Am I Settling in My Career? When Something Needs to Change

Do you quietly know that you are good at your job. Really good. You have worked hard to get to where you are, you have built a reputation that matters to you, and on paper — if someone asked you to explain your career to them — it looks like it is going well.

And yet.

There is something quiet happening underneath all of that. A restlessness you cannot quite name. A growing sense that you are going through the motions of a role that used to energise you and no longer does. Maybe you have started asking yourself, privately, am I settling in my career? Maybe you are brilliant at something you are just no longer excited by. Maybe you wake up on a Monday morning and there is a flatness there that did not used to be.

Or perhaps it is more acute than that. Perhaps you know, with real clarity, that something needs to change — but you do not know what the change should be, and the thought of getting it wrong is keeping you exactly where you are.

Well today’s episode of Leading Women in Tech maybe exactly what you need. This episode is called Career Pivots: When You’re Ready for Something New. But I want to be clear upfront about what I mean by a pivot — because I am not talking about blowing up everything you have built and starting from zero as a pilates instructor or launching a new career as a baker. I am talking about the kind of thoughtful, strategic career shift that high-achieving women make when they are honest with themselves about what they actually want next – a sideways step into new responsibilities to allow them to once again feel the exciting energy that should be available to all of us if we are in the right role for this current time in our careers. Today I want to help you understand how to do that without making a reactive decision you will spend the next two years trying to recover from.

Let’s dive in.

It’s Not a Character Flaw. It’s a Signal.

The first thing I want to do — before the framework, before the practical tools — is give you permission to take this feeling of not quite settled seriously.

Because one of the things I see most consistently in the women I work with who are ready for a career pivot is guilt. Guilt about wanting more when what they have is objectively good. Guilt about restlessness when they know how hard they worked to get here. Guilt about the thought of leaving a team that depends on them, a role they are genuinely good at, a salary that matters to them and their family.

And underneath the guilt, sometimes, a quieter and more painful question: what is wrong with me?

So let’s address this head on. 

Nothing is wrong with you. The feeling that something needs to change — the boredom, the restlessness, the sense that you have outgrown where you are — is not a character flaw. It is not ingratitude. It is not a sign that you are hard to please or that you will never be satisfied. It is a signal. And signals are worth paying attention to.

When I work with someone in coaching on this, we often land on this restlessness not being the problem. But instead it is information. 

If a piece of equipment in your organisation started sending warning signals — consistently, persistently, in ways that could not be ignored — you would not tell it to be more grateful. You would ask what the signal was telling you. You would investigate. You would take it seriously.

You deserve at least the same level of intelligence applied to your own career.

So let me be clear: the restlessness you are feeling is not the problem.  It is information. And the question is not how to make it go away — it is what it is trying to tell you.The boredom, the restlessness, the sense that you’ve outgrown where you are — this is not a character flaw. It is a signal. Signals are worth paying attention to.

 So let’s step away from the guilt. 

The Diagnostic: What Kind of Change Do You Actually Need?

When something needs to change, the instinct is often to focus on the most visible thing: the job. I need a new job. I need to leave. I need to get out.

Sometimes that is right. But sometimes the job is not actually the problem — and leaving it to recreate the same situation somewhere new is one of the most expensive mistakes I see high-achieving women make.

So before you decide what to change, you need to diagnose what is actually wrong. And in my experience, there are four distinct types of “something needs to change” — and each one has a different response. So let’s dive into these. 

Type One: You’ve Outgrown the Role

This is the understimulation problem. You were genuinely excited by this work when you started. It was your zone of genius — the work that used your best thinking, that stretched you, that you loved. And at some point — gradually, without a clear moment when it changed — you got so good at it that it stopped being a stretch.

I talked about this in Episode 300 as the zone of excellence trap: the place where you are doing outstanding work that used to light you up and no longer does. The work has not changed. You have changed. And the mismatch between your capability and the challenge the role offers is creating a kind of quiet depletion that looks like burnout from the outside but is actually something different.

If this is your type, the response is not necessarily to leave. It is to find where the stretch is. That might be a bigger role in the same organisation. A different function. A project that uses your skills differently. Or it might mean leaving — but the diagnosis matters, because it tells you what you are looking for next.

