Are You Stuck in All or Nothing Thinking About Your Career?

Episode 32: All or nothing thinking is one of the most common thought patterns people get stuck in. It is the thinking that tells you the choice is between staying exactly as you are or throwing everything away and starting from scratch. Between doing something perfectly or not bothering at all. Between total success and complete failure. In this episode Dana explains what all or nothing thinking actually is, how to recognise it in your own head, and most importantly how to think differently when it shows up. 

In this episode you will learn:

• What all or nothing thinking is 
• How it shows up specifically in career change and why it is one of the main reasons people stay stuck
• The real spectrum of career change that all or nothing thinking makes invisible
• Four practical questions to ask yourself when you notice all or nothing thinking taking over

Connect with Dana:

Website: https://www.danastevens.com/workwithme
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dana_stevens_coach/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danastevens1/
Free Coaching Consultation: https://calendly.com/danastevens/initial-coaching-chat

If this episode resonated, follow The Career Change Studio and share it with someone who’s feeling stuck in their career.

And if you’re ready to design a working life that truly fits your needs and lifestyle, book a free clarity call at https://calendly.com/danastevens/initial-coaching-chat

Special thanks to @Lou_Greenaway_Music for the piano composition and performance.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello! Today we're going to be talking all about a thinking pattern. And it's one that's extremely common, and I often see it with the people that I'm working with. But honestly, it's one that I can get stuck in as well. But the more I've learnt about it and the more aware of it that I am, the easier it becomes for me to switch out of this way of thinking. So it's called all or nothing thinking. You might know about it, you might not, that's okay. I'm going to explain what it is today and help you find a way out of it as well. So just to start with, I'm going to give you a non-career related example, mainly because it's one that I get stuck in all the time, and I think it's quite an easy way to understand the pattern. So let's say you decide to eat more healthily. So you plan your meals for the week, you do a big shop with all that healthy food, you're absolutely on it Monday and Tuesday, and then on Wednesday evening, you might be really tired, and someone offers you a biscuit, and you think, oh, go on then. And then you have another one, and then something happens in your head. You think, well, I've ruined it now, I've already broken it, so I might as well just finish the packet off. And then because you finished the packet, you think, well, today was a total write-off, I'll start again on Monday. You're thinking, Well, I haven't done this perfectly, so I can't carry on. I've either got to be all in doing this correctly, or just have to accept I've messed up and wait to start again next week. And then typically Monday comes, something else happens, and somehow you never quite get back on track. Now that might sound familiar to you, that certainly has happened many times for me, but that is an example of all or nothing thinking. And it shows up everywhere in how we approach our health, our habits, our relationships, our decisions, and very powerfully for what we often talk about in how we think about our careers. So today I want to explain a little bit more about what it actually is, how to recognise it when it's happening, and most importantly, how to think differently. Because this is a very common thought pattern I work with in my coaching, and I really do think that understanding it can help you start to make changes and change how you approach the decisions that you might be putting off. So just to explain a little bit more about all or nothing thinking, it really is exactly like it sounds. It's when your brain basically collapses this whole spectrum of possibilities down into just two options: the best case and the worst case. Perfect or failure, everything or nothing, all in or completely out. There's no middle ground, no nuance, no partial success, no good enough for now, just two positions at opposite ends of a very long scale. And your brain is telling you that those are the only two places you're allowed to stand. And it shows up in the language you use to yourself as well. Either to do this properly, or I don't bother at all. I'm either good at this or I'm terrible. Either stay in this career forever, or I throw everything away and start again from scratch. I'm either succeeding or I'm failing. And the reason it feels so like logical or reasonable, even responsible sometimes, is that on the surface it kind of looks like we're just having high standards, right? Like not being willing to settle for half measures. And look, sometimes that is actually true, but a lot of the time it's actually our fears, our worries dressed up as standards. Fear of the messy, the imperfect, the uncertain middle ground where real change actually happens. Because here is what all or nothing thinking does in practice. It makes starting something feel impossible unless you've got like the perfect conditions. It makes any small setback feel like a complete failure. It makes the gap between where you are and where you want to be look and feel enormous and unbridgeable. And it keeps you stuck often for much longer than anything else would, because neither of the two options it's offering feels safe enough for you to choose. So you end up staying where you are, not because you want to, right? But because the only alternative your brain is offering you feels too big, too risky, too all or nothing. So I thought it might be useful to share a conversation that I had recently in a consultation with a client, because I think it will bring this to life in a way that might feel quite familiar for you, right? I was speaking to a woman who was feeling really stuck. She knew she was unhappy in her work, she knew something needed to change, but every time she thought about making a change, she felt this huge wave of fear and felt really overwhelmed by everything, and she just couldn't move forward. And as we talked, I started to understand why, because in her mind, changing careers meant one very specific thing. It meant giving everything up, starting again from scratch, retraining, probably for years, losing the salary she'd built up, going back to the bottom of a new ladder she'd never climbed before. And when I asked her, like, why are you thinking that that's the only path? Like, where's that idea come from? She kind of paused and said to me, Well, I don't know, I just haven't really questioned it. I thought that's what a career change was. It just felt like this obvious truth that if she changed careers, this is what it would involve. But really, that's just only one version of change. One version that she could see that she was seeing before her. So I asked her to tell me why those were the only two options. Why was the choice between staying exactly as she was in a job that was making her miserable, or kind of blowing everything up she'd built and starting from zero? And she went quiet. Because when it was put like that, she could see it. She could see that she'd collapsed this enormous spectrum of possible change into just these really extreme two positions, and neither of them felt okay, which is exactly why she'd been stuck. But here's the reality: career change is not a binary choice. There is a whole spectrum of change. At one end, yes, some people do retrain completely and move into an entirely new field, and for some people that's the right decision for them. But it's only one option on a very large scale, not the only one. Plenty of people that I work with make a sideways move, taking their existing skills into a different industry, or maybe just a different organization or a different company. Some people make what looks like a small adjustment on paper, but it actually changes their day-to-day experience completely. Maybe that's about the company culture that they're moving to, the type of flexibility that they need. And some people stay in the same broad field but change the way they work. Maybe they're going independent or moving into consultancy or, like I said, finding a company that has a completely different culture. And other people make internal changes