702: Don’t Choose the Wrong Career: What Staying Is Quietly Costing You (And How to Avoid the Same Mistake Twice)

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: 85% of people are stuck in the wrong career doing work that they don't like. And on average, they're going to spend 90,000 hours of their life doing it, more time than with their kids, their partner, and their friends all combined. That time is something they will never get back. Most people, however, won't do anything about it, not because they don't want to, but because they don't know what to do.

[00:00:24] But what are the hidden costs of staying in the wrong career, and how do they quietly compound for years without you realizing those costs? And most importantly, how do you choose differently?

[00:00:34] 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 get to thrive more often.

[00:00:46] Jackie is a healthcare professional. She's also been a leader in healthcare. She knows the signs of physical decline better than most people, so when it started happening to her, she couldn't ignore it.

[00:00:57] Jackie Meister: I did get promoted to manager, but that's when I worked with this toxic leader. My nervous system was just off-kilter. That's when my health started to go downhill a little bit. It was just like a perfect storm.

[00:01:08] Scott Anthony Barlow: And then things got worse.

[00:01:10] Jackie Meister: I think I gained, like, 40 pounds in four months. It was just a wake-up call, and so I really focused on my health. I focused on, you know, sleep, nutrition, got exercise, did all the things. It took a good three years to recover from, I would say.

[00:01:28] Scott Anthony Barlow: Three years of her life recovering from the physical damage of being in the wrong career, the headaches that won't go away, the weight that starts adding up, the nervous system that never settles down, the way that you can't quite fall asleep because your brain won't stop running.

[00:01:42] What happens in your career eventually shows up in your body and every place else, every single time. But here's what happened when she finally got it right.

[00:01:52] Jackie Meister: I got out of all of those things and realigned myself, and now know that I made a good fit with my home, out of an unhealthy relationship, and in a job that I absolutely love, and I have never had more energy. The weight just came off. It was just, I know that that was the underlying issue.

[00:02:13] Scott Anthony Barlow: The weight just came off. It wasn't magic, and certainly not because she started a new diet or found a new workout, but because she fixed the career fit. The takeaway here, when what you're spending your time and investing your time in is a bad fit for you, your body knows, and it's been telling you.

[00:02:31] The exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix, the stress that weekends don't touch, that part is not normal. And you don't burn out from working hard, you burn out from working hard in a career that is not a fit. This is where most people get trapped. They stay in the wrong career because they believe it's just the easier choice that keeps everything stable.

[00:02:54] Good salary, decent benefits, flexibility. They've got what most people would call a good situation. However, walking away from that feels reckless. But here's what most people don't see. The safest looking career move is often the most dangerous one, long-term.

[00:03:11] That's what our client Vivi had. 12 years at the same financial services company. She had good salary, supportive colleagues, the flexibility to visit her family in Brazil every year.

[00:03:22] Vivi Robadey: I knew I had the job that allowed me to do the things that were important to me. So why was I so unhappy?

[00:03:32] Scott Anthony Barlow: That question I think is one of the most ominous things that I've heard someone say. She had a list of good job boxes checked, and it still felt wrong because of the flexibility, because the thing that she couldn't afford to lose had become a cage.

[00:03:46] The company kept growing, but the work kept shrinking. More micromanaging, less freedom, less room to actually create anything. They put her in a box, and it kept getting smaller. The role she signed up for slowly disappeared and got replaced by something that she never would have chosen. But she stayed because those other things were good, the salary, the benefits, and leaving felt like throwing all of that away.

[00:04:10] And every year she stayed, she got more entrenched, more comfortable on paper, and more hollow inside. She was 40, applying for jobs that she didn't fully want just to have an exit. She was telling herself stories that her English wasn't good enough, that being a woman and a minority in finance made her less hireable.

[00:04:27] The golden handcuffs weren't just a salary, they were a set of beliefs overall that were keeping her stuck. She gave herself one full year to figure out what she actually wanted, and the fun thing here is actually she left, ended up leaving on her birthday.

[00:04:41] Vivi Robadey: The biggest challenge for anyone in a situation that you're trying to find for your next step is when you do finally found a job that you believe it's a great fit, you will do everything to convince them that you are the right person.

[00:04:58] But you leave outside the equation something, which is really important, they need to convince you that they also are a good fit for you.

[00:05:07] Scott Anthony Barlow: Here's what most people assume and are scared of. They assume that career change means a pay cut. That's actually one of the biggest fears we hear over and over. But our data tells a completely different story.

[00:05:17] Over 85% of our clients who are accepting new roles do not actually take a pay cut. Many end up earning significantly more. The financial risk isn't in leaving, it's in staying, because every year you spend building a career in the wrong direction is a year you could have spent building one in the right direction, and that gap doesn't stay the same.

[00:05:36] It gets wider. So that's the financial cost. The golden handcuffs, yeah, they're real in a lot of cases. But there's a third option that does the most damage because you don't see it happening. The compounding career cost, well, it's the hardest to see because it's not about how you feel or what you're earning, it's about who you're becoming.

[00:05:56] Every promotion, every project, every year of experience is building your professional identity around work that was never the right fit in the first place. And the further you go, the harder it feels to change direction. Most people don't choose their career. Their career chooses them by default, and then one day you look up and realize that you've spent a decade getting really good at something that you never actually wanted to be doing in the first place.

