Leaving a career you hate is a scary decision. There are a lot of what-ifs that go through our minds when considering the pros and cons. Sometimes, our fears can convince us to stay where we are. Is the fear of making a wrong move keeping you stuck in a job you hate? In this article, I’m sharing three specific categories of what the fear of making a wrong move comes down to.
I often hear people talking about how unhappy and unsatisfied they are with their careers, but they continue to stay in them out of fear of making a wrong move. I have found that this fear comes down to three things: a lack of confidence, worry about rejections, and loss of intolerance. Let’s dive into these three things.
A lack of confidence might sound pretty self-explanatory. But how does it show up when you’re doing work you don’t enjoy and choose to stay in that job despite knowing you hate it? When you’re so afraid of going somewhere else, it is just as bad as what you are doing now. The longer you stay in an unfulfilling career, the lower your confidence in yourself becomes. You lose confidence in your abilities, your self-esteem starts going down, and you even start to question if you are the problem. Maybe I’m not as skilled as they have said. You start internalizing the messages of unfulfillment that started externally but have become internal. It might start with a loss of confidence in your abilities as it relates to work, but then it becomes a loss of confidence in your ability to make decisions for yourself.
If this is you, I want to challenge you to think about all your decisions up until now. Were you making those decisions from a place of intentionality, or were you making those decisions simply to leave a toxic and impactful place? What often happens is that we get unhappy at a place and then jump to the next one. If you didn’t start with wanting to make an intentional decision about your career, then you aren't going to end up in another job or opportunity that is aligned with who you are because that was never your goal in the first place. Your goal was just to escape a toxic place. And you achieved your goal.
When you look at the decisions you’ve made in the past and how they got you to where you are now, you start to feel like maybe you don’t know how to make good decisions for yourself. Under that is the fear of, “If I go somewhere else, will I have the skills to be successful?” What if you can’t live up to the expectations, or you can’t thrive or learn what you want to learn to be successful? Leaving can feel like a failure because you have invested time and energy into your current path.
One thing I always try to remind women is that fulfilling work, by its very definition, is aligned with who you are. It’s aligned with your values, your interests, and your skills. And this is what I help women clarify in my program, Find Your Fulfilling Career. Your values and interests are not stagnant. What was important to you five years ago are not the same things that are important to you today. Who you were five years ago is not who you are today. If a fulfilling career path aligns with who you are, it stands to grow and evolve with you.
The two fears that drive a worry about rejection are the fear of starting over and the fear of age discrimination. Both of these fears can inherently feel like they could lead to rejection for you. If you were to start over, there is a fear of rejection. When you have been in a career for a long time, it can feel scary to start over because you have invested time, money, and energy into where you currently are. You worry that you are going to be a beginner again and that you are going to have to learn new skills. Can you really teach an old dog new tricks? That worry and fear will keep you stuck in a job you hate.
Most women have a hard time identifying their transferable skills. Your fear of starting over is really tied to your inability to articulate the skills you already have for a different context. Your brain tells you that for you to pivot, you will have to start from the bottom again. But you don’t have to start over. Not all the time. Sometimes, you might, depending on where you choose to go, but most times, you probably have more skills than you think you do, and you don’t have to start over. What you really need to do is understand how to identify your transferable skills.
I want to call them to the surface so you can identify them and determine what is keeping you in a job you hate. We need to identify if our fears are factual or not. Fears are emotions, which means they are valid but not always factual.
The second thing I mentioned with fear or rejection was age discrimination. When you’ve been working on your career path for a long time and want to transition, you might be worried that people will think you are too qualified to start again. You worry about how people will perceive your decision to pivot with all of the years of experience you have. Maybe they will wonder if something is wrong with you because you are trying to pivot at this stage in your career. Or you might worry that people will think you are too old to learn new skills, new technologies, or new processes. The fear of how people will view your age can keep you stuck in an unfulfilling career because you are afraid you will get rejected if you try something new.
This is a big one that I really want you to learn how to navigate loss. We don’t know how to manage our grief until we experience it for the first time. When we switch jobs, we’re losing more than just a job. We are losing part of our identity. You might be losing a source of your financial security or your social network and community. It can feel like you are losing so much of who you are. We need to learn how to navigate that loss and especially divorce our identity from our careers. If we don’t, we will keep staying in toxic work situations.
I want you to consider whether you are willing to spend another five to eight years in a job that you hate and is making you miserable. Are you ready to look up in eight years and realize you’re still in a position that you knew five years ago was not right for you? You can only decide for yourself if it is worth it to stay because you are afraid of making the wrong move, afraid of losing money, afraid of age, afraid of all these things, knowing that that place is killing you slowly. So ask yourself which is bigger, your fear or desire to be fulfilled. Is fear of making a wrong move keeping you stuck in a job you hate?
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