The Career Change Studiois your go-to podcast to help you design and create a new working life so that you can live the way you want and need in your next chapter. Join Certified Career Change Coach Dana Stevens for practical advice, inspiration, mindset shifts, and proven strategies to help you move on from unfulfilling work, explore new directions, and design a career that works for you.
Still Going Round in Circles? This Might Be Why...
•Dana Stevens•Episode 26
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Episode 26: A common thing Career Change Coach Dana Stevens hears from women who are thinking about coaching is:
"I just need to get my head sorted first. Then I'll be ready to start."
In this episode, Dana explores why that thought, though completely understandable, contains a loop that is very hard to break from the inside. The clarity you are waiting to have before you begin is not a starting point. It is one of the things the coaching process is specifically designed to produce. And waiting to have it before you start is, in the most literal sense, waiting for the result before allowing the process to begin.
If you have been going round in circles and wondering why you cannot seem to get clear, this episode will reframe that in a way that might change when you decide to start.
In this episode you will learn:
Why wanting to be prepared before you begin coaching is a completely understandable instinct, and why it works against you in this specific situation
The circular logic at the heart of waiting to have your head sorted before starting
What sorted actually looks like at the end of a coaching process, and where it comes from
Why the only way to reach the clarity you are waiting for is to stop waiting and start
Special thanks to @Lou_Greenaway_Music for the piano composition and performance.
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Hello, how are you? Today's episode was inspired by a conversation I had recently that I thought would be helpful to share. I'd been speaking with a woman who'd reached out after finding this podcast, and she was feeling really stuck in her job and knew it wasn't right for her anymore. And on our consultation call, I walked her through my structured career change process, and she said, It sounds exactly right. I've been going round in circles trying to figure out what to do next, and I know I need to do something different. I'm ready to make a change. And then she said something I've heard so many times, often in different ways, but it comes out like I'd love to work with you, but I just need to get my head sorted first. Then I'll be ready to start. And I want to tell you what I said to her because hopefully it's useful for you too. I asked, what do you think getting your head sorted would actually look or feel like? Right? What do you think getting your head sorted would actually look like? And importantly, how long have you been trying to do that on your own? Now there was a pause, and then she said, It's been a long time, a really long time. On and off. She'd been trying to do it for about two years, maybe a little bit more. And that is what I want to start with today. Because what she ended up describing was this idea that she needed to get some clearer, more sorted, more mentally organized place in her brain before she was ready to begin. And it's a really common idea that people have, but it's actually quite a self-defeating pattern. And I want to spend this episode really looking at it properly because I think understanding it could change a lot for you in terms of when you decide to start your career change journey. Let me start by saying firstly that this is not an irrational thought, right? It's not a sign that something's wrong with you. In fact, it's actually a rather responsible and quite considerate way of approaching things because logically your brain's thinking, coaching is an investment of time, of money, of energy, and if I'm going to make that investment properly, I want to make sure I'm in the right headspace to get the most of it. I don't want to waste the sessions being confused or unclear. I want to arrive with something clear to work with. I want to be fully ready. Now that sounds entirely sensible. And if you were preparing for almost any other kind of investment, it would be. If you're about to start studying for a course or something like that, you might want to start doing some background reading first, right? Get your head into it. If you were going to start a new exercise program, you might want to clear your schedule a little bit. Preparation before beginning is generally a good instinct to have. But there is something specific about this situation that makes the same logic work against you rather than for you. So hopefully I'm going to help you understand why. Because the thing that you're trying to prepare for, the thing you're trying to get ready, the mental clarity, the being sorted, having sorted thoughts, the sense of direction, it's not the kind of thing you can get to alone by just thinking harder or longer or more carefully. Because if it were, you would already be there. The fact that you've been going round in circles, if that's what you feel like, if that's what you resonate with, it's not a sign that you're almost ready. It's a sign that going around in circles is what happens when you try to do this without the right tools and support. Wanting to be prepared before you begin is a good instinct in most situations, but you cannot prepare your way to the very thing that coaching is here to help you build. So hopefully, if I show you a way of thinking about it, hopefully once you see it this way, you'll be hard to unsee. When someone says, I just need to get my head sorted before I start coaching, what they're really saying is I need to arrive at the outcome before I begin the process that creates it. So think about that for a moment. The clarity you are waiting for, the sense of direction in terms of what to do with your career with the rest of your life, the ability to think about your career without going around in circles, that is not a starting point. That's the destination. It's one of the things that my career change coaching process is specifically designed to take you to. It's the result, not the prerequisite. So waiting to have it before you start is kind of in the most literal sense, waiting for coaching to work before you've allowed the coaching to begin. And here's the thing about that loop: you can't break that thought pattern from the outside. You can't think your way out of circular thinking using the same thinking that is going round in circles. Those same thoughts will keep you in the same thought loop. You cannot get unstuck by doing more of the thing that has been keeping you stuck. Something needs to change, a new perspective, a new way of thinking needs to come in. A structured process needs to create a different kind of clarity than the one you've been trying to reach alone. That is not a failing, it's just how it works. You would not expect to be able to fix a complex technical problem in a field you've never been trained in simply by telling yourself to think about it for long enough. You'd get help from someone who knows what the tools are. This is the same thing. The woman I spoke to had been trying to sort her head out on her own for quite a long while and she hadn't managed it. Not because she was not intelligent or capable or thoughtful enough. She was, in fact, all of those things. She was actually incredibly self-aware. But because the tools she needed to do that thinking differently hadn't been given to her yet, that's why she was struggling, and they were not gonna arrive. Those tools weren't gonna magically arrive on their own. So you cannot think your way out of circular thinking using the very same thinking that's been going round in circles. Something from the outside needs to come in. That is what the life first career process is for. And I also just want to pick up on something here because I know that for you, maybe, or for lots of people at least that I talk to, the fact that