If you’ve ever reached your breaking point with a job, you know the feeling: You’re totally drained, lacking confidence, but desperate to escape. Unfortunately, this negative energy doesn’t make the job search–or the courageous career leap–any easier. It’s a Catch 22 that keeps many people feeling stuck, but it doesn’t mean you’re 

In this episode, I’m sharing a bit about the months leading up to my own career change. I’m explaining why so many people end up feeling stuck and lacking the confidence to make their leap. Then, I’m sharing my top tips for regaining your confidence, reclaiming your identity, and making baby steps towards your courageous career change.

In this episode, you’ll learn...

• What a “Catch 22” is and what it means for your career change [1:32]

• My own experience lacking the confidence to leave a bad job [2:38]

• What it feels like to reach your breaking point with a job [5:24]

• How this feeling of being stuck can make it even harder to make a leap [5:50]

• How to “zoom out” and take a holistic, big-picture look at your life [7:47]

• Why it’s important to show yourself grace when you’re feeling stuck [8:21]

• How to create distance between you and the work that’s draining your energy [12:07]

• How to reclaim your identity by devoting energy to non-work passions [14:42]

• How to start taking baby steps towards your career change [19:27]

• Why it’s important to find support during this transition period in your life [20:18]

• Some words of encouragement if you’re feeling stuck [23:54]

If you’re considering your own courageous career leap, be sure to tune into this episode.

Standing at your own crossroads and ready to get clear on your direction? Apply for my Catalyst Coaching Program today!

Transcript of Episode 20: Feeling Stuck? How to Regain Confidence to Make a Career Change

[00:00:00] Finding a new job, making decisions that are good for us are the right decisions that are empowered decisions comes from a place of good energy and confidence and frankly, usually a bad job or a bad situation at work leaves us without those things that we need to make the right next step forward. 

[00:00:25] Welcome to Leap Like Me, if you can't shake the feeling that you're not on the right path. If you feel called to change things up but don't know how to begin, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Lisa Hoashi. She and my specialty is coaching people at those crossroads moments in life when you feel called to take a new direction. Sometimes that means taking a leap. I want to share practical advice and inspiration for your lips and how to keep going after your dreams in a challenging world. This season, we're talking all about career leaps. Come along for the conversation. 

[00:01:09] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Leap Like Me. I'm really excited about today's topic because I think it's a topic that I've actually never heard anyone else talk about, and I think it's super important to every moment that you are kind of sitting with the decision of do I need to make a career change? So this is what I call the Catch 22. That is a block in your career change. So let's go to the definition of the Catch 22. So here's the Oxford definition a catch 22 is a dilemma or difficult circumstance from which there is no escape because of mutually conflicting or dependent conditions that are all too common. Catch 22 that I've learned that most people find themselves then at the moment that they are trying to put into motion a career leap is that they find themselves in the position that they can actually not escape a bad job because the bad job is leaving them with no confidence and no energy to get a new job. 

[00:02:25] All right, I'm going to repeat that the catch 22 of you not being able to escape a bad job is because that bad job is leaving you with no confidence and no energy to get a new job. This is the worst feeling of being totally stuck, desperate and miserable, and I can say that because I have totally been there. So let me go back. About 10 years, I was working at a global humanitarian aid organization in Portland, Oregon. I was in charge of the Internal Communications Strategy and delivery for this organization. Flight three thousand five hundred people around the world and I reported directly to the CEO. So it was a fairly high profile and demanding job. I worked really long hours and I was feeling super drained. There were parts of this job that just was not a very good fit for me, and there had been maybe some habits, but also some outside circumstances that was making this job just really difficult. And I was waking up thinking about work at night. I was having trouble sleeping. I was worried about politics and backstabbing. I felt like I wasn't doing a good job. I had colleagues who I felt were blocking my work and I just couldn't get around them. I couldn't make traction. I was just really tired of feeling like I was spinning my wheels. I had neck pain that would not go away. You know, I was like, I would find myself in the car, and I couldn't reach to the back seat with that, like stabbing pain because of the long hours that I was spinning at my desk at the computer. And I was just I was so unhappy and I knew that I had to make a change. But I was just I was scared about making that change. And I also, when I would come home, I was single at the time. And by the way, dating was not also going well. 

