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Career Rut, Stagnation, or Burnout: How to Get Unstuck, Change Careers, and Find Meaningful Work · Happen To Your Career - Meaningful Work, Career Change, Career Design, & Job Search

• 0:00
  Scott Anthony Barlow: You're good at your job. You've spent years proving it. And somehow, that's exactly why you're stuck. You've thought about making a change, probably more than once, but the weeks still keep coming and you're still there– still delivering, still showing up, still waiting for something to finally shift. But here's what no one tells you.
• 0:00
  It's not the company. It's not the timing. It's not even you, as it turns out. There's actually three hidden reasons why high performers stay stuck, and until you see them, you can't fix them. No one ever showed you what the actual path looks like until now.
• 0:00
  I'm Scott Anthony Barlow, and this is Happen To Your Career where we share real conversations with real people and walk you through how to build the life you want and design your career so that you can thrive.
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  We're unpacking the three hidden reasons you feel stuck, not the obvious ones, not the ones you've already thought of, but the ones working against you underneath the surface, the ones you don't even realize are there. And for each one, I'm gonna give you one specific thing that you can do to start moving forward.
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  But stay with me through the end because the last one, well, turns out this is the one people never see coming. It's the one that changes everything. Let me paint a picture for a minute here. You're good at your job. Really good. You've built a reputation. People rely upon you. You're the one that they call when things get complicated.
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  And from the outside, everything looks great, like it looks like a good job. But between all the meetings, the deliverables, and the responsibility, there's still this quiet voice that keeps saying this. "This isn't it." And the worst part, you feel like you shouldn't feel it this way. Yeah. Let me say that again. You feel like you shouldn't feel this way.
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  You've got a great salary, a title that took years to earn, team that depends on you. Who are you to want something different? Okay, so we hear this almost word for word, constantly.
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  Now I want you to meet Louise McNee because she described it perfectly. We featured her on a past a podcast episode after we worked with her to make a change, but she'd spent over 15 years in business operations and finance moving up steadily, respected at every single company that she'd worked for. But here's what she told us about what was actually happening on the inside.
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  Louise McNee: You know, you just tell yourself, "suck it up." You know, you kind of just, you just, you know, you're in a really good position compared to other people. You know, your salary is great. You're working for big name companies. You've had progression, you know.
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  When you go and speak to people, it's taken me a long time to kind of be able to be proud of my achievements and be able to sell them to people rather than underplaying them.
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  So it kind of like, "oh, just what are you complaining about? This is just... You've got it all. Don't... Just get over it. It just must be a phase that you're going through."
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  Scott Anthony Barlow: And then in the same breath, she said something that I think is even more important.
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  Louise McNee: And then the other side of that is I just really did not know what another option was or what I wanted. And that was one of the hardest things, and I did not know if there was another career out there for me. I did not know. I didn't know how to get out of it, so I just stayed in it.
• 0:03
  Scott Anthony Barlow: Two things happening at once. Two extremes. "I shouldn't complain", and, "I have no idea what else there is." Here's what's fascinating about that. Psychologists actually have a name for this. It's called cognitive dissonance. The mental tension you feel when two conflicting beliefs exist at the same time.
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  In this case, my life looks successful and, you know, people would want this. And also something is deeply wrong. It's difficult for your brain to hold both of those things comfortably. So instead of resolving the tension by acting, most people manage it by going numb, by staying busy, by telling themselves it's just a phase.
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  Well, it turns out, it's not just a phase, and I don't think you needed me to tell you that. You probably already know it. That combination, the guilt of wanting more, it's one of the most common places high performers get stuck, and almost no one talks about it because from the outside there's nothing to talk about.
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  And that's actually why it's so isolating. You're probably the type of person that doesn't want to complain, feels gratitude towards, you know, what you have in the first place and are not reconciled with all of this together. So being stuck doesn't mean that you failed. It just means the path that got you here is not the path that's going to get you where you actually want to go in the future.
