Picture the scene: client on a call, laptop balanced on a stack of books, seventeen browser tabs open, weighing up a career change like it's a peace treaty.
Furrowed brow.
Shoulders hunched.
Every sentence starts with "I just need to make sure…"
Changing your career touches basically everything in your world: your pay cheque, your sense of who you are and (not to get too deep on a Thursday) perhaps your very soul…
No wonder it feels like a big deal.
However, the people who treat their shift like a courtroom trial tend to move slower than the people who treat it a bit like an experiment. Possibly even… whispers... fun?
No, I’ve not had too much coffee (debateable). Allow me to elaborate.
The heavy bit
Career change sits right on top of some pretty primal stuff: security, status, belonging. So your brain, quite reasonably, files it under "serious business" and starts triple-checking everything before you're allowed to move forward.
Sounds sensible, to be fair. In practice, it often just means you circle the same three options for eight months, weighing each one within an inch of its life, without actually trying anything.
Loosen your grip to speed things up
Here's the psychological bit (there's always a psychological bit, sorry… but not really). Most of us are wired to find uncertainty genuinely uncomfortable, often more uncomfortable than an outright no. It's a big part of why career changers rush to pin down ‘The Answer’ before they've explored anything at all. The trouble is, exploring is exactly what gets you to the good stuff. Shut that down too early and you narrow your options before you've even seen what's out there. This is where our Career Assessment Tool can really open your mind to the world of possibilities. Almost all of our coachees say they are pleasantly surprised by some of the suggestions that it provides - often giving career suggestions that they didn’t even know were a thing.
Loosening your grip a little (trying something because it looks fun, not because you've proven in advance it'll work) isn't a detour from progress. Quite often, it is the progress.
There's a second, related quirk worth knowing about: we tend to catch each other's moods without meaning to. Sit across from someone who's doom and gloom about their career and, weirdly, you start feeling a bit doom and gloom too. It works the other way as well. Bring curiosity to your career change instead of catastrophe, and the people around you are far more likely to stay curious (and supportive) with you.
How to bring a bit of play into a ‘Very Serious Decision’
1. Follow the fun, not just the five-year plan. What do you keep doing "instead of" the career change admin? Reorganising your bookshelf? Running the group chat like a small nation? Creating art out of chocolate? That's not just procrastination (okay, maybe a bit). It's often a decent steer towards what actually gets you buzzing.
2. Try something with zero stakes attached. Book the taster class. Join the slightly odd little community for people who like the thing you're curious about. You're not committing to anything. You're just having a nosey.
3. Stop narrating the doom. If every chat about your career change starts with a sigh, your friends will, understandably, start dodging your calls. Swap "this is hopeless" for "this is annoying, but kind of an interesting puzzle" and watch how differently people respond.
4. Let yourself be bad at things again. Adults hate looking clueless. But being a beginner, on purpose, at something low stakes, rebuilds exactly the confidence you'll need for the bigger leap later.
5. Set boundaries around the seriousness, not just the fun. Give yourself an hour, or an afternoon, where career change thinking is banned entirely. Ironically, this is usually when the best ideas turn up.
The bottom line
Serious and significant feels safe. It keeps you exactly where you are, thinking very hard, going nowhere particularly fast. Playful is where the actual movement happens: the accidental discoveries, the "oh, I quite like this" moments that no pros-and-cons list could ever have handed you.
You don't have to treat your career change like a courtroom trial. You're allowed to treat it a bit like a science experiment. Or, dare I say it, a game.
Feeling stuck in the serious spiral of your own career change? Come and see us at Waddyado. No seventeen-tab spreadsheet required (unless you’re super into spreadsheets, obvs).
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