[00:04:32] So I first like no part of my life that really felt like it was going well. At that point, I just felt like the job was out of control and doing nothing for how I actually wanted to live my life. And I would come home often kind of late from the office because, you know, I didn't have a family to bring me home earlier. It was just like, I just let work, totally take over my life, so I'd come home late. I still have my laptop with me because I might need to do more work at night and would make myself some dinner. And I would just sit on the sofa and I would just think I've got to do something. I've got to, you know, sit here and do something that is going to get me out of this situation, whether it's looking for jobs or updating my resumé or even just thinking about like, what could I do next? And I would just sit there. I remember specifically this one moment I was just sitting there and I was just like, I'm so exhausted. I am so tired. I can't even think about what I'm going to do next. And then just the wash of feeling so stuck, just washed over me. And I just thought, you know, like the sense of despair, just like, how am I going to get myself out of this situation? And so I tell this story because I did manage to find my way out of that extreme stuck. Catch 22 situation. 

[00:06:02] But I want to let you know that if you are in a similar situation, I just want to extend this. You are not alone. It's so common. The thing is that when when we're in a situation that is not good for us and we've been there for a long time and it's having like it's chronic effects on us is worn down our self-confidence. It's worn down our energy levels. We are feeling miserable. It's like it's a worse time to go out and look for a job, right? Because finding a new job, making decisions that are good for us are the right decisions that are empowered. Decisions comes from a place of good energy and confidence. And frankly, usually a bad job or a bad situation at work leaves us without those things that we need to make the right next step forward. So in today's episode, what I want to share with you is some of my top tips for how to extract yourself from this situation so that it's not a Catch 22, so it doesn't keep you blocked and stopped from making a change that is going to be better for you, right? This is important. It's important that you're able to make this change because so much is riding on it. Your health, your relationships, your ideals and your vision for your life, your ability to have a good impact. So much of it, you know, and most importantly, just your well-being. We want you to be well. 

[00:07:41] So coming up, here are my top tips for how to get out of this situation. If you're finding yourself in a situation like this where you're really contemplating a career switch but you are not sure where you're going to get the energy or the self-confidence. Here's the first thing I want you to do with me. I want you to come and zoom out with me. So I'm kind of getting this picture in my mind of like a Christmas story and Ebenezer Scrooge, like looking at his life or things happening from a little bit of a distance, OK? We're standing off to the side and kind of looking at you and your situation. So something that I find happens a lot with people and especially when we get in a low energy and low confidence place as we start to take a lot of the responsibility for how unhappy we are. 

[00:08:41] So one thing that's important to remember is, yes, like we are the we're only in control of ourselves and we do have control over how we react and how we show up. And I think it's important also to understand that there are many things, especially in our work lives, that are out of our control. And so if you are miserable and happy, even, you know, I've had clients who have come to me and they're like, I'm having panic attacks due to work. It's important, I think, to, first of all, give yourself like a big dose of self-compassion and to understand that the situation that you find yourself in right now is not all your fault. It is not. I think what people often think of is like, if I had done this, I could have been happier or it's my failing because I'm not able to make the situation work. But what I find over and over again in talking with clients is that there are so many elements of their situation which is leading to their sense of dissatisfaction, which is outside of their control, or is maybe something that is I mean, overall, it's just like not their fault. Right. 

[00:09:57] So one, for example, was a woman in a fairly senior position who is at her company. All of her colleagues at this level were all men, and it was a very male centric atmosphere, and it was super difficult for her to navigate that kind of environment every single day and it was really taking a toll. It was just she just did not feel welcome there and that she felt like she had to try so much harder to be seen and to be recognized at the table in that type of environment. I had another client who he had experienced in a job that he had at one time loved so much. He had found that over time, though over the years, that his job scope had cracked and that he was now doing a lot of things that work that was not in his skill set and not where he enjoyed doing and not his strength. And so that had been eroding over a long period of time. His sense of confidence and his ability to deliver and to do a good job. And so. He was starting to feel so unhappy because the work was just not the right fit for him anymore. So I think it's really important to first just really to allow yourself some grace that you have not been 100 percent responsible for this situation. It is now and that can be really hard because right now it is your responsibility now to get yourself out of the situation right? And that can be really difficult. But I think it's important and you're going to be better equipped to be able to do what you need to do. If you can give yourself some grace and some love at this moment that you have not been able to control everything that has happened. And if you need to move on, it's not necessarily I failed. But it can instead be. I'm choosing something better for myself, so I'm going to cut my losses here and move on to something that is better for me. 

