340: Change Career Direction Without Starting Over

If you have ever caught yourself thinking, “I don’t want to start over, but I can’t stay where I am,” you are not alone. Many high-performing professionals reach a point in mid-career where their success on paper no longer matches how their work feels in practice.

In this episode of The Mid-Career GPS Podcast, I challenge the assumption that you need to start over in order to move forward. Most mid-career professionals are not facing a starting-over problem. They are facing a repositioning problem. When you understand that distinction, your next move becomes much more strategic and far less overwhelming.

If you are feeling the tension between not wanting to start over and knowing you cannot stay where you are, this episode will help you reframe the problem and think more clearly and confidently about your next move.

In this episode, I discuss:

• Why mid-career professionals often feel stuck despite years of strong performance
• How a role can outgrow your professional identity and become overly tactical
• Why values shift toward impact, meaning, and leadership at mid-career
• How career capital can create the feeling of golden handcuffs
• The difference between “or” thinking and the “and” bridge strategy
• The hidden risks of staying too long in a role that no longer fits
• How stalled growth affects confidence, visibility, and professional energy
• How to separate facts from assumptions when self-doubt shows up

Join My Free Training: The Mid-Career Reset

If this conversation resonates with you, I invite you to join my upcoming free training called The Mid-Career Reset: Why Doing Great Work Is No Longer Enough at Mid-Career.

In this live training, I will show you how to move beyond relying on great work alone and start positioning yourself as a strategic leader who is seen, valued, and ready for what is next.

You can attend on either of the following dates:

• Tuesday, March 24 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern
• Wednesday, March 25 at 12:00 p.m. Eastern

Reserve your seat here:
 https://johnneral.com/webinar

If this episode resonated with you, please share it with a colleague or friend who may also be navigating their own mid-career crossroads.