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  And in the years that we've been doing this work since 2013, helping people navigate real career changes to work that fits while we see those same root causes underneath being stuck over and over again, and almost every story maps onto at least one of them. But here's three that we see the very most.
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  Number one, you built your career around skills that drain you. There's another concept in psychology called 'Satisficing'. It was coined by Nobel Prize winning psychologist Herbert Simon, and it describes something every single one of us has done. Satisficing means a blend of satisfying and sufficing. It's what happens when you make the best decision available to you, given what you know and what you can see in front of you. What's within reach at that moment? Not the optimal decision, but the good enough one.
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  And at 22, 25, even 30 satisficing is exactly what you're supposed to do. You take the job that pays well. You follow the advice of people that you respect. You move into the field that makes sense given your degree, your circumstances, your options. None of that is wrong necessarily. It's all actually very reasonable.
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  But when nobody tells you about satisficing decisions, is that they compound every promotion, every raise, every title deepens your investment in a path that was chosen by a version of you who didn't yet know what you actually wanted.
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  And then the more successful you become, the further you travel down a road that was never truly yours to begin with. Until one day, you look up and realize you've built an entire career on skills and experiences that are genuinely impressive and, maybe even genuinely exhausting for you. Okay, so here's why.
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  Researchers Martin Seligman, huge fan of Seligman's work and Marcus Buckingham, two of the most cited names in positive psychology, drew a distinction that most people never hear until it's almost too late. Skills are learned capabilities, things you got good at through training, repetition, and effort.
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  Strengths are something different entirely. Strengths are talents and tendencies that energize you when you get the opportunity to leverage them or use them. The work that makes time disappear that you do, even if nobody was watching because you can't stop it. Here's the critical part. You can skill build your way into a career that depletes you entirely.
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  The problem isn't that you weren't good at what you chose. The problem is that you spent years, maybe decades, getting exceptionally good at those areas that were never actually fully in your strengths. And the better you got, the more the world rewarded you for it. And the more that you were rewarded, the deeper the trap became.
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  This is how pigeonholing happens, by the way. Positive psychologists call the distance between your skills and your strengths, the competence fulfillment gap. And it is completely invisible from the outside, which is frustrating. It's exactly why nobody around you understands why you're not fully fulfilled or why you're not happy, because half the time you don't fully understand it yourself.
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  I want you to meet Vicki Meng. And by the way, if you've listened to the podcast for quite a while, you may have heard her episode in the past. She had a master's degree in accounting, her CPA years of climbing in corporate finance. Every objective measure that said she was winning, but here's what she told us.
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  Vicky Meng: Accounting, even though I did so much education in that field has never really felt like the field for me. It was more of a family culture background influence. But what was sad about it was that I knew accounting wasn't for me, at the same time, I had no other passion.
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  Scott Anthony Barlow: That is satisficing in its purest form. She made a reasonable decision for who she was then, followed the path that made sense, skill built her way into a career that looked like success from the outside, and felt that depletion from the inside. The promotions kept coming. The fulfillment gap kept widening. Here's the just absolute mind bending part. Being promoted doesn't mean you're in the right place.
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  It just means that someone felt you were exceptionally good at the place that you're in. And until you close that gap, until the work matches, not just your skills, but your actual strengths, no amount of success is going to make that stuck feeling go away. Let's shift.
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  Reason number two, fear has been making your decisions for you. How many times have you thought seriously about making a change? We started researching, maybe even talked to somebody about it and then quietly put it back on the shelf. And if you're being honest, probably more than once, probably more than a few times. I've definitely done that over the years. It's part of the reason why we have a company now.
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  But here's the thing. Fear is rational. You've built something real. You have a team, maybe even that depends on you. You have a life, a mortgage, a family, reputation, built around where you are. And the idea of disrupting all of that doesn't just feel risky. For someone who has worked as hard as you have, it can feel almost irresponsible.
