3 steps to making better career decisions
There is a pattern I have come to recognise in the people I coach who feel stuck in their careers. They are rarely stuck because they lack options. More often, they are stuck because they have too many.
What can look like indecision on the surface is often something more complicated underneath. Over time, I have found it tends to show up in three areas.
1. The job
Choice can be a wonderful thing. Move to a competitor, change industry, reskill, go contracting, move country, take a career break, take extended parental leave — many of these options were not available to the same degree twenty years ago, and that should be celebrated.
But beyond a certain point, choice can start to feel less like opportunity and more like confusion. When the number of plausible options grows, so does the effort required to compare them.
2. The longer-term plan
Modern career narratives are full of worthy messages: do what you love, define your purpose, contribute to wider society. All well and good.
But these choices are now being made against a backdrop of technological change, a turbulent political landscape and genuine economic uncertainty. That quietly loads each decision with extra pressure: not just to make a good move, but to make the right one - the one that will still make sense in five years' time. That is a heavy burden for any decision to carry.
3. The movement tax
Then there is the cost of moving. Leaving behind hard-earned credibility and knowledge. Giving up the confidence that comes from knowing who to call and how to get things done. For many people, that includes practical things that matter enormously: balancing school pick-ups, knowing when to be in the office, or simply having the comfort of colleagues you know as people rather than names on a Teams screen.
Even when work-life balance still feels some way off, the idea of trading known frustrations for unknown ones can stop people exploring a change at all. The possibility that a new role might be better is often not enough to outweigh the cost of starting again.
There is a cruel twist here too. The longer people wrestle with a decision, the harder it often becomes. Sometimes things need to get well beyond a person's limit of tolerance before they are willing to give up what they know and make a move. In those moments of stress, confidence in their ability to relearn and progress starts to drain away, as does the energy to pursue something new.
So the decision stops being a career decision. It becomes identity, family, money, confidence and future self-worth, all rolled into one.
“The biggest obstacle to career change isn’t lack of knowledge. It’s letting go of the old professional identity.”
From seeking certainty to building clarity
Think about the last ten years of your career. Did it progress in the way you expected? If not, how realistic is it to expect the person you are today to map out the next ten with any real precision?
And besides, you will never know for certain whether a career choice is the right one. One path might have been better. It might also have been worse. And life has a way of interfering regardless - redundancy, illness, a difficult manager, changing family needs, shifts in your partner's career, or priorities that simply evolve over time.
That is why certainty is such a poor goal. No amount of thinking or worrying will produce a plan that removes ambiguity.
What is useful is having a clear process for weighing up the next step, managing the associated risks, and being ready to learn, adapt and have honest conversations that expose blind spots and assumptions once you have made a choice.
Three steps that help people make confident career decisions
If certainty about the next move is unavailable, clarity about what matters and perspective on how to adapt once reality shows up become much more valuable. In practice, I find three steps help.
Get clear on what matters in your life right now. Not what used to matter. Not what should matter on paper. What matters now. That might include money, ambition, flexibility, energy, location, family life, learning, health, identity or headspace. Different times call for different priorities.
Challenge the assumptions sitting underneath your options. You are unlikely to do this well on your own. Think carefully about who in your family, friendship group or working life can help you reflect honestly. Talk through both the opportunities and the risks. Ask yourself: what have I been treating as fact that may only be a story I have been telling myself?
Take a step in the intended direction. Change only happens by taking some risk. That does not mean making a reckless leap. It means moving, then continuing to ask questions of yourself and others, and paying attention to what comes back. If the move does not work out as planned, that does not automatically make it the wrong choice. It may be a necessary step towards where you eventually end up. Sometimes it is more useful to see a move as a stepping stone than a jump off a cliff.
Conclusion
The goal, then, is not certainty about whether it is the right move. It is confidence in your decision-making process - something you can return to again and again.
That is not drifting. It is how most good careers are built - including the ones that look neat and well planned in retrospect.
If you are sitting in that analysis loop and want a sounding board to help you explore your life goals, what you really want from your career, the assumptions that may be blocking your progress, and what you can do about them, that is a lot of what I do.
If you want to explore what a career coaching conversation with The Latitude Practice might offer, this is exactly the kind of work we help people with.