Type Two: You’re Misaligned With the Organisation

This is the values and culture problem. The role itself might be right — the function, the level, the type of work — but the organisation you are doing it in has stopped being a place you can do your best work in. The values are not aligned. The leadership above you is not what you hoped. The culture has shifted in a direction that does not fit who you are.

This is sometimes the hardest type to diagnose, because the organisation’s problems can masquerade as your own. When you are in an environment that is not right for you, it can start to feel like a personal failure rather than an organisational one. The question I always ask in this situation is: if everything about this role — the function, the level, the type of work — stayed the same, but you did it in a completely different organisation with a completely different culture, would you still want to leave?

If the answer is no, you probably do not need a career pivot. You need an organisational pivot. A new employer. That is a job search — and while it is not a small thing, it is different from what we are talking about today.

If the answer is yes — there is something else going on. Which brings us to Types Three and Four.

Type Three: You Need a Different Kind of Work Entirely

This is the mission shift. The work itself — regardless of organisation — has stopped being meaningful to you. Either because your interests have genuinely moved on, or because you have done this type of work long enough that you have run out of things to learn from it, or because something has changed in your life that has shifted your priorities in ways you are only beginning to understand.

This is a genuine career pivot. It is the kind of change that requires more than a new employer — it requires rethinking what kind of work you want to be doing. And it is the change that most deserves the careful, structured thinking I am going to give you in the next section.

Type Four: You Need a Different Way of Working

This is the structure problem. You might love the work, and you might be in the right organisation, but the way you are doing it — the full-time corporate structure, the specific demands of the role, the toll it is taking on the rest of your life — is no longer sustainable or desirable.

This is the woman who is not bored, not misaligned, not done with this type of work — but who is done with doing it in the way she has been doing it. This is often the entry point for fractional leadership, consultancy, portfolio careers, or a move into a smaller organisation where the scope is different.

I have done a whole series of episodes on fractional leadership — Episode 284, 288, and 289 — if that is resonating. But even if fractional is not the answer, the question of how you work, not just what you work on, is worth asking.

Before you decide what to change, diagnose what is actually wrong. The four types: outgrown the role / misaligned with the organisation / need different work entirely / need a different way of working. Each has a different response.

You Have More Options Than You Think

One of the things that keeps women stuck in roles they have outgrown is a belief — often unconscious — that the options available to them are binary. Stay or go. This job or starting over. The career I have built or the uncertainty of something completely different.

The binary is almost always false. And one of the most useful things I can do in a career pivot conversation is help someone see the full range of what is actually available to them.

So let me give you a broader map than the one you are probably looking at right now.

Internal Pivot

Before you look externally, have you genuinely explored what is possible inside your current organisation? A different function, a different team, a different geography, a special project, a secondment, a stretch assignment that takes you somewhere you have not been?

I am not suggesting you should stay if leaving is the right answer. I’m the first to call out that someone has stayed in a particular company too long. But I have worked with women who left organisations they actually liked — because they assumed there was nothing new there — only to discover six months later that the role they would have loved had opened up the month after they resigned. Explore internally before you conclude the internal options are exhausted.

Functional Move

A functional move is a lateral shift into a different area — from engineering to product, from product to strategy, from a technical function to a commercial one, or vice versa. This is the option that the “you have to be a specialist” narrative most consistently undervalues. At the senior level, range is often more valuable than depth — and a move that looks like a step sideways is sometimes the fastest route to the next level.

Sarah Walker, CEO of Cisco UK and Ireland, who I interviewed in episode 293 of the podcast spent her career moving across functions before leading one of the most significant tech organisations in the region. Her story is worth remembering when the sideways move feels like the wrong one.

In general, if you intend to get to the C-Suite, it’s good to have the breadth that these sideways functional moves involve. Sometimes the curiosity of the sideways move is one of the strongest indicators that you’d thrive in the C-Suite – you want to understand multiple parts of the business and how they interact. 

Smaller Organisation or Earlier Stage

If the issue is the way you are working — the scale, the bureaucracy, the distance from real impact — a move to a smaller organisation or an earlier-stage company might change everything without changing the type of work you do. The job title might be the same. The experience is completely different.

This is not a step down. For many senior women, it is a step into a version of the work that is actually more energising — more direct impact, more autonomy, more of the work that attracted them to leadership in the first place.

