Why Career Change Guilt Is Costing You More Than You Think

Episode 35: If you have been thinking about changing careers for a while but have not yet made a move, there is a good chance you are carrying some guilt about that. You may be thinking 'I should have done this sooner', 'I have wasted so much time' or 'why did I leave it so long?'. In this episode, Career Change coach Dana Stevens makes the case that that guilt is not only unwarranted but is actively getting in your way. 

In this episode you will learn:

• Why not changing your career sooner was almost certainly the right decision for the circumstances you were in
• What the hindsight trap is and why it is not a fair basis for self-judgment
• Why reclaiming your past decisions as conscious and intentional rather than passive or weak is one of the most important things you can do for your confidence right now
• How the guilt about the past is directly undermining the confidence you need for the future

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! So in this week's episode, we're going to be talking about guilt. And this is something that lots of clients who want to change careers come to me with. They say things to me like, I should have done this sooner. Why have I left it so long? I've wasted so much time. I knew I was unhappy and I didn't do anything about it. And typically their confidence may have taken a knock as well, so they'll start blaming themselves for that and start questioning what they now have to offer. Saying things like, I'm just being de-skilled in my job. If only I'd done something about this years ago. What if I'm too old now? So if this resonates with you, today's episode is going to be really helpful because I want to talk about why that guilt you might be carrying, however understandable it might be, is not actually serving you. Why the guilt about not having changed sooner is actually getting in your way right now and crucially what you can do about it instead. And I really want to offer you that you have nothing to feel guilty about, and I really mean that, and I'm gonna explain that in a minute because I'm not just trying to say that to be reassuring, but I genuinely believe it's true when you look at the full picture of why you are where you are right now. So that is one of the most important things I want to say to you, and I want you to take away from this episode, is that if you haven't made a change to your career before now, there was almost certainly a reason. And that reason is probably a good one. Right? Maybe you weren't ready before. I don't mean like as a criticism that you weren't ready, because readiness can be real, right? Can feel very real. The clarity and courage and confidence that a career change requires doesn't just arrive on demand, it builds up over time, and sometimes you need to get to a certain point before you can see clearly enough to act. And the fact that you're here now, thinking about this seriously, suggests that you probably have reached that point now, and that timing isn't random. Maybe before you just weren't sure enough. You had a nagging feeling that something needed to change, but you couldn't quite articulate what or how. And trying to make a career move before you know what you're moving towards, of course that feels scary, and it doesn't always feel possible. And maybe for you, your circumstances just genuinely did not allow it. Maybe there were financial pressures, family responsibilities, health, caring commitments. Whatever the reason, I want to offer you a way of thinking about it because you didn't just stay where you were or where you are because you were incapable of change. You didn't stay because you didn't care about your own well-being. You stayed because something else, something real, meant that staying was the most sensible option or felt like the right option at the time. And that's usually a very different story from the one the guilt might be telling you. There's also this wonderful thing called hindsight, right? Which is the ability to understand something only after it has happened. And it often has us thinking about how we could have handled a situation differently. And then we usually think, well, then I definitely should have handled it differently. But this way of thinking doesn't help us because we just get caught up in this hindsight trap. Hindsight traps are when you look back at a decision you made in the past and judge that using the information that you've got now. You know things today that you didn't know then, and you only have access to it because things played out the way they did, right? You've got clarity now that you didn't have then, and you're using that current clarity to assess your choices that were made without that clarity. And then typically what we do is we beat ourselves up about it, right? We give ourselves a hard time, we tell ourselves that we shouldn't have done it that way, that we're stupid or lazy or less than in some way for not doing things differently. But we're not being fair to ourselves. That isn't a fair way of looking at the past. Because your past self was doing the best that they could with what they knew then, what they felt, what they needed, what was available to them at that time. They didn't have the benefit of knowing how things would turn out. They couldn't see what you can see now. And holding your past self to this standard that you can't possibly meet or couldn't possibly have met is like a form of self-criticism that's not