[00:06:18] Our client, Paul, knows this territory very well. He's an executive communications leader who spent years building exactly that kind of career– titles, prestige, senior roles, all of it. From the outside, everything looked like success.

[00:06:33] Paul Ichilcik: There are a lot of things that tick the boxes, but I started to see I was spending 80 or 90% of my time doing something that I didn't enjoy and that didn't actually gel with my skills.

[00:06:43] Scott Anthony Barlow: 80 to 90% of his time. Now, think about that for a second. For every 10 hours he is working, maybe one or two of them felt like the right fit. The rest, going through the motions. As well, he kept moving though. More senior titles, those bigger opportunities, but for so much time he never stopped to ask if he was actually chasing the thing that he wanted.

[00:07:02] And then came the private equity job. Great compensation, high prestige, exactly the kind of move that looks right on paper. He left in eight weeks. Eight weeks because he hadn't done the work of understanding what was actually needed, not just what looked impressive. And we'll come back to what changed for Paul here in a moment.

[00:07:18] But first, I need to address something that almost everyone gets wrong. There are two things most career advice completely ignores. First, what staying in the wrong career is actually costing you, that physical cost, the financial cost, those costs that quietly compound for years before you notice. And second, exactly how to choose the right career. Because most people who leave the wrong career, they almost always make the same mistake twice.

[00:07:43] They end up in another version of the same thing that they don't enjoy, another job that makes them either dread Mondays or maybe even it's a great situation, but it's not a fit. Paul did what most people do. He left without knowing what he actually wanted and ended up in another wrong fit in eight weeks, and that's the pattern we see over and over.

[00:08:02] People leave reactively, they look for something that doesn't feel as bad, and three years later, they're right back where they started. The problem was never just the job. The problem was how they chose the next one. Something we've learned after working with literally thousands of people on career transitions is that the ones who land in the right career and stay, well, they're not the ones who search the hardest.

[00:08:24] They're the ones who got most specific the quickest, not about the job titles, not even about the industries, but about themselves. They answered a different question, not what job should I get or how can I make the most money or what industry should I go to, not even, you know, what job actually fits my experiences and how do I translate?

[00:08:44] But instead, they answered the question of, "What does the right career fit actually look like for me specifically?" We call this the Ideal Career Profile, and it's the difference between making a reactive decision and making a decision that serves you in all the areas of your life. So let's get into it.

[00:09:03] How do you actually choose the right career? It starts with what we call signature strengths. Most career advice and job search methods start with job titles or industries, or even salary ranges. Those are all the wrong starting point. The right starting point is understanding your tendencies and the things that you can't stop doing.

[00:09:23] Now, here's the distinction that changes everything. Strengths are not skills. Skills are things that you have learned to do. Strengths are what you were built to do. They're the combination of your natural wiring, your experiences, your tendencies, and talents, and how those have been developed or evolved over time.

[00:09:42] Gallup research shows that people who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be engaged at work. That's six times, by the way. That's a completely different experience of work.

[00:09:54] Our client, Jim, is an HR professional, someone who spent his whole career helping other people navigate work. He knew the language, he knew the frameworks, and when he needed to navigate his own career, he discovered that knowing about career strategy and actually doing the work for yourself and on yourself are two completely different things.

[00:10:13] Jim King: When I was ending my last role, I had this feeling of, "Am I doing the right thing? Am I in the right field? Am I in the right type of industry, in the right company?" And for me, I really wanted to redefine myself, like, figure out who I am so I can show up authentically in interviews and working conversations.

[00:10:34] Scott Anthony Barlow: Jim started through the process of beginning to identify signature strengths, what actually energized him, not just what he's good at, by the way. He got specific about values, what you actually value, not just some arbitrary things on a page. Instead, he created what he calls his TIDES values.

[00:10:54] Jim King: My strengths are empathy, responsibility, input, belief, connectedness. My values are transparency, integrity, a strength and a value, development, empathy, and support.

[00:11:07] And looking for those things in my next role, I was able to authentically show up as myself when I was having these conversations, and it led to the clarity led to confidence, and that just pointed me in the right direction for the right opportunities for me.

[00:11:22] Scott Anthony Barlow: Clarity equals confidence, and that confidence came from knowing what he was built to do and how he wanted to invest his time.

[00:11:31] What all of these people had in common, they stopped waiting for certainty, and they stopped waiting for the perfect moment, the perfect plan, the perfect proof that it was going to work. They decided the next chapter was worth figuring out, and then they started. None of them started over. They all built on something that they already had.

[00:11:46] They just finally pointed in the right direction. The question here isn't whether you can afford to make a career change at this point in life. The question is whether you can afford not to.

[00:11:54] By the way, if you wanna go deeper on this and you want more stories or even the research for why we help people systematically make changes the way that we do, well, you can get the Happen To Your Career book. You can actually get the audiobook for free.

[00:12:08] It walks you through how to figure out what's next and how we help people make the change without even blowing up your life. For a limited time, you can actually grab that at happentoyourcareer.com/audiobook. To make it even easier, just click into the show notes in the description. I'll see you next time right here on Happen To Your Career. Adios. I'm out