Fractional or Portfolio Work

If you are tired of the full-time corporate structure, fractional leadership or a portfolio career might give you the intellectual variety and the autonomy you are missing without requiring you to step out of the field entirely. This is the option most senior women underestimate because they assume it means either stepping down from the level they have achieved or taking an enormous financial risk.

Neither of those is necessarily true. But it does require a different kind of positioning — and that is worth getting support with before you make the move.

Entrepreneurship or Founding

And then the final pivot is moving into entrepreneurship or being a founder. I include this not because it is right for everyone — it absolutely is not — but because it is the option that gets dismissed too quickly by women who have the skills, the network, and the insight to make it work. If the thing you most want is to build something that is genuinely yours, that solves a problem you care about, and that operates according to your values rather than someone else’s — that is worth taking seriously rather than treating it as a fantasy.

The question is not whether you could do it. You could. The question is whether this is actually what you want — and that requires honest reflection, not the kind of career-pressure-driven thinking that makes entrepreneurship look appealing primarily because corporate feels terrible right now.

The binary of stay or go is almost always false. The real question is: what is the version of your career that would actually excite you — and which of these paths gets you closest to it?

How to Think Through a Career Pivot Without Making a Reactive Decision

A reactive career pivot — the one made at the peak of frustration, in the middle of a difficult year, when everything about the current situation feels intolerable — is rarely the right one. I have seen it enough times to say with some confidence: the decision you make at your lowest point in a role is almost never the one that serves you best in the long run.

That is not an argument for staying when you should leave. It is an argument for making the decision from the clearest possible version of your own thinking rather than from the most exhausted or most reactive one.

Here is the framework I use with clients who are navigating this.

Step One: Clarify What You Are Moving Toward, Not Just What You Are Moving Away From

The first question is not “what do I want to leave?” It is “what do I actually want next?”

These are different questions, and they often produce very different answers. Moving away from something — a toxic culture, a boring role, an unsustainable structure — gives you energy, temporarily. I know I seriously considered opening a wedding cake business, but what I was moving away from – a toxic culture, was really the driving force. Making wedding cakes was a hobby that I thought would provide an escape. I now know I wouldn’t have thrived doing that as a business. 

So remember – what you’re moving away from is one piece of the puzzle but it does not give you direction. And without direction, you are likely to recreate the same problems in a new environment.

So before you decide to leave, spend some time getting specific about what you are moving toward. Not in a vague “I want more meaning” sense — but specifically. What does the work look like? What problems are you solving? Who are you leading, and how? What does your working week look like in this new version of your career? What does success feel like — not just look like?

If you cannot answer those questions with any specificity, you are not ready to make the move yet. That is not a criticism — it is useful information. It tells you that the next step is not to update your LinkedIn but to do the thinking that makes the right decision possible.

Step Two: Do the Values Audit

A career pivot made without clarity on your values is a pivot made in the dark.

What I mean by values in this context is not abstract principles. I mean the specific things that, when they are present in your work, make you feel like you are doing the right thing in the right way — and when they are absent, make even the most prestigious role feel hollow.

Common ones I hear in coaching: autonomy, impact, intellectual challenge, collaboration, creativity, social contribution, financial security, recognition, leadership, flexibility, learning. But your list is yours — and it is worth making explicit rather than leaving it as a felt sense that you cannot articulate.

Once you have your values, you can use them as a filter. For any option you are considering, ask: does this role or environment give me the things on this list? Where are the gaps? Are the gaps acceptable, or are they the thing that made the last role unsustainable?

Step Three: Test Before You Leap

One of the biggest fears around career pivots is irreversibility — the sense that once you make the move, there is no going back. And while some moves are more reversible than others, the fear of irreversibility is often significantly larger than the actual risk.

What reduces that fear and increases the quality of the decision is testing. And you can test more than you might thing. 

The first test is in your current role. For example, before you leave your current role to become a fractional leader, can you take on one advisory engagement on the side — carefully, within the terms of your contract — to understand what that work actually feels like? Before you move to a startup, can you spend time with people who work in that environment — not to be sold on it, but to understand the reality of it? Before you make a major functional move, can you volunteer for a cross-functional project that gives you direct experience of what you would be moving into?

