I was talking to someone who’s been at the same organization for a decade. “I’ve been blabbing about wanting to leave for five or six years,” he told me. “I think it’s one of the things that destroyed my marriage — how stressed and unhappy I’ve been.” But talking to me was the first step he’d taken.
I’ve observed a pattern with smart people who are feeling stuck.
They recognize the problem. Their brain thinks, “I should do something.” Then they ask, “Okay, sure, do something, but what?”
And either they don’t know the answer (scroll LinkedIn? rage apply? have coffee with someone’s cousin???), or the answers they think about seem dangerous. So they stay, hoping that tomorrow it will be better. Or that a better answer will reveal itself.
Changing something is risky. You have to do something you don’t usually do. Put yourself in front of different audiences, different organizations, or a new industry.
It would mean being more of a beginner than you are right now. To people accustomed to being experts, who’ve spent years earning credibility and authority, it’s that much harder to be new at something. To ask basic questions, rather than sophisticated expert ones. To try something you haven’t before, without being sure you’ll be terrific at it.
How would I look? What would I say? These are not silly questions. Your reputation is important. You’ve built credibility with the people in your life by showing up thoughtfully. AND, to leave what you know isn’t working, you need to become familiar with new possibilities — which means staying undecided and uncertain while you do the research.
That’s pretty hard.
So people stay put. Sometimes for years.
It’s easy to dither and delay. You don’t want to ask for help until you know with more certainty exactly what you’re asking for. You’ve got to do the research later. You keep telling yourself you’ll do something, and then you don’t do it, and you lose a little bit of faith in yourself.
Something happens when you decide, and you step forward to ask for help even when it feels messy and unformed. You become, in your own mind, a person who has gone from dread and shame and “I need to figure this out someday,” to being a person who has taken action. “I’ve reached out to get help, and I have another conversation scheduled for next week.”
That’s a different identity, and it feels better. You’re not breaking promises to yourself, ignoring pain. You reclaim a feeling of agency. You still don’t know what’s on the path ahead, but it feels different to be a person taking steps than it does to be a person avoiding something.
You don’t need to know what you’re asking for yet. Sign up here for my Foundations email sequence and I’ll walk you through it, right in your inbox.
