In Career Transition? Where Do You Look First? 🤔
When you know it’s time for something to change — a new role, a different direction , where do you look first?
Most of us look straight out. Job boards, who’s hiring, what’s realistically going. It feels responsible. And there’s nothing wrong with it, except for what it quietly does to you. Before you’ve even asked what you want, the market’s handed you the options. You’re choosing off a menu someone else wrote.
I did it that way round for years. I chased what I thought the world wanted from me, the sensible next thing, without stopping to ask what moved me. Each move looked like progress. And each time, a year in, the same flatness would find me again. You keep choosing from the same menu that gave you the role you’re leaving, so you rebuild it. Same job, different logo. You change everything except the thing that was actually wrong.
The job was never going to tell you who you are. The confidence, the clarity, they were never the employer’s to give. They were always yours. You’d just gone looking in the one place they were never kept.
So there’s another place to look, and it’s the one most of us skip. Not what’s out there, what’s in here ?. What do I actually want ? Not what’s impressive, or safe, or easy to explain over dinner. What would I move toward, if the wanting were allowed to count.
Here’s what I do. Before a decision, I put my attention on my chest, into my heart, and I listen to what it’s telling me. That’s it. It’s not mystical. It’s just refusing to let the head make the whole call. You’d be surprised what’s been waiting underneath the sensible answer you’ve given yourself for years.
Two things stop people here. Some are afraid to listen at all, because if you heard it clearly, it might ask you to change something you’ve built your whole life around keeping stable. So you keep the volume down. Others hear it perfectly well. They just don’t believe they’re allowed to give it to themselves.
That second one is the quiet heart of it. You don’t become worthy of what you want and then receive it. You give it to yourself, as a gift, and in the giving you’re already saying your own life is worth something. That isn’t selfishness. It’s refusing to keep putting yourself last.
Then you take it out to meet the world. Going inward first doesn’t mean following your heart off a cliff. The inner work gives you the direction. The world gives you the terrain. You need both, and in that order. In my experience, things tend to move once you commit, but they wait on the inner work. It’s almost as though the world is waiting for you to go first.
A lot of people are standing at this threshold now, or will be before long. Whatever brought you here, your own choice or someone else’s, what happens next is a response. And the response is yours.
So before you press the repeat button, what’s the quieter part of you, the one you usually talk straight over, actually asking for?