Transcript

Welcome And Who This Is For

John Neral 0:10

Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Mid-Career GPS Podcast. I'm your host, John Narrell. This is the show for mid-career professionals who feel stuck, undervalued, or unsure what's next, and know that doing more isn't the answer. Here we focus on how you show up, how you make clear decisions, build influence, and take control of your career. So let's get started. Happy St. Patrick's Day to you. I gotta tell you, I am not a fan of corned beef. It was something I never liked eating as a kid. But that shamrock shake, that's still a darn good shake. So, however you choose to celebrate, I wish you all the best of luck, health, and prosperity on this happy St. Patrick's Day. So here's my question for you to get us started. Have you ever caught yourself saying something like this to yourself? I don't want to start over with my career, but I know I can't stay where I'm at. Let's face it, you have worked hard to get where you are, and you want to be organizationally loyal, but something about your work doesn't feel right anymore. Maybe the role no longer fits. Maybe you feel like you're not being utilized or leveraged in the way that you should be. Maybe you've been doing great work for years and you're still not getting the opportunities, visibility, or the promotion you expected. So now you're in this kind of strange place. It feels like professional or career limbo. And starting over feels reckless, but staying where you are feels exhausting. If you've been feeling that kind of tension in your career lately, my friend, you are not alone. I hear this from mid-career professionals all the time that say something simply doesn't feel right. But here's the truth I want to talk with you about today. Most people at mid-career are not facing a starting over problem. In this episode, I want to help you understand why that feeling is showing up for you and what you can begin doing about it so you can move forward with more clarity and confidence. So, first of all, why does this happen? Well, along our mid-career journey and our professional path, three dynamics I see typically happen. One is that your role has outgrown your professional identity. In other words, you are worth far more than what the job is where you're at. The job you once worked hard at and loved may no longer reflect who you are or who you are becoming. Think about it. Your responsibilities have changed, your leadership expectations have increased, you have more demands placed on you, and the work that you do feels more operational or tactical than it feels strategic or visionary. Another reason may be that your values have shifted. See, when we first start our career, we're looking for security. And let me just acknowledge that in this job market, we still want security. But in the early stages of our career, we just want to make sure we're doing good work and we're being retained by the organization. Maybe we're seeking a promotion early on. We want to establish some form of credibility. But at mid-career, when you have more experience, more skills, more leadership abilities and talents, your priorities now shift. And when they shift, they shift towards making greater impact, more influence, more visibility, more meaningful work, and more alignment with who you are professionally. And lastly, let's acknowledge how much career capital you have. You have worked hard at building your network, you have built relationships, you have an established brand that hopefully aligns with your reputation in a positive way. You have content expertise or organizational expertise, and you have knowledge within this arena you get to play day in and day out in. But there is an underlying fear. And that fear is you saying to yourself, if I'm not happy, if I'm not liking what I'm doing, and I change everything, will I lose all of this? I know this only too well because in my mid-career journey, when I was working as a middle school mathematics teacher and district mathematics coordinator, I wanted a bigger role. But that role was not available in the district where I worked because we weren't organizationally structured in that way. So I started looking for department chair positions and supervisory positions. And I knew that I had outgrown my role. And so I was trying to figure out what that was going to be. Now, what's really interesting about this whole story is that in the midst of all of this, I had an opportunity to accept a corporate job in a sales training, administrative type role. And it was a huge step away from what I was already doing. And I was thinking, oh my gosh, is this the person whom I'm becoming? Is this role really right for me? Now, I ultimately didn't take that job simply because the risks were too great in terms of the reward. It was a phenomenal position, and I'm sure I would have loved it and done well with it, but it didn't have the kind of security that I had as a tenured teacher and a tenured teacher who was excelling in his job. And so as I started looking for these other positions, I kept saying to myself, look, if I'm going to make this move, what do I gain and what do I lose? The big shift for me happened when I realized that I wasn't throwing anything away. I was merely repositioning myself. When we go through a period of career transition, our brains want to tell us that it is a complete restart. You might hear yourself or other people say, you're starting over fresh. You're starting this whole new chapter. You're not. You're merely continuing the story that you're writing about your career and reconfiguring or repositioning where you are at. For example, you might move toward a more strategic position. You may move from manager level thinking to director level thinking. Your experience that you have gained up until this point is now something you get to leverage. And you can leverage it when you're networking or you're interviewing for a position. Because a lot of times what happens is that we get caught in this and or type thinking. So stay with me for a minute. And or or think about the story you're telling yourself. Is this something that gets to be an and, or is it something that gets to be an or? For example, can I stay in my current job and get the skills necessary to make me more ready for that next level? I like what I'm doing, or do I have to go somewhere else in order for me to get the skills that I need? The or is what often feels like we're turning off the valve and shutting the water off on our career and not being able to make a change unless we say goodbye to everything that we had before. What I want to offer you is that there's an and to consider. The and is the bridge between where you are and where you want to be. And you make that bridge and you change the dynamic simply because of how you show up. Think about it. If you're considering making a career move this very moment or in the near future, how do you want to show up? When people tell me that they don't want to start over, they feel like they have too much to lose. What they're really saying is that they don't want to lose the progress they've already made. They've worked too hard and for too long to get where they want to be, and they're having trouble getting clarity about exactly what's going to be next. But one of the questions I often ask in the coaching relationship is for them to explain what the risks are of staying where they are. Essentially, if they're stuck. And so they begin to start questioning what's wrong. And their default is they start questioning, well, what's wrong with me? Their confidence starts to erode. So maybe they've