first, working on their mindset and their relationship with themselves in the job they already have, and that can actually change everything about how they experience it, even if on the outside there's no visible change. I've had people decide that actually it's not the job at all. It was them, it was the way they were approaching it. And once we worked on that and changed that, they decided the job they were in was right for them. But maybe they just needed to make some tweaks. So there's so many different ways of changing your working life. And for anyone who's worried about the financial implications, which let's be honest is almost everyone, that's always part of the conversation. It has to be. We're never gonna make a plan that involves you leaping off a financial cliff. Your real life is always the starting point. And we're always gonna make financially responsible decisions. You are, right? That's what's gonna be part of the very pragmatic planning. And I also want to say something about retraining specifically because it does come up often, and the all or nothing thinking around it is particularly powerful. Even if you do decide to retrain, it doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to be starting from scratch. You'll be adding new skills and knowledge to a foundation of everything you've already built. Your experience, your judgment, your self-knowledge, your professional relationships, none of that disappears. You're not suddenly 22 again, not knowing yourself, not knowing how to make conversation, not knowing how to do relationships. You're someone with decades of real-world experience choosing to add something new to it. That's a very different thing from starting from the beginning. I've actually done a whole podcast about why, you know, changing careers doesn't have to be about starting from scratch, so you can go back and find that. But the point is that conversation with this client, potential client, she has a client now, that opened up a completely different set of possibilities for her. Because once she could see that the choice was not staying stuck or blowing everything up, the whole landscape changed. There were options in between that she'd not been able to see before. And that's what happens when you start to challenge all or nothing thinking. So how do you recognize it when it's happening, right? Because the tricky thing about all or nothing thinking is that sometimes it feels completely rational from the inside. It feels like, I don't know, you're being like really clear-headed and realistic rather than what it is, which is a distorted thinking pattern. The first thing to listen out for is this kind of either-or language in your own head. Either do this or I do that, either stay or I go, either do it properly or I don't bother. Anytime you notice that either-or framing, that is worth pausing on, because it's usually a sign that your brain has collapsed this spectrum into two options. Watch out for the words always and never as well. You know, I always end up back here, I never manage to follow through, I always give up when it gets hard. These are all or nothing statements. They're treating one pattern of behaviour as this like permanent and total truth about you, rather than something that's happened before and can be changed. It's taking one or two examples and then creating this whole like narrative for yourself, sometimes even a whole identity around them that isn't actually accurate or even true. Your brain has just latched on to a few examples to suit a narrative. You can also watch out for the word properly, right? I need to do this properly, I need to be ready before I start, I need to have everything figured out first. Properly almost always signals all or nothing thinking because it sets this standard that has to be fully met before anything is allowed, right? And notice the moment when a small setback becomes total failure. When you miss one session at the gym and decide the whole week is ruined, when one difficult conversation at work makes you think the whole situation is hopeless, when one bit of feedback makes you think that the whole bit of your work is completely rubbish, when one rejection makes you conclude that the whole direction you were going in was wrong, that leap from one specific thing going wrong to everything being a disaster is all or nothing thinking and action. In a career change context, it can often sound like this. I can't change careers because I don't know exactly what I want to do yet. So I can't even start. I can't start looking until I have my CV completely sorted. I can't apply for that because I don't have all the qualifications they've listed. I can't make a move because I don't know how it will turn out. Each of these thoughts is setting up a condition that has to be perfectly met before you can take any action. Before you're allowing yourself to take any action, and the reality is that condition is never quite met. And that is how weeks, months, or even years go by without you taking action. So what do you do when you actually start to notice it? Well, this is the part that I work on with my clients all the time. We'll work through this together. Not just pointing out the pattern, which is useful, but giving them real tools, like the constructive thought practice that I teach them to help them think differently when it shows up. But you can ask yourself some questions even now, right? The most powerful thing you can ask yourself is what is in between? When your brain is offering you these two extreme options, ask yourself what exists in the middle of those two things? What is the partial version? What's the smaller step? What's the option that is neither all or nothing, right? There is almost always something there. Your brain just has not been trained or asked to look for it. Another useful question is, what would good enough for now look like? Not perfect, right? Not the full vision, not the final destination, just good enough for this stage, good enough to get you moving forward, good enough to gather more information, good enough to take one step without it having to be the whole journey. The final thing that's useful to notice is the conditions that you might have set yourself, and then getting yourself to question that, right? So if you said, I don't know, if you said I can't do X until Y is in place, ask yourself, is that actually true? Does Y really have to come first? Or is it just what all or nothing thinking is telling you? What would happen if you did X before Y was even completely sorted, right? What would happen if you did X first? Would it really be as bad as the pattern is suggesting? And uh something I do in my coaching regularly is to ask, like, what is the smallest possible version of this? Not the full leap, not the complete transformation. What's the smallest step you could take that would move you even fractionally on in the right direction? Because tiny steps are not nothing. They are beginning of momentum, and momentum, once it starts, tends to build. This is the work I do with my clients, right? Not just showing them the pattern, though that is part of them, but teaching them to manage their own minds, to notice when all or nothing thinking has taken over, to pause, ask a different question, and to find the option that actually exists rather than accepting the two extreme options that often feel like the only choice. Because once you can do that for yourself, it's not just useful for this career decision, it changes how you approach every big decision, every habit you're trying to build, every goal you're working towards. It's one of the most transferable tools there is. And before I finish, I thought it might be useful to just like, I don't know, paint a picture of what changes when you can start to challenge this pattern. When you stop collapsing everything into two extreme options, a whole landscape of possibilities opens up that you couldn't see before. The whole range, like the spectrum of change that was invisible, becomes visible. The sideways move you hadn't considered, the partial step that doesn't require you to have everything figured out first, the option that's right for this season of your life rather than forever. Starting becomes easier because instead of needing conditions to be perfect before you take action, you can take the next available step, even when things are not quite ready. And taking that step, however small, is how you gather the information you need to take the next one. It's how clarity builds, not by thinking more, but by moving.