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  And here's what we've seen happen again and again and again with the people that we work with. The fear of making the wrong move keeps people in the wrong situation far longer than any actual bad decision ever would. By the way, Katie told us this directly. She had outgrown her company and she knew she needed to leave, but here's what kept her.
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  Katie Kalchman: I'm loyal to a fault. I think it's one of my problems. And I just would feel, you know, not only like as an employer, but like as friend to kind of say, 'Thanks. See ya!' I just feel bad. But I know what, sometimes you have to be selfish and look out for yourself, and that's where I'm kind of at the point to that.
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  Scott Anthony Barlow: Loyalty to her team, responsibility to the people who depend on you, not wanting to leave them in a difficult spot. These are not small things. They're real. And for high performers especially, they run deep, but they become the walls of the cage. And the longer you stay, the more normal the cage starts to feel.
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  Reason number three, you don't know what you want and you haven't admitted it yet. This one is the hardest to say out loud. It's also the one that almost nobody sees coming. Most people who feel stuck don't have a clear picture of what they're moving toward. They know what they're moving from. That part is actually much easier.
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  They know that they don't want to do this. They can even point out some of those pieces. But they haven't done the work yet to figure out what they actually want next with high specificity, than staying in something you're tolerating, but comfortably familiar. Here's what's happening psychologically.
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  There's a specific term for this too, and I want you to hold onto this. Psychologists call it identity foreclosure. I actually love this one. And it is what happens when your sense of self becomes so tightly wrapped around your career, your title, your company, and your professional reputation, that the idea of changing it doesn't just feel risky, it feels like a threat to who you fundamentally are.
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  Think about it this way. If someone asks you right now to describe yourself, how quickly does your job or career, or maybe even job title, how quickly does that come up? For most high performers, the answer is pretty quick. Because over years of building, delivering and being recognized for what you do, the line between what you do and who you are quietly disappears.
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  And that's exactly where identity foreclosure does its most damage. Because it's not just that you don't know what you want, it's that your brain is actively protecting you from finding out. It's this ridiculous loop asking, "what do I actually want?" Threatens the identity that you've spent decades building.
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  So your nervous system literally shuts the question down before you can even begin to answer it. And furthermore, it feels justified. There's a second layer though. Remember satisficing? Making good enough decision based on what is available, well, most people don't realize that they're satisficing their current situation to staying is its own satisficing decision.
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  It's the path of least resistance. The option that requires the least disruption. The brain frames it as a safe choice, and it actually, the brain doesn't even look at it as a choice. But it is. It is a choice. So you end up with this cognitive dissonance working against you from two directions at once.
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  "I know something needs to change", pulling one way, "and I can't imagine what that looks like", pulling the other, and in the middle of that tension, most people don't act. They manage, they cope, they wait.
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  I want you to meet Kristen Rocco. She was burned out in a marketing role. She was pretty exhausted. And when we asked her what she was curious about, here's what she said.
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  Kristen Rocco: I don't know. I don't know what I'm curious about because I was just so focused on getting through every day and then trying to, you know, relax and power myself, but for the next day that I really didn't spend enough time thinking about all of those other things. Right?
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  Scott Anthony Barlow: She wasn't incurious. She wasn't directionless. Her identity foreclosure and her satisficing were working together to keep her exactly where she was by making curiosity about the future feel inaccessible.
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  Okay. This starts to get pretty convoluted really quick. But Louise, remember her from earlier? Well, she described what that state actually feels like from the inside.
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  Louise McNee: It's just hard to kind of tell people that that's how you feel almost every minute of every day. And I felt like my energy, it is just taken all of my energy just to get through the day, nevermind thinking about what I wanted to be doing and how to get out of it. That was way past me.
• 0:14
  Scott Anthony Barlow: We call this the stuck cycle, and it shows up in many different ways. The role drains your energy. The drained energy triggers identity foreclosure. The identity foreclosure makes it impossible to imagine something different, and the inability to imagine something different keeps you satisficing. Choosing the good enough option of staying over and over again without even realizing you're doing it. And then it compounds.
