Going Around in Circles? A Different Way to Think about Career Change
Part 1 of the FREE to Change™ series on career change at midlife
Another year gone. Same job. Same Sunday evening feeling.
You've Googled. You've bookmarked courses. You've opened tabs, read LinkedIn posts, and closed everything an hour later feeling less certain than when you started. You might’ve been doing some version of this for years.
This can look like indecision but after eight years coaching mid-career professionals through this process, what I've come to understand is that most people aren't stuck because they lack courage or clarity or commitment. They're stuck because they're trying to answer the wrong question, in the wrong way.
They're treating career change as a single decision to be solved, and waiting, consciously or not, until they feel certain enough to make it.
That wait can last a very long time.
Why treating career change as a project changes everything
We’re no longer talking about a dramatic reinvention or a big leap into the unknown. A project is something nearly everyone is familiar with and has experience in.
A project provides a structure: starting an idea, planning, implementing, checking progress, and wrapping up. Thinking about career change this way breaks a large, emotionally charged question into smaller, more workable pieces. And crucially, a project gives you somewhere to put the thinking that doesn't involve lying awake at 2 a.m. or scrolling LinkedIn in a state of quiet panic.
Most people keep career change entirely inside their heads. They think about it driving to work, making dinner, on Sunday evenings when the week starts looming. That's not the same as engaging with it properly.
According to Careershifters’ State of Career Change Report 2026 nearly three quarters of career changers have been considering a change for more than a year. More than a quarter for over three years. That's not because career change is impossible. It's because thinking without structure tends to go in circles.
Once you treat it as a project, practical questions replace existential ones:
When will you actually work on this?
Where do you think most clearly?
What's a realistic pace given everything else in your life?
An hour on a Saturday morning is worth more than waiting for a full weekend when life finally calms down enough to reinvent yourself.
If you're in your forties or fifties, you may still have 30,000 working hours ahead of you. Isn’t that worth more than occasional late-night Googling?
But how you approach it matters as much as the decision to start
For almost twenty years, I supervised psychology research projects. Students would arrive at our first meeting full of ideas and energy. And within the first ten minutes, almost without fail, they'd make the same mistake.
They'd jump straight to the method. Questionnaires, experiments, participants, equipment. They were so anxious to get moving that they tried to solve the problem before they'd properly defined it.
I see exactly the same pattern in career change, even in people who have committed to working on it seriously.
What course should I do? Should I update my CV? Should I stay or go?
These things feel like progress. They're the career change equivalent of deciding how many participants you need for your experiment before you've written your research question. The instinct to move quickly makes sense, but acting on it too soon tends to create more confusion, not less.
The real first move is a decision about how you're going to approach this. Not as a high-stakes exam with one right answer, but as a research project: something to be explored systematically, with curiosity, over time.
Why career change starts with better questions
One client described arriving with "an untamed jungle of possibilities": lots of half-formed ideas, conflicting priorities, and years of accumulated assumptions about what was realistic for someone like her.
That's not unusual. Many people don't come to career change with no ideas. They come with too many, tangled together, and no way to evaluate them.
In the beginning, career change isn't about generating answers. It's about creating the right conditions to find them.
That means staying curious rather than forcing certainty. Testing assumptions rather than acting on them unchecked. And being honest about what you actually know at this stage, which is usually less than you think, and more than you're giving yourself credit for.
One client came into coaching thinking she needed to leave her field entirely. A more structured process of reflection revealed something different: it wasn't her career that had become unsustainable, it was the way she was working within it. Once she could see the problem more clearly, the range of possible solutions widened considerably. You can read her story here: Should I Stay or Go? A Mid-Career Academic Finds Clarity.
A note on confidence
People sometimes assume that those who change career successfully must simply be braver, or more certain, or more naturally comfortable with risk.
In my experience, that's rarely the determining factor.
Most people begin this process from a fairly ordinary place: tired, restless, curious about something else, increasingly aware that the fit between them and their work has shifted. The difference between those who make progress and those who stay stuck is usually not personality. It's whether the process becomes concrete enough to engage with consistently.
To help you get started, I've created a Career Change Project Starter Sheet: a simple one-page tool to help you create a realistic container for this work, clarify what you're actually trying to explore, and begin asking more useful questions.
You’ll also receive occasional career change emails and updates from COACHD. I will process your data in accordance with my Privacy Notice . You can unsubscribe at any time.
The next article in this series is about examining your existing working life more carefully before you start generating ideas about what comes next.