just unkind, but crucially unhelpful. And there's also a really useful distinction we can make here between regret and guilt. Regret is looking back and wishing something had been different. That's understandable, but guilt implies that you did something wrong, that you made a bad decision you should have known better than to make. And in most cases, when it comes to the timing of a career change, that's simply not true. You made the decision you made for the reasons that made sense to you at the time. That's not worthy of guilt. It's just being human. So the next time the voice in your head says, I should have done this sooner, it's really worth asking yourself this question. Should I? Should I really? Could I have made a different decision? Should I or could I have made a different decision with what I knew then? What about with the circumstances I had then? With the level of clarity I had or didn't have back then, with the thoughts that I had then? But usually when you look at it honestly, the answer is no. You couldn't have done it sooner. You did it when you could, or you're doing it now, right? You're here, now, today. Now, sometimes the reasons that you stayed in a job that wasn't working might actually have been a deliberate and considered choice. And sometimes what happens is along the way, in the like frustration and guilt about not having changed yet, you may have forgotten that. I'll give you an example that I see lots of times with my clients, right? I've worked with quite a lot of women who stayed in a job specifically because it was flexible, because it meant they could do the school run or be there when their children were ill or not miss the things that mattered. They made a conscious decision that at that stage of their life, being present and available for their family was the priority. The job was the vehicle for that, and it served a purpose. And yet now, a few years on, they're giving themselves a really hard time, telling themselves that they've wasted time, telling themselves they should have been braver or more ambitious or more proactive. And I have to keep saying to them, wait, this is what you chose. This was the deliberate decision you made based on what mattered most to you at the time. That's not something to be ashamed of, that's actually something you can be proud of. But for you, maybe you've stayed in a job because you needed the money, and leaving wasn't financially possible. Maybe you stayed because you were supporting someone else and you didn't have the headspace to deal with a career change on top of everything else. Maybe you stayed because you were going through something difficult in another area of your life, and the stability of a familiar job is what you needed. Honestly, I hear that a lot, people who maybe were going through mental health struggles or a big life change, maybe a divorce. And yet years later, they're still giving themselves a hard time, or I should have made a change. No, maybe you needed to protect yourself, look after yourself in that moment, and changing jobs just wouldn't have been the right decision for you. None of them are evidence of poor judgment or weakness. They're evidence that you were weighing up what you needed and making the best call available to you. And I really want to explain why this matters so much, why it's so important that you don't keep telling yourself this false story, this false narrative, and why you need to reclaim what actually happened. Because when you gloss over the fact that you made a conscious and considered choice, and instead you tell yourself, you rewrite it as you just drifting or failing to act or just being lazy or whatever, something really damaging happens. You start to build up this story about yourself as someone who doesn't know what they want, or someone who can't make good decisions, or someone that's indecisive, someone who just lets things happen to them rather than choosing. But that story generally isn't true. You did know what you wanted or needed in that moment, you did make a decision, you just made a different one than the one you might make now, and that's okay, that's allowed. This is what it means to be human in a life that changes over time. Reclaiming, reunderstanding that those choices were conscious and intentional rather than failures is really one of the most important things you can do for your confidence right now. Because if you can trust your own past decision making, then you can start to trust the decisions you're about to make. And that trust is exactly what you need to move forward. Because let's just focus a little bit more on what that guilt is really doing, because it's not just an unpleasant feeling that you're carrying around, it's actively getting in the way of what comes next. The first thing it's doing is taking up space, usually, lots of space in your head. Every moment you spend in the thought I should have done this sooner, it's a moment you're not spending on figuring out what you want to do. The guilt is like this huge distraction. It keeps your attention firmly on the past, on the time you feel you wasted, on the decisions you feel you got wrong, and away from the future that you're actually trying to build. It's just not useful thinking. It's circular thinking, an unconstructive thought cycle, and it costs you time and energy that you could use that you need for something else, right? For moving forward. And the second thing it's doing is quietly telling you this story about yourself. A