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  Every day you stay, it gets a little harder to see the door. It's the perfect storm. But here's what I want you to hear. Feeling stuck is not a personality flaw. It is a design problem, and design problems have solutions. So here are three things you can do to end the stuck cycle and move forward in your career change journey.
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  Number one, stop looking for your passion and start looking for your pattern. If someone has ever told you to follow your passion, flag that advice as incomplete. Here's what actually works. Look for your pattern, instead. Go back through your entire career, even the early stuff, find the moments when you were most energized, not the most praised, not the most successful, most energized.
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  What were you actually doing in those moments, those time periods? What problems were you solving? Who were you with? What did the environment feel like? Write these things down. Get them out of your head, on paper, on purpose, on a document or digital document. You're not looking for a job title. You're looking for a set of context, a set of conditions.
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  Because when you can describe those conditions and that context under which you do your best work and feel most alive, you can start taking those clues and evaluating every opportunity against those conditions. That's a far smarter filter than asking, "Do I feel passionate about this industry?"
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  Louise did exactly this. When she started working with us, she didn't immediately go hunting for a new job. She started identifying the specific conditions she needed– the culture, the flexibility, what flexibility even means to her, the kinds of problems she'd be solving, the kinds of people that she actually wanted to spend time around and invest time into.
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  She had real conversations. She actually interviewed companies, maybe even more than they interviewed her. And when a role at a radio station came up, she could evaluated against her actual list. That clarity didn't come from sitting still and thinking harder. It came from doing the work of identifying the pattern first.
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  The second thing you can do, design an experiment, not a leap. Most people think about career change as binary. Stay in the misery, you know, or leap into the unknown and hope for the best. This is a false choice at best. Between staying and leaping, there is a third option. Designing experiments. An experiment is a small, intentional, low risk, often low lift way to test a hypothesis.
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  The second thing you can do, design an experiment, not a leap. Most people think about career change as binary. Stay in the misery, you know, or leap into the unknown and hope for the best. This is a false choice at best. Between staying and leaping, there is a third option. Designing experiments. An experiment is a small, intentional, low risk, often low lift way to test a hypothesis.
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  Now, there's a concept in cognitive behavioral psychology, so called, behavioral activation, and is developed by researcher Peter Lewinsohn, and later expanded through decades of clinical research. The core finding is this. "Action doesn't follow motivation. Motivation follows action." Even if you've heard that before, you probably know that most people are waiting to feel ready before they move.
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  They're waiting for clarity before they act. But clarity doesn't come from thinking harder. It comes from doing something. Anything, sometimes, that generates real information, at least. That's what designing an experiment does. It introduces a feedback loop. For example, if you were to say, I think I might wanna move into a completely different industry.
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  I would challenge you to first identify some industries that might match up with what you know about yourself, and then we would design an experiment around that thought. Who in that industry can you have one conversation with this week, even a short 15 minute conversation, to learn more about it? And what about next week? How can we start getting these inputs to really learn about what this is like, and using that feedback and inputs to assess what you know about yourself and say, "yeah, I do think that can fit", or an even better scenario might be, "no, I actually don't think that fits. Here's what I think I want instead." All are good options.
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  Another example would be, if you were to say, "I think I might be interested in working for myself." Okay, great. But can you take on one small project on the side to find out what that actually feels like before you build a plan around quitting your day job? Within these experiments, you're not deciding your whole future. You're gathering small sets of data and replacing assumptions with actual evidence.
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  Each experiment that generates real information builds the confidence to run the next one, and you get better and better and more accurate information along the way. But here's the fun thing that happens when you start running experiments. The stuck feeling, well, those feelings start to lift, not because you've solved everything, but because you're in motion.
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  And motion creates momentum. And momentum, over time, when paired with feedback loops through experimentation, those create clarity.