[00:12:08] Here's my second tip for how to start drawing back some of that energy and to start cultivating some of that self-confidence that you're going to need for your career. It's about boundaries, so we need to start finding a way now to start putting some distance between you and your work. So the first way in which that you can start to put up some boundaries, boundaries are very good, by the way, for helping stop up energy drain. So, you know, if you've got energy and it's a week in, it's draining away. We want to think about how to kind of stop them up. And so I like to think of boundaries as the way that we kind of help us conserve and preserve some of that energy that we have. So one of the ways that you can do that is to start taking back some of your time. So an example of that is, you know, when going back to my own personal story at that moment that I realized that I needed to start making some changes and to start getting myself out of a situation where I was so unhappy with my job, I decided one of the first things I needed to do was to start clean limits on my working hours. So as I mentioned before, I was single at the time. I think that for single people can be really especially, I don't know, tempting or easy for for us to to not put limits on our times because we don't have that excuse of, you know, the partner waiting for us at home or the kids we have to go pick up. So what I started to do was to to just say to myself, because really no one on the outside, I was really just worried about what people thought of me and how much they thought I should be working. I decided that I was since I was planning on leaving this job anyway. I was going to let go of the worry of what other people thought about me and how much I was working. And I was just going to set my own working hours and I just said, OK, I will be at my desk at 8:00 and I will leave at 5:30. And I and I also started taking an hour long lunch break or at least a half hour walk outside of the building at lunchtime. And I started playing those limits on my working hours because it was important for me. I thought one of the biggest drains on me is just how many hours I'm spending. And, you know, are they the most productive hour or so? I started to take back my time and to be more clear with myself about how much time I was going to put into that job. 

[00:14:42] The other type of boundary that I think is a good one to start thinking about how you could do is to also think about how to take back yourself. So this is kind of more where we start getting into like a bit of the identity. So and I don't know how to describe this in any other way. They kind of just a little bit where we are, but like, it's kind of like thinking about like how much of yourself, how much of your like your life for are you giving, how much of your creativity and attention are you giving? It's like all of those things. And one way that I think is really important for us to start taking back some of that and and to start disconnecting from work is to start finding some outside pursuits that are more appealing and take more of your attention. So it's like, you know, instead of you just saying, OK, I'm going to, you know, take spend less time thinking about work or I'm going to focus on that last or give it less my attention. Instead, you find something that can start to help you divert your attention away from it. And this is also like a fun way that you can do it. So, for example, at this stage when I decided that I needed to leave my job and I was pretty clear that I wanted to take a sabbatical, but I was really scared to take it. I decided that in order for me to get ready for this sabbatical, that was maybe happening or maybe not happening, I did want to get better at my outdoor skills because I wanted if I was going to take the sabbatical, I wanted to do a lot of backpacking and hiking, and it would be ideal if I could learn how to solo backpack. 

[00:16:30] So what I ended up doing was that I had this opportunity popped up in front of me and that was to take a nine month wilderness survival immersion course. So it was like one weekend a month I would go out into the forest and learn how to make fire, rubbing two sticks together with no matches. And I was like, You know what? I think that I need to have this outside thing that I'm enjoying, and it's fun to me that is going to start taking away, if possible, my attention away from work. And at a minimum, I have this thing that I have to do outside of work, where I have to be off line and no one can bother me on these one weekends a month, you know? And so like, this is my my step to just start taking it back a bit of myself. And what I found was that it actually had these much bigger returns and much bigger benefits than I even could have expected, because something that happened was that I started to realize as I got into the course and we started to do lots of different types of things in the outdoors was that it just reawakened this curiosity and interest and this love of act, two different types of activities that I realized that there was this part of me that was just waiting to be more explored and expressed, and that there was certainly more to me outside of work than I had been giving myself time for. And I just remember one little experience of this when memory of that moment of like that aha, where we were actually carving bows and arrows out of pieces of wood. 

