Signs It’s Time for a Career Change, and Why Fear is Getting in the Way
If you've been ignoring the signs it's time for a career change and unable to make a decision about whether to stay or to go, you're not alone.
My client, let’s call her Nicole, had been in her role for over a decade. As a mom of two young kids, she was navigating the competing demands of a high-pressure job and parenthood. What made it even harder was her boss: a micromanager with zero boundaries who consistently created more work and more unnecessary stress.
Nicole would get home to kids who were so excited to see her, only to rush through dinner and the evening routine so she could log back on to work at 8:00pm when she should have been resting and recharging. Doing the things she loved like reading, volunteering, and spending time with her partner.
After being in her industry and similar roles for over a decade, she wanted to quit. But…her job looked great on paper, paid well, was flexible enough, and provided critical health insurance coverage for her family. Leaving felt scary, impossible. And honestly? It felt selfish to even consider it.
She had been thinking about a career change for years. She had written the pros and cons lists. She had conversations with her partner. She said “I’ll quit next year” every year.
Here’s what I know for sure: You can't pros/cons list your way out of a decade-plus career. Not when fear, worry, self-doubt is running the show.
What you can do is identify how your thoughts and feelings about a career transition are impacting the decisions you are making (or not making). As a certified career coach, I use a framework called Energy Leadership to do exactly that.
Energy Leadership is how you see the world around you and your ability to lead yourself through it. Regardless of your current job title, we are all leaders. We lead our lives, our career transitions, our family, our communities.
Your Emotions Aren’t the Problem, They’re Data
Up until now maybe you believed that the world was “glass half full” or “glass half empty.” That there were only two choices, 1.) stay and suffer in a role that’s completely draining or 2.) quit without a plan or safety net.
The Energy Leadership framework offers something different: 7 levels of energy, or perspectives, through which you can choose to view any given situation…including the career decision you’ve been putting off for years.
Energy Levels are categorized as either catabolic (draining) like Levels 1 and 2, which limit our options, or anabolic (fueling) like Levels 3 - 7 that expand our choices. We all have the ability to experience all seven of these perspectives. No level of energy is good or bad and each has its advantages and disadvantages.
Every Energy Level has a core Thought, Feeling, and Action. Your core thoughts (your “who”) are shaped by your values, beliefs, and experiences. It’s also where your current level of self-awareness lives. Those thoughts inform your feelings, and your feelings directly impact your actions and results. If we can build more awareness around our core thoughts and our “who” we can essentially “hack” our results.
Most leadership programs or traditional career coaches focus on the 'what' and the 'how,' the tactics, the action steps, the resume tips. Energy Leadership, and my brand of career coaching, is about going deeper. It focuses on the 'who' (your core thoughts and what you believe to be true) and the 'how you feel' (your emotions).
This matters because who you are and how you feel about any situation, including a career transition or career pivot, will directly impact your approach and the results you get. If you’ve been asking yourself: “Should I stay and push through or just quit already?” Let's take a closer look at the Energy Levels or perspectives that are most likely showing up for you right now.
Level 1: Fear, When Your “Inner Critic” is Driving
Level 1 is characterized by the feeling that things are happening to you and that you have zero control over your circumstances. This is where fear, worry, and self-doubt live. It’s also where your “Gremlin” lives.
Your “Gremlin”— sometimes called your “Inner Critic”— is that little voice inside your head that tells you you’re not good enough in some way. For career changers, it often sounds like:
“I don’t have enough experience to make a pivot.”
“I’m too old to start over.”
“I don’t want to let anyone down.”
“I’m selfish for wanting to make a change, I should be grateful.”
It’s nearly impossible to make a clear, confident decision from a Level 1 perspective. If you think about it in terms of fight or flight, Level 1 is flight. You avoid making decisions in an effort to protect yourself from failure, rejection, or judgement.
When Nicole came to coaching, she said: “I feel like I’m failing and that it’s selfish, as a mom, to even think about wanting to make a career change.”
She felt defeated and hopeless. She had thought about making a change obsessively for years, had the never-ending conversations with her partner, kept saying, “I’ll quit next year” or “I’ll quit after annual bonuses are paid out.” But she never did.
This makes perfect sense. If you think that you don’t deserve to quit your job, you likely feel defeated and in Nicole’s case, selfish.
If your career has become tied to your sense of self-worth, this post on identity and career is worth reading before you go any further. Because when you feel defeated and undeserving of a change in the first place, you likely won’t even research other opportunities. So, no action is taken and nothing changes. Your Gremlin wins.
Level 2: Control, When Logic Becomes a Hiding Place
Level 2 is the level of control. If Level 1 is flight, Level 2 is fight and it can look a lot like productivity.
This is where black and white thinking lives. From a decision-making standpoint it might sound like: “I just need to power through and choose. It doesn’t matter.”
But it does matter. Level 2 is highly logical, and while logic certainly has its place, you can’t think your way to a decision. Eventually, you need to feel your way through it and take action.