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  Number three, I want you to begin telling a different story about your experience. It's something that doesn't get talked about anywhere close to enough. The story you're telling about your past, the one that feels like limitation is not an objective summary of your career.
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  It's a symptom of everything we've talked about today. When identity foreclosure takes hold, it doesn't just make it hard to imagine the future, it rewrites how you see the past. Your experience gets filtered through the lens of the identity that you built, and anything that doesn't fit that identity gets minimized. It gets dismissed or hidden. Often, without you even realizing you're doing it.
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  So you end up leading with your job titles and your industries instead of your actual strengths or you describe where you've been instead of what you're capable of. Most stuck people are telling a story about their past that boxes them in without thinking, we might say things like, "I've only ever worked in one industry." "I've been in the same company for 15 years." You might not know how to present that. "My background is too narrow to go anywhere else."
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  These may feel like facts, but they're really just stories, and they're stories being told by an identity that's trying to protect itself. Here's what changes when you start closing the competence fulfillment gap that we talked about earlier. When you stop leading with your skills, what you've been trained to do, and start leading with your strengths, which are what actually energizes you, the story transforms entirely.
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  Most importantly here, I wanna point out something that gets missed 'cause it's subtle, is that when you are telling stories, whether it's in an interview or a coffee conversation, or even the other informal interaction, then when people are hiring you, they're hiring you for your strengths, which are the essence of who you are, as opposed to hiring you for your skills, which we already know how that goes.
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  The same career history that felt like a limitation suddenly now is evidence of exactly the kind of value that is hard to find and harder to replicate. Vicki, who we met earlier, well, she spent months ashamed of her experience and convinced that working at a small, loosely structured company made her look less credible to hiring managers.
• 0:21
  And this was coming out in the interviews. I literally had a conversation with her at one point. And she didn't realize how this was coming across in interactions. Her identity foreclosure was telling her that the past didn't measure up. Her satisficing was keeping her in that story because challenging it felt too exposed.
• 0:21
  And then having that feedback and having that visibility shifted so much. She stopped describing the past and started describing her value in a very different way. Two weeks after she made that shift, just two weeks, she had a signed offer for the role that she wanted. Same resume. Totally different story. Completely different outcome.
• 0:21
  This is what happens when you stop satisfying your narrative, when you let identity foreclosure loosen its grip, and when you start telling the story of your strengths and capabilities instead of the story of your skills. So I wanna bring this together here. There's these three hidden reasons that make you feel stuck.
• 0:21
  Now you know what they are. The first, of course, is that you've built your career around skills that drain you. Or are no longer fitting for you. Not because you've made bad decisions, but because you've satisfies. You chose a good enough path for who you were then. And over time, that gap between your skills and your actual strengths widened into something that no promotion could close.
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  Second is that fear has been making decisions for you. Not loud dramatic fear, but quiet fear. The fear of disrupting what you've built, the fear of letting your team down. The fear dressed up as loyalty and responsibility that keeps you exactly where you are.
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  And third, the one that most people never see coming, that identity foreclosure has been running the show. And when your career becomes your identity, your brain will protect that identity at all costs, including the cost of never asking what you actually want.
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  But here's the good news. Every single one of these is a design problem and design problems have solutions. Find your pattern, not your passion. Design and experiment, not a leap. Start telling the story of your strengths and what lights you up. You can't think your way out of being stuck here. You have to act your way out.
• 0:23
  By the way, if you want additional help, we have a really wonderful resource in the form of our career change guide. You can actually go to our website. We'll put the link in the description and then you can go there, click. It's designed to help you understand how people get clear, how they get unstuck, how they discover what their ideal career actually can look like.
• 0:23
  That way, you can find meaningful well-paid work without starting over, and you can download your copy of the guide just by going in, clicking the link below. It's all in the show notes and description.
• 0:23
  Because here's the truth, stuck is not a destination. It's just a starting point. In the moment you take that first action, you stop letting your career happen to you and start happening to it. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow. This is Happen To Your Career. Let's go make this happen. Adios.