story that isn't true and is not helpful. It's reinforcing this idea that you're someone who doesn't take action, someone who lets things drift, someone who can't be trusted to know what they want or do something about it. And if you tell yourself that story often enough, you start to believe it. And when you do believe it, it affects how you show up in this process of making a change or stops you even doing it at all. It stops you from feeling confident or decisive or trusting your own judgment. And this guilt about the past starts to directly undermine the confidence you need for your future if you let it. The two things are really deeply connected, and that is why letting go of it, letting go of that guilt, is not just a nice thing to do for your own well-being, right? It's a really practical necessity for the work ahead. It's really hard to build real momentum towards your next chapter while you're still dragging the weight of judgment about your last one. Right? That weight of judgment that you're putting on yourself will drag you down, will weigh you down. And the two things start being in direct competition. So you need to put one of them down. You can put one of them down. So I suggest you do put down the guilt. You don't need to carry it forward with you. So what do you actually do with all of this, right? I don't want this episode to just be me telling you just to stop feeling guilty without giving you something practical to replace it. You know, whenever we're changing our thoughts, it's not just I want to stop thinking one thing. It's really helpful for us to put a more helpful, more constructive thought there in its place and strengthen and build our belief in that. One of the most useful steps, most useful things you can do as a starting point is to build this awareness. So the next time you notice that voice saying, I should have done this sooner, I want you to actually notice it. Name it. You might even say to yourself, there is that guilt thought again. Not I'm guilty, but there is that thought again. And actually, even this really small act of separating yourself from the thought, observing it rather than being inside it, starts to reduce its power. It's a temporary thing you're thinking, not something that defines all of you. And then the second thing to do is to question it. Is it actually true that you should have done this sooner, or could have done this sooner? Or is that a judgment you're making now with the information and clarity that you didn't have back then? When you interrogate that thought rather than just accepting it, it really usually doesn't hold up, it doesn't stand up. And the third thing is to replace it with something more accurate. Like I said, this is about giving your brain something else to strengthen to believe in instead. Not a forced positive affirmation, right? But something honest and more useful, a useful version of the story, right? So that might be something like I didn't change sooner because I just wasn't ready. And that's okay. I made the decisions I made for good reasons that made sense at the time. I'm here now, and this is exactly the right time for me to start. The time hasn't been wasted. I've gained knowledge and experience. And that last one actually is worth thinking about and dwelling on because one of the things that guilt does is make you feel like you've wasted something, wasted time. As if the years in the job that wasn't right somehow count against you, but they don't. Because those years have given you something, right? They've given you things self-knowledge, clarity about what you don't want, which is enormously helpful, skills and experience and judgment that you'll bring to whatever comes next. Sometimes getting to a point of extreme discomfort in a job gives you that certainty that change is what you want and need. And that's really useful. So just to wrap up today, I want to say that the guilt about not having change sooner is, of course, understandable. But it's typically not warranted, not justified. You didn't leave sooner because you weren't ready, or you weren't sure, or your circumstances didn't allow it. You probably stayed for reasons that made sense. And in some cases, you may have made a very deliberate and conscious choice that you deserve to reclaim rather than keep telling yourself it was a failure, a personal failing. And you can't build the future you want while you're still dragging all this guilt around with you. It's taking up your space, it's taking up your energy. And it's feeding you this story about yourself that not only isn't true, but is making the work ahead harder than it needs to be. So I just want to say again, you can put it down, right? Not to pretend that the past was perfect or to avoid learning from it, but to accept it honestly for what it was. Let it be what it was, and now turn your attention to what is actually in front of you. Because you're not coming into this from a place of wasted time. You're coming into this and starting from a place of experience and self-knowledge and a clear sense of what you no longer want. And that can be a really helpful foundation. And if you want help building on that foundation and figuring out what you do want next, how you want to move forward, come and have a free consultation with me. The link, as always, is in the show notes. I hope that's been useful. I hope that's given you some interesting food for thought. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next week. Bye for now.