Feeling stuck in your career? Here’s where to start
Updated: Aug 18
If you’ve felt stuck in your career for a while, it can start to feel like the problem is you.
WTF is wrong with me?
Why can’t I figure this out?
Why am I still here?
The problem isn’t you.
The problem is that a lot of career advice massively oversimplifies what it actually takes to make a career change.
“Just take this fancy personality assessment!”
Or:
“This expensive CV service is the answer to all your problems!”
Except... it’s not.
Because approaches like these tend to focus almost entirely on the practical, logical side of career change.
And so much of career change is actually an inside job.
Your fears. Your beliefs. Your doubts. The stories you tell yourself about what is and isn’t possible for you.
And crazy as it sounds, this is the huge, gaping hole in so much career navigation work.
We spend enormous amounts of time trying to answer What should I do next? Without looking at the thing that may actually be stopping us from doing it.
It’s why, when I help people get unstuck, we spend just as much time and energy on the emotional and mental side of career change as we do hatching a plan for what’s next.
Because as humans, we’re wonderfully complicated. And we can’t expect something as big as changing careers to be solved with a neat little formula.
The two paths of career change
This is how I like to think about it.
There are two parallel paths we need to travel if we want to get unstuck and make a career change.
Path One: The obvious one
This is the path most people think of when they think about career change.
Figuring out what you want and creating a strategy to go after it.
What are you good at?
What do you enjoy?
What kind of work would suit you?
What opportunities are out there?
Who do you need to talk to?
How do you position yourself to make the move?
This is the practical, logical side of career change. And yes, it’s incredibly important.
But it’s only one part of the picture.
Because running alongside it is another path.
Path Two: The invisible one — getting out of your own way
This is the internal work. The personal development side of career change that is just as important if you actually want to make the change.
Your fears.
Your beliefs.
Your doubts.
Your assumptions.
The stories in your head about what is and isn’t possible for you.
This path is every bit as important as the first. But it’s the one that so often gets overlooked.
I know this because, for 16 years, I worked as a career consultant using a largely logical, formulaic approach to career change.
And when I’d follow up with clients six months or a year later, I’d sometimes discover they were still in the job they’d paid me good money to help them leave.
They weren’t making the changes we’d mapped out.
And I started to realise there was a gap in what I was offering.
We’d done the practical work. We’d figured out what they wanted, explored possibilities and created a strategy.
But we hadn’t addressed what was happening inside.
Their fears.
Their limiting beliefs.
Their doubts about what was possible for them.
The stories they were telling themselves about why they couldn’t make the change.
I knew I was only doing part of the job.
I needed more tools in my toolkit.
So in 2019, I trained as a Life Coach through Martha Beck’s Wayfinder training.
I wanted to go much deeper into the Soul Search side of career change — to help people notice and work through the emotional and mental blocks that can stop them from actually making the change they want.
Because whether we realise it or not, this is so often where we get stuck.
And one of the biggest things I see stopping people?
Fear.
Meet your Lizard
Martha Beck calls the fearful voice in our heads our inner Lizard — that primitive part of the brain whose number-one job is to keep us safe.
Its job is essentially to scan the environment looking for two things:
Lack and attack.
What don't I have enough of?
And what might hurt me?
Thousands of years ago, that was pretty useful.
Is there enough food?
Is that rustling in the bushes a predator?
Am I safe here?
These days, our Lizard is still running the same programme.
Except instead of worrying about being eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger, it sounds more like:
I don't have enough time.
I don't have enough money.
I'm not good enough to do that job.
What if I let everyone down?
What if they don't think I'm qualified enough?
What if I fail?
And when it comes to career change, the Lizard can have an absolute field day.
You're too old. It's too late to start over.
You'll have to go back to university and start again.
You'll earn less money.
You won't be good enough.
What if you make the wrong decision?
The job market is terrible. Stay where you are.
Or perhaps your version sounds like:
I'm 51. I'm too old to make a change.
I have two kids and a mortgage. I can't just follow my dreams.
I've spent all these years building experience in this industry. I can't change now.
I took years out to be a stay-at-home parent.
I don't have a university degree.
I'm too close to retirement.
The details change.The underlying message is usually the same: Don't do it. It's not safe. Stay where you are.
And here's the important bit.
Your inner Lizard isn't bad. It's just trying to protect you.
The problem comes when we treat every single thought it produces as the truth. Because fear gets a megaphone.
And when fear gets loud enough, it becomes incredibly difficult to hear the quieter parts of you.
Your curiosity.
Your intuition.
Your desires.
Your soul.
And that’s where paralysis can set in.