From this perspective, it’s common to ignore the emotional and intuitive sides of a decision…the parts that are often most important. You try to force a decision for the sake of expediency. And when you can’t? You start beating yourself up for not being able to “just choose already.”
For Nicole, Level 2 looked like control. Or the attempt to control something that was beyond anyone’s full control. How her partner, family, friends, and boss would react to her decision to quit. Endless to-do lists she needed to check off before she would finally feel “ready.” But ready never came. She kept adding to the list. It was exhausting and kept her from ever having to make the actual leap. The checklist was no longer a productivity tool, it was a shield. And underneath it, all of those Level 1 feelings and fears were still holding her back.
Level 3: Settling, The Comfort of “Fine”
Level 3 is the level of settling or rationalization. Of telling yourself: “It’s not that bad, I should be grateful to even have a job.” It’s the energy of “fine.”
You go back and forth: Should I stay? Should I go? The paycheck is incredible, but I’m sacrificing time with my family. I work from home and have flexibility but the company culture is a nightmare that makes me question my self-worth. And somehow, you’re able to tolerate all of it because the “pros” seem to outweigh the “cons,” at least on paper.
Level 3 is likely why so many people stay in jobs they've outgrown for far longer than they should. It lets us cope, it helps us to tolerate and accept our situation and then we end up talking ourselves into staying. This perspective feels better than Level 1 or Level 2.
From the Level 3 perspective, we’re not thriving, but we’re surviving. We’re able to move forward one day at a time.
The danger of this perspective is that all of our Level 1 and Level 2 thoughts and feelings are going unaddressed and we become complacent.
For Nicole, Level 3 was super specific: her health insurance. One of her family members required medication that was expensive and difficult to access and her current employer covered it fully. Staying in her job meant her family member had what they needed. That's not a small thing. That's a real, legitimate reason to stay.
At the same time, her partner’s company also provided insurance that would cover the medication. Now, all of a sudden, insurance becomes a way to rationalize away the desire to make a decision. It sounds like: “We’re all set up here with the insurance and medication, it’s working well. If we change then we have to do a lot of paperwork. Ugh, I would love to finally make a decision but it’s fine. It’s easier to just stay in this job.”
And here's the thing… Level 3 isn't “bad” or “wrong.” Sometimes staying is the right call. The difference is whether you're staying by default or consciously choosing to stay on purpose.
Level 4: Care, Whose Needs are You Making Decisions for?
Level 4 is the level of care and giving. Decisions made from this perspective are often driven by what someone else wants or needs or what might benefit the group. Sometimes because you genuinely want to show up for them, and sometimes because you're trying to meet their expectations, avoid conflict, or not rock the boat.
It’s easy to forget that Level 4 is also the level of self-care and how we nurture ourselves.
For Nicole, Level 4 showed up as her deep desire to be present for her kids and to provide for her family. She wasn't staying in her job purely out of fear or habit, she was also staying because she genuinely cared about what it meant for the people she loved most.
When we finally named that, something shifted. She stopped calling herself selfish for wanting to leave, and started recognizing that her desire to provide and her desire for something more weren't in conflict, they were both true at the same time.
That's the power of this framework. It doesn't ask you to choose between logic and emotion, or between yourself and your family. It asks you to see the whole picture, see all of your choices and confidently choose on purpose and with intention.
What Changes When You Have Awareness
When you build self-awareness around your thoughts, feelings, and actions you develop something that no pros/cons list can give you: agency.
You move from black and white thinking to a full menu of options. You stop asking "should I stay or should I go?" as if those are the only two choices. And you start to separate who you are from what you do.
Even if you ultimately decide to stay in a role that isn't perfect, you can do so on purpose, not by default or out of fear. You can look at your situation clearly, name your reasons, and make a conscious choice you can stand behind.
That's what happened for Nicole. She moved from feeling selfish and completely stuck, to obsessive to-do lists and road maps, to learning to tolerate and settle, to finally seeing her decisions through the lens of what she genuinely cared about, herself included. Through coaching, she moved through each level and developed the awareness to see which perspective was running the show at any given moment.
Here's how she described the shift:
"I have strong conviction that this will be OK. Coaching gave me the dedicated time to actually think things through. I noticed how much I can second-guess my decisions and how I get in my own way. That awareness changed everything."
She went from jittery, reactive, and exhausted to calm, boundaried, and clear. She started taking her kids to school in the mornings. She carved out time to read and volunteer. And she stopped logging back on at 8pm.
She didn't quit her job on day one of coaching. Rather, she developed an excellent exit plan and stopped letting fear make decisions for her.
Ready to Stop Letting Fear Run the Show?
If you recognize yourself in Nicole's story, or in the Gremlin's voice, or in the endless pros/cons list that never quite leads anywhere, you’re in the right place. And though it may feel like it today, you're not stuck, and you are not alone.
Understanding how your thoughts and feelings are holding you back is the first step toward finally making a decision.
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And if you're curious about what this kind of coaching actually looks like, start here: What Is Coaching? And How to Know If It's Right for You.