they've been going round in circles for months or even years, that can start to feel like evidence of something. You can start to make it mean something, evidence that you're more confused than other people, evidence that you're somehow harder to help, that there is something particular about your situation that makes it more complicated, less likely to resolve than other people's. And I just want to push back on that with respect. Because you haven't been going around in circles because you're not trying hard enough or thinking carefully enough, or because your situation is too complicated to resolve. You've been going around in circles because you've been trying to do something that can genuinely feel difficult if you don't have the tools that make it possible. Think about what you've actually been attempting. You've been trying to figure out what you want in a world full of options and noise and other people's expectations. You've been trying to separate what genuinely matters to you from what you've been told should matter. You've been trying to identify your own limiting beliefs while you're still inside them. You've been trying to reframe what you've already achieved in a way that lets you see what's actually possible next. And you've been trying to build confidence in a decision before you have the framework that allows you to test it and assess it properly. That's a lot. So of course it doesn't always feel easy. Frankly, it can feel very hard to do alone. Not because you're not capable, but because these are precisely the things that structured coaching with the right tools and an outside perspective is built to help you with. The constructive thought practice I use with my clients is a tool. The life first criteria is a tool. The structured process of moving through clarity, then confidence, then decision making, then creating a plan. That is a framework that exists because thinking through a career change without one is like trying to build something without any structure to work from. You can try, but it is a lot harder than it needs to be, and the results are a lot less reliable. So you haven't failed to sort your head out because anything's wrong with you. You've simply been trying to build something without the right equipment, and that is exactly what coaching is here to provide. Going round in circles is not a sign that you're too confused to be helped. I just want to say that because so many people come to me and say, Oh, do you think I'm a lost cause? Do you think I'm too confused? And I always say no. And I mean it genuinely because I just think with all of those people that I meet, this is just a sign that you've been trying to do something genuinely difficult without the tools that make it possible. And those tools exist, which is why I'm never phased, even if people come to me incredibly confused, with literally no idea. I'm not phased by that because I know that once we use the right tools together, I can help them start to make some decisions. And you've just not had access to those yet. So I want to give you a picture of what the other side of this actually looks like. Not a theoretical description, but a real one because I think sometimes we hold on to an idea of what getting our heads sorted would feel like, and it's worth making it concrete. The clients I work with who arrive the most unclear, most tangled up, most convinced that they're the lost causes or their situation is too complicated or their thoughts are too muddled, these are actually often the ones who make the most significant shifts. Not despite arriving that way, but partly because of it, because they come without a fixed idea of what the answer has to be. They are genuinely open to a future direction, and that openness combined with my structured process and the tools I'm going to teach you, that is an extraordinarily powerful thing. What sorted looks like when it comes, it's not a sudden dramatic light bulb moment. I know I've talked about this before, I've done a whole episode of the podcast about it, but it's really important that I want you to understand it's not this sudden dramatic light bulb moment of enlightenment. This, like, oh, finally the answer's here. It genuinely is more gradual than that. It comes through a series of realizations, a session where something becomes clearer than it's ever been before. A realization that the story you've been telling yourself about what's possible and what's been holding you back is not as fixed as it might have felt before we started. A moment where you look at your own experience and skills and history and start to see them differently. Not just as a record of what you've already done, but as a foundation for what you could do next. It's a culmination of all of these things. And one thing I'd love you to take away from this is that none of the women I've worked with arrived at that clarity before they began the coaching process. They arrived at it through the coaching process. It was produced by the coaching work, not brought to it. The sorting, the feeling sorted, that happens inside the coaching, not before it. Which means that the version of you who is sorted, that's got her head sorted, who knows what she wants and believes she can get there, she is not somewhere in the future waiting for you to catch up to her. She is built session by session, tool by tool, reframe by reframe, through the process itself. You don't just like find her in the future, you become her. And you cannot do that by thinking harder alone. You do it by starting on the coaching process. The clarity you're waiting to have before you begin is something that the process creates. It's not the starting point, it's a destination, and the only way to reach it is to start moving towards it. So let me come back to the woman I told you about at the start. When I asked her how long she'd been trying to sort her head out on her own, and she said a while, quite a long while. At that moment, something shifted for her because she could see suddenly that the strategy of doing it all on her own was not working. Not because she was doing it wrong, but because what she was trying to do, get clarity on this significant life question, manage the thoughts and the fears and the beliefs that built up around it, see her own situation from a different angle, genuinely required more than just thinking about it on her own could ever provide for her. She had been waiting for the result of the coaching to happen before committing to the coaching. And once she saw that clearly, the decision to start became much simpler. So if you recognize yourself in any of this, I want to offer you the same challenge I offered her. What does getting your head sorted actually look like? And if you've been trying to get there on your own, how long have you been doing that for? And is it working? Because if your answer is that it's been a while and that you're still going round in circles, that is not a reason to keep waiting. It's the reason to start. The tools that will help you think about this differently are not going to arrive on their own, but they are available and they work, and you do not need to feel sorted to have your head in a better place to start using them. You just have to be willing to begin. And if you want to have a proper conversation about whether this is the right next step for you, the link to Book of Free Consultation is in the show notes. So come and talk to me. And I'll keep saying this because I know someone's getting nervous. People get nervous about coming and talking to me. They think, oh, I've got to really figure out what I want to say and what I want before they even come to a coaching consultation. No, I promise you, you do not need to have your thoughts in order before you do. Bring all your messiness, all your confusion to the consultation if you want, right? Because that's what we need the coaching to sort out, so it's better that we talk about where you actually are. That's it for this week. I hope that's got you thinking differently. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next week. Bye for now.
