more certainty before I could decide, I kept trying to solve every possible future problem in advance. And I see versions of this with clients all the time.

They want something to change, but they also want to know the new job will be better before they leave the old one. They want to know they won’t regret their decision. They want to know they’ll make enough money, that the new role will give them the flexibility they want, that they’ll enjoy it, that their family will support the decision and that they won’t discover six months later that they made a mistake.

But when we make certainty a requirement for moving forward, it becomes very easy to stay exactly where we are.

Staying where you are is still a decision

For a while, I responded to feeling stuck by doing more in my corporate role. I filled my time, I took on more and gave myself plenty of evidence that I was far too busy to seriously pursue the idea of building my own business.

I think part of me was hoping I could work hard enough to make the desire go away, but it didn’t. Instead, I started feeling increasingly resentful.

I resented my employer for owning so much of my time. I could feel resentment towards my boss and towards the demands of the role, but when I really looked at it, a lot of that resentment was towards myself.

I knew what I wanted to explore and I wasn’t backing myself to do it and that was a tricky thing to admit because it meant I had to stop treating staying as the passive option.

We often talk about the risk involved in leaving a job or changing careers, while treating staying as though nothing is being decided. But staying has consequences too.

For me, staying meant continuing to build a career I already knew I no longer wanted to keep building. It meant giving more years to something because it was safe and familiar, even though another part of me wanted to find out what I was capable of creating next.

And once I started looking at it that way, the question changed.

The exercise that helped me see the decision differently

I made the inevitable pros and cons lists but nothing really helped until I eventually started looking at the decision in a much simpler way. I looked at the best-case scenario for staying in corporate and the best-case scenario for building my business.

If both worked out as well as they possibly could, which life would I choose? The answer was easy. I wanted the business. Then I looked at the worst-case scenarios.

The story in my head had made feel like leaving was the risky choice, because I could imagine the business failing, losing income, regretting the decision and eventually returning to corporate.

But when I looked properly at the worst case, I realised that if the business didn’t work and I eventually chose to return to corporate, I would be somewhere close to where I already was. But I would also have built new skills, learnt an enormous amount and, most importantly for me, I would know that I had backed myself enough to try, so I wouldn’t always have, I wonder if,  or I should have…

Then I looked at the worst case of doing nothing, and I saw myself years later still wondering whether I could have built the business, still wanting something different and knowing I had let fear, security and other people’s opinions make the decision for me. That was when I realised I had more to lose by not going, as staying clearly became my worst case scenario.

Feeling stuck doesn’t always mean you need to leave your job

My story happened to end with me leaving corporate and starting a business, but that is not what I think everyone who feels stuck in their career needs to do.

In fact, one of the reasons I think feeling stuck can be so confusing is that it can come from very different places.

Sometimes someone has simply never stopped to question the path they are on. They have spent years doing the next logical thing, working hard, getting promoted, earning more, taking on more responsibility, and one day realise they don’t actually know whether they still want the destination they have been working towards. 

Sometimes they do know what they want but don’t trust themselves enough to pursue it, or they are waiting for a level of certainty that just doesn’t exist. 

Sometimes they genuinely have no idea what they want next. They know they don’t feel good where they are and assume leaving the job will solve that, but they haven’t yet understood what they want to be different. 

And sometimes the job has become the place where much older patterns are playing out.The need to prove yourself. The belief that your worth comes from what you achieve. The inability to disappoint people. The need to get everything right. The belief that you should be able to cope with any amount of pressure.

If you take those patterns with you, a new job may initially feel different, but it doesn’t necessarily change the way you experience your life and soon enough they will rear up in your new role. As the old saying goes, “We take ourselves wherever we go.”

This is why I think it is so important to really understand why you feel stuck before you decide what you need to do about it.

When your career has become part of who you are

Another thing I see particularly with women who have been successful in their careers for a long time, it that their work is no longer simply something they do, it has become part of the way they understand who they are.

When you have spent 15 or 20 years becoming accomplished, capable and respected in a particular world, walking away from it can bring up a lot of fears. Such as who am I if I’m not doing this anymore? What does success look like if I’m no longer chasing the next promotion? What will people think if I choose something with less status or less money? Was everything I did to get here a waste?

And if a large part of your self-worth has come from being successful at work, speaking from experience,  choosing a different path can feel like you are risking far more than a salary.

That’s why simply telling someone to “just leave” or “follow your passion” completely undermines  the complexity of the decision as there can be a lot to untangle.

What becoming unstuck actually looks like

For me, becoming unstuck doesn’t necessarily mean handing in your resignation. Instead it means understanding why you feel the way you do, what you actually want to be different and what is currently getting in the way of you moving towards it.

From there, you can make a decision. That decision might be to leave, it might be to stay and change the way you are working. It might be to start exploring something else while you keep the security of your existing role. It might be to stop expecting a career change to solve a problem that actually needs to be addressed somewhere else.

The important part is that you start seeing that you have choice again.

Because “I’m stuck” can feel like a description of something that is happening to you. It can feel like there are no good options, that there is nowhere to go. That you just have to keep tolerating where you are until something changes.

But often there are choices available to us that we aren’t yet willing or able to see because of what we believe those choices might cost. I know that was certainly true for me.

If you feel stuck in your career, start here

So if you already know the options you are considering, try the exercise that helped me.

Imagine the best-case scenario for each path. If both worked out incredibly well, which one would you want? Then look at the worst-case scenario for each, including the path where you change nothing. We are often very good at calculating the risk of making a change and much less deliberate about calculating the cost of staying exactly where we are.

If you don’t yet know what you want, try to understand what “stuck” actually means for you. What is making your current situation a problem? What do you want your life to feel like instead? What do you believe needs to change for that to happen?

Because you do not need to have your entire career mapped out before you can decide or do something, you just need enough understanding to make the next decision.

When I eventually left corporate, I still didn’t know exactly how everything was going to work out. I couldn’t know whether I would build the business I imagined, how long it would take, or whether there would be moments where I questioned the whole thing.

There was still uncertainty. But what had changed was that I was no longer asking uncertainty to disappear before I trusted myself to make a decision. And perhaps that is the most useful thing I have learnt about feeling stuck.

Sometimes we spend so long trying to find the decision that comes with no risk, no fear and no possibility of regret that we forget we are already making a decision every day we stay where we are.

For me, getting unstuck started when I stopped asking, How do I know this will work? And started asking, If I back myself, what do I actually want to choose?

If you want to accelerate getting unstuck, check out my 12 week program The Reset Method. Here we uncover what is really getting in your way and have you moving forward.