[00:18:20] So I was working on this bow all weekend with just using a knife to carve a bow and. And by the way, like the first like, we only got to use our bows. If the bow wasn't made correctly, it would break when we tried to shoot an arrow with it. And of course, most of us, like as soon as we shot that one arrow, our bow broke. So we had spent like the entire weekend carving it for this one payoff. But what I noticed in the painstaking hours the Turk to carve that bow was that I loved working with my hands. I loved this attention to craft and to making something, and it just like it totally brought that to life for me, which was, you know, an activity that I had not been doing in my professional life whatsoever. But it was so good to feel that again and just to feel that reconnection with myself. So this is kind of the aid. I just give this illustration to you to give you a sense of the flavor of what it means to kind of start taking back yourself from a work situation that's really not working for you. The last tip that I have for you to take back your energy and start building your confidence again is to start taking some baby steps toward the idea toward your intuition, toward what is next for you, or even if it's just part of your discovery process. Just taking some of these small steps are going to give you some new ideas, some New Hope possibilities, and along with that come bursts of energy and self-confidence. 

[00:20:01] So some baby steps that might be ideas for you would be to maybe sign up for that course. You know, if you have a idea that you might want to pursue some additional training or learn something new signing up for that course. Talking to a trusted colleague or a mentor about kind of where you find yourself and what you're thinking about, that can be an awesome thing to do because often they can reflect back to you where they think your strengths are what they think you're good at, and that always is good for confidence. You can also look into hiring a coach like myself, so learning about what kind of support is out there for you and also to have someone who really specializes in that type of problem that you're dealing with can be reassuring because, you know, someone like me can say, Oh yeah, that what you're feeling right now is shared by many people and can completely validate much of your experience, which can also really help in just giving you that boost to feel better and. I feel like there are also some options and some solutions and ideas for how you can kind of get unstuck and keep going. You can also do some brainstorming or daydreaming. Setting aside some time for yourself, even that can be a small step that can be really helpful. 

[00:21:26] So you could daydream about what could be all the time possible careers that you could go on to next. What are things that you love to do as a child? These can often be helpful in kind of thinking about where your strength is or what are things that always give you pleasure or let you up, or that people have always said that you're good at. All right. Those are my top tips for you to just review them again. The first was to zoom out and to just reassure yourself that you are not responsible for all of the things that have happened that have led you to this point to just give yourself some grace to kind of allow yourself a bit of relief from that feeling that it's all on you to make the best of the situation and to remind yourself that it's not necessarily about I fails when you say I quit this because I am choosing something better for myself. The other tip that I have for you is around boundaries. Two ways to put some distance between you and your work. Taking back your time and taking back yourself, taking back the energy, the attention, the focus, the life force that you have been putting toward all of that. And to start taking back a bit for yourself and possibly redirecting it towards something else, they can start to fill you up and alert you and let you know about the other opportunities that are out there for you. And then lastly, starting to take some small steps. So I've mentioned this before, but small steps are what start to get us momentum. 

[00:23:18] So every small step can bring you a burst of energy, can bring you renewed self-confidence, and each one that you take is going to get you closer and closer to where you want to go. So it's so important to just find some small, easy, doable things to get started so that you can start to get that positive reinforcement and start to build some momentum off of that. I hope that this has been helpful and that you've gotten some ideas here or even just the simple validation. But if you find yourself in this Catch 22 situation, that bad work situation is leaving you with such low energy and self-confidence that you're not sure how you're going to get to a better work situation, but you've gotten the validation that you're not alone. This happens to so many other people, and I hope also that you've gotten some ideas through my tips about how you could start getting unstuck and start to move through this situation. It's totally doable. And as you will hear again and again in the stories that we tell in this season of Leap like me, there are many ways to get through it and out of it. And there are so many ideas for how to do that. So keep listening. I'm so excited to share more about this with you. Thank you for listening to this episode of Leap like me. There now is the time. If you're listening for the first time and you got some inspiration and ideas for your own life and work to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss new episodes and leave us a five star review. You can listen to leap like me wherever you stream your podcasts, and the video recordings are also on YouTube. Head on over to Lisa Hichem to get the show notes, which also includes transcriptions. If you're at your own crossroads moment in life and are ready to get clear on your next direction and want to work with me as a trusted outside perspective who can guide the way, then head on over to lisahoashi.com/catalyst-coaching? That's a wrap for this episode. Thank you for listening, and stay tuned for more.