The two ways we tend to deal with fear
Unfortunately, most of us haven't been taught what to actually do with fear.
So we tend to go one of two ways.
1. We push it down
We repress it. We don't want to look at it. We certainly don't want to get curious about it because we're worried that if we open that particular box, we might be overcome by what's inside. So we ignore it and keep trying to come up with a career plan.
2. We simply believe it
We acquiesce. We cave. We let fear take over and do whatever it tells us to do.
Don't apply.
Don't contact that person.
Don't explore that idea.
Don't leave.
Stay where you are.
Neither approach is particularly helpful when you're trying to make a career change.
So what do you do instead?
Start here
Not by forcing yourself to come up with the perfect career plan.
Clarity first. Strategy second.
Before you can hatch the plan, get curious about what's actually keeping you stuck.
Step One: Listen
Start noticing what your Lizard says to you. What does it tell you that you don't have enough of? Time? Money? Energy? Experience? Qualifications? Confidence?
What does it tell you that you can't trust?
Yourself? The job market? Other people? Your ability to make the right decision?
Don't try to fix any of it yet.
Just listen.
Get the chatter out of your head and onto paper.
And then, for each fear, ask yourself:
What assumption is hiding underneath this?
Because underneath our fears there is nearly always an assumption we've made about what will happen.
I'll have to take a huge pay cut.
No one will hire me at my age.
I'd have to retrain for years.
There aren't any jobs like that where I live.
My experience won't be relevant.
These thoughts can run around in our heads for YEARS without ever being properly examined.
Which brings us to the next step.
Step Two: Question
There are two questions I ask my clients to rely on:
Is this actually true?
and
What assumptions have I not checked out yet?
Sit with those questions for a moment.
If you're really honest with yourself, nine times out of ten you'll discover that you're not 100% sure.
You might have a hunch that your mental story is true. You might have believed it for a very long time. It might feel incredibly true.
But you don't actually know with 100% certainty.
And if you don't know? You haven't done your research yet.
This is where the inner work of career change starts to meet the practical work.
And it's exactly why Research is such an important part of my Soul Search → Research → Job Search framework.
Instead of allowing an untested assumption to determine your career, go and investigate it.
Step Three: Get curious
I want you to become an investigative journalist about your own fears.
Or a scientist testing a hypothesis.
Take one of the fears you've written down and ask:
What research could I do to find out whether this is actually true?
If you're thinking:
“I'd have to take a huge pay cut.”
How do you know?
Have you looked at salaries?
Have you spoken to people doing the work?
Have you talked to a recruiter?
If you're thinking:
“I'd have to go back to university for three years.”
Have you actually checked?
What qualifications are really required?
Could your existing experience transfer?
Are there other pathways in?
If you're thinking:
“No one will hire someone my age.”
Who could you talk to who has made a similar change?
What evidence can you gather from the real world rather than relying on the story running around inside your head?
Ask really good questions. Scratch beneath the surface. Gather information. Talk to people.
Test your hypothesis.
Because we let fears rule our actions when we treat them as facts.
But when we notice them, question them and research them, we become conscious of their impact.
And that helps calm the Lizard down.
You're no longer standing there imagining all the terrible things that might happen.
You have actual information.
And from there, you can choose your next best step.
That's how you start to get your power back and de-charge some of these beliefs.
Not by telling yourself to stop being scared. But by getting curious about your fear.
Step Four: Flip the fear
And finally, I want you to do something else with the biggest fear that's holding you back.
Flip it.
We've spent all this time asking:
What might happen if I make the change?
But there's another question we don't ask nearly enough:
What is NOT making the change costing me?
Your fear is very good at showing you what you might lose.
So let it show you what you might gain, too.
If you're afraid you'll lose money, could changing direction eventually give you greater financial security?
If you're afraid you won't have enough time, could different work give you more time?
Could you gain more energy?
More freedom?
More fulfilment?
More confidence?
More meaning?
More of yourself back?
Fear tell us a lot.
It don't necessarily tell us the truth.
But if we're willing to listen to our fears, get curious about what's underneath them and investigate the assumptions they're built on, they can tell us something incredibly useful about what we need — and perhaps even what we're longing for.
You don't need to eliminate fear
Getting unstuck isn't about becoming completely fearless and it's definitely not about waiting until you feel 100% confident before you do anything. Fear is going to come along for the ride.
The work is learning to notice it, question it and investigate it — rather than automatically handing it the steering wheel.
Because your inner Lizard doesn't get to make your career decisions. You do.
And sometimes, that's the real first step to getting unstuck.
If you'd like some help doing exactly that, my free masterclass Get Unstuck: The First Step to Career Change will show you where to begin.
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