unknown 16:03

Right?

SPEAKER_00 16:03

And then setbacks become less like huge, less of a catastrophe. Because instead of one difficult thing meaning the whole situation is hopeless, it just means one difficult thing happened. Something to learn from or adjust to, not total failure, not back to square one, just a thing that happened in the middle of a process that's still going, a process that you're learning from. And you start to trust yourself more, because you're no longer waiting for certainty before you act. You're building the confidence that comes from taking action, even when things are imperfect, which is a completely different and much more, I guess, useful kind of confidence than the kind that depends on everything going well. That woman I spoke to in the consultation, when we opened up the spectrum of change and she could see that the choice was not just stay stuck or blow everything up, something shifted. She got curious instead of scared. She started asking what options existed in between rather than sitting with two impossible extremes. And that curiosity, that willingness to look for what is actually there, rather than accepting the all or nothing frame, that's when everything actually starts to move. And that's available to you too, right now. Not when you have it all figured out, not when the conditions are perfect, but now. So this week I want to give you one thing to take away and try. The next time you notice yourself thinking in either-or terms, try and just pause. Pause for a moment and ask yourself what is in between these two options? What is on the spectrum between all or nothing? You don't have to have the answer immediately, just the question can be enough to start with. Because the question can sometimes be enough to break the pattern. It's what opens the door to a different kind of thinking, and a different kind of thinking will lead us to different kinds of feelings, and that will lead us to different actions, which is so important because taking different actions creates a different life, different reality for us. And if you recognize this pattern in yourself and you want help working through it, that's exactly the kind of work I do with my clients. Come and have a free consultation and let's talk about what it's doing in your specific situation and what you could or how you could be approaching it instead, right? The link to book is in the show notes, so come and chat to me, alright? Hopefully that's given you lots of food for thought this week. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next week. Bye for now.