New Job, or New Direction?
Before you update the resume, get specific about what's actually driving your career change!
"I want something different but I don’t know what” is one of the most common sentences I hear, and one of the least useful on its own. It's a feeling, not a direction. Acting on a feeling before you've turned it into a direction is how people end up leaving a job that wasn't the real problem, or staying in one that was. A wise somatic practitioner once taught me that you really need to feel your feelings in order for a feeling to actually complete in your bodies, and for us to then move forward with insights form that feeling.
So, before you touch the resume, do the slower thing first: get specific about what's actually underneath that desire for a change.
The most common reasons people want a change? Better pay. More stability. More flexibility or balance. Room to grow. Recognition. A culture that fits. Sometimes plain boredom, or your health asking for a change.
So first thing for you to do is to name your top three reasons in your own words about why you want to change your role.
Then run each one through a single question that tends to surprise people: what could change this in my current role?
This is the question most career advice skips, because it isn't dramatic. But it's the one that saves you from blowing up a situation a conversation could have fixed. If the issue is recognition, the fix might be a manager who finally understands what you actually do. If it's balance, it might be a boundary you've never actually set. If it's growth, it might be a project you could ask for on Monday. A new employer inherits the same you, with the same unspoken needs, so the reasons you could solve where you are tend to follow you if you don't.
So the first step is trying to determine: what you get more of what you want and solve for some of the issues that are motivating your desire for a change in your current role.
Here is a recent client that I worked with: An operations director at a nonprofit was sure she needed to leave. When she sorted her reasons, here is what she found:
More autonomy. Something she could renegotiate right where she was.
Clearer recognition. Also within reach in her current role, with the right conversation.
Solving cross-functional problems with data, instead of keeping the trains running. The one that didn't bend.
Two of the three could be addressed without leaving. The third was the real signal. It told her the move was toward business operations, not just away from her current desk, and knowing that changed how she ran the entire search. We then focused on how she can get more transferrable experience in her current role to set up her to be a strong standout candidate for business operations roles.
The point isn't to talk yourself out of leaving. Sometimes the honest answer is that every reason points the same way, and you go. And there are always reasons that are outside of the parameters of what a current role or organization can provide for you. When the work itself no longer fits, when the field has nowhere left for you to grow, when your values and the organization's have quietly parted ways, no boundary or conversation closes that gap.
The point is to know which kind of change you're making before you make it, so your energy goes where it can actually pay off.
Exercise
Write your top three reasons, and next to each, the most honest answer you can give to "could this change right where I am?" What's left after that, the reasons that don't bend, is your direction.
Want a thinking partner while you sort the reasons that bend from the ones that don't? That's what the work is for. Book a free consult or explore 1:1 coaching at rupadevrihan.com.