applied for an internal promotion and didn't get it. And they're like, Well, that doesn't happen to me. Or they've put some resumes out there and have applied for some jobs and they're not getting any calls or invites to interviews, and they're saying to themselves, Well, that's not like me. Their confidence starts chipping away and it erodes. And they're not the ones confident professional that they used to be. In staying where they are and not growing, they get comfortable. And look, once again, in this job market, in this economy, comfortable can be a very, very great thing. But it also can come at a cost. The other cost here to consider is your visibility. When your growth stalls, you may become invisible. That person who just exists at that place on the org chart. Promotions don't come as often. Opportunities don't appear as frequently as they once did. And here's the kicker you start seeing other people around you pass you. They're the ones getting the promotions. They're the ones getting the high visibility project. They're the ones speaking up at the client meeting. The third cost, your energy drops. You stop showing up with the presence and the impact that wants to find you. People might even come to you and go, hmm, something's different. Are you okay? What's what's changed? And that's the real danger. Because you're quieting or dimming that expertise and light that only you can bring, that that I I call and often refer to as your genius. Because the longer you stay in a role that no longer fits you, the more it begins to shrink you. I'm not saying the solution here is you need to go get a job that's two levels above you in order to feel better about yourself. It's not that. It is about finding what the next step is going to be in your career and how you show up for it. And if you don't know what that is, that's where we can do some work and figure out exactly what that next step is going to be. Anytime I have a guest on the show, and I think now we're at episode 340. So I've had an opportunity to interview a lot of people on this show. And I hope you will check some of them out if you haven't already. But at the beginning of every interview, I asked my guest to describe for me what was their mid-career moment. That moment at mid-career that shaped who they are and what they do. When they realized something needed to change in their career. When you listen to me ask a guest that question, I want you to pay particular attention to what was going on for them. What was the fulcrum, the pivotal moment that shifted the weight to an opportunity to change rather than to stay where they are? So what if you had the space and the time? What if you gave yourself permission to really open up and explore, to reevaluate what success means for you right now? What's the job? Who are you working with? Who are you working for? What are you doing? How much money are you being made paid? What impact are you making? What if you could reposition your experience to start thinking about how to leverage those experiences and make some more intentional moves toward that next step? That next step that increases your career satisfaction and makes you feel better. How do you position yourself for what's next instead of reacting to what you are telling yourself is wrong? And when you're telling yourself what's wrong, I really want you to get clear as to whether or not that is truthful with a capital T because you have facts and evidence and proof to back it up, or it is truthful with a lowercase T, where you might be speculating or interjecting some assumptions about what that is. Look, the reality is we are nearing the end of quarter one. Hope it's not a strategy. Luck, even on this St. Patrick's Day and St. Patrick's Day week, if you happen to be listening to it during this time, luck is great. You can't bank on it. So then what happens? What can you do for yourself to take a step towards elevating your career to what that next step's going to be? Even, and I will offer you more importantly, finding ways to grow in your current role that sets you up for what's going to be next. So here's how I can help you. Next week, March 24th and 25th, I am hosting a free training. It is called the Mid-Career Reset: Why Doing Great Work is no longer enough at mid-career. And in this training, I will talk to you about why great performance alone stops leading to achievement at mid-career. That you cannot rely on just doing good work anymore to get by. You'll also learn how to reposition your experience so you are seen as strategic leadership and what it actually takes to create momentum in your career again. Because what worked for you early on is not going to work at mid-career. So if you've been feeling like you don't want to start over, but you also know you can't stay where you are, this training is specifically designed for you. If you are someone who wants to make a move in your career but not sure how to do it, this training is especially for you. If you are grateful you have a job and happy where you are, but would like to entertain something else, this training is exactly for you. So it's going to be Tuesday evening, March 24th, 7 p.m. Eastern. I'm going to rerun the same webinar on Wednesday, March 25th at noon Eastern. And even if you can't attend live, you're going to get a replay. You're going to get a replay for a limited time. And you can do all this by checking the show notes or going to my website, johnnerrill.com forward slash webinar, and you will see all information about the webinar there and sign up for it. Okay. So if you've ever been to one of my trainings before, you know that I always leave time at the end for QA. I'm going to do the same thing here. This is a live webinar. You are going to get me live on Zoom. Nothing is recorded. Obviously, you get the replay. It's going to be a recording. Um, but you're going to get me, and I'm going to be there for you to really help you dig in more specifically to what the heck is going on at mid-career and how to navigate through it with greater impact, more visibility, more effectiveness, and a level of satisfaction you've been craving in your career. Okay? So johnnarrell.com forward slash webinar. If this episode resonated with you, do me a favor and share it with someone, please. Share with them, invite them to come to the webinar. It's a free webinar. Okay. Not going to cost you anything other than time. All right. So it's about 30, 40 minutes worth of content. And then we're going to do some QA afterwards for up to about an hour. All right. So I hope to see you there. Would love to have you there. Let's figure out what this next step for you is at mid-career. And you don't have to tear everything down in order to do it. What you do need to do is show up for it. And the first step, come to the webinar. Johnnarrell.com forward slash webinar. Check the show notes. Until then, my friends, remember this. You will build your mid-career GPS one mile or one step at a time. And how you show up matters. Make it a great rest of your day. See you at the webinar. Bye for now. Thank you for listening to the MidCareer GPS Podcast. Make sure to follow on your favorite listening platform. And if you have a moment, I'd love to hear your comments on Apple Podcasts. Visit johnnarrell.com for more information about how I can help you build your mid-career GPS, or how I can help you and your organization with your next workshop or public speaking event. Don't forget to connect with me on LinkedIn and follow me on social at John Daryl Coaching. I look forward to being back with you next week. Until then, take care. And remember, how we show up matters.