But equally you can test on a short term basis. I’ve coached many women through leaving in their first 6 months of a new role because it wasn’t a good fit. Now none of us want that, but it happens more often than you might think! I suspect most of us have one bad-fit role that we know within a few months of joining, at some point in our career. Sometimes you can identify what you could have checked before joining, other times there was no way to know it. The mistake I see is hanging on for 18 months or longer because it looks bad to leave sooner. That couldn’t be more wrong. What’s bad is holding onto something when the data is saying this isn’t a good fit. 

So remember – testing comes in many forms. 

Testing does not always produce certainty. But it almost always produces better information than you had before — and better information produces better decisions.

Step Four: Build the Bridge, Not Just the Exit

A career pivot has two parts: the exit from where you are, and the entry into where you are going. Most people plan the exit and assume the entry will take care of itself. The entry almost never takes care of itself.

Building the bridge means actively investing, while you are still in your current role, in the skills, relationships, and visibility that the next step requires. And it means creating a stellar first 90 days. If you are planning a functional move, are you building relationships in that function now? What will your first 90 days look like? If you are planning to go fractional, are you developing the positioning and the network that fractional work requires? If you are planning to found something, are you beginning to test the idea, building the audience, or exploring the funding landscape?

I meet far too many women who say to me ‘I want coaching but I’ve just started a new role – can we touch base in six months’ – and I always want them to hear that this is the moment to get coaching, not in 6 months time. Right now. This is the most crucial point. 

And here’s the thing building your bridge takes time — not just your last few weeks when you’re building relationships, and your first 90 days in that new function, but more. Often six to twelve months of deliberate investment before and during the leap. But it makes the leap significantly stronger. And it gives you something to step onto rather than just something to step away from.

Step Five: Use Every Resource Available to You

This one sounds obvious and is consistently underused.

You should not be navigating a significant career pivot alone. Not because you are not capable of it — you absolutely are — but because the combination of internal pressure, identity attachment to your current role, fear of getting it wrong, and the sheer cognitive load of thinking this through alongside doing your actual job is enormous.

Multiple mentors are powerful. As is a coach who specialises in this kind of transition who can help you cut through to the real question faster than you will get there on your own. A mentor who has made a similar move can give you the honest picture of what that path actually looks like — not the version you can see from the outside, but the one you only understand when you are in it. A sponsor who knows your capability and your potential can open doors that are currently invisible to you.

And your peers — the women in your network who are navigating similar questions — can provide the kind of honest, experienced reflection that is genuinely hard to find elsewhere.

Use all of it. This is too important a decision to navigate with only your own thinking.

What’s Really Underneath the Fear

Before we wrap upi today’s episode l want to spend a moment on something that I think keeps more women stuck in roles they have outgrown than anything else.

It is not really uncertainty about what comes next, though that is part of it.

It is identity.

When you have built a career around a particular role, a particular organisation, a particular set of skills — that career becomes part of how you understand yourself. The job title is not just a job title. It is the shorthand for who you are professionally. And the thought of changing it is not just the thought of doing different work. It is the thought of being someone different. And that is genuinely frightening.

This is especially true for women who have worked hard to reach a level that was not easily reached — who fought for the title, the role, the recognition. Leaving it can feel like undoing that work. Like giving back what was hard won.

And I want to say this as directly as I can: the identity you built to get here is not the only version of you that is possible. The skills, the judgment, the experience, the relationships — none of that goes away when you change direction. It comes with you. It is the foundation of what comes next.

What you are leaving is not your capability. You are leaving a particular expression of it. And there are other expressions available to you — ones that might use it more fully, more meaningfully, or in a way that is more aligned with who you have become.

The fear of losing your professional identity is real. But staying in a role you have outgrown in order to preserve an identity you have also outgrown — that is the higher cost.

What you’re leaving is not your capability. You’re leaving a particular expression of it. The skills, the judgment, the experience — none of that goes away when you change direction. It comes with you.

What a Good Career Pivot Actually Looks Like

A good career pivot is rarely overnight. It is usually the product of six to twelve months of honest reflection, deliberate testing, and careful bridge-building — followed by a decision that feels neither impulsive nor overdue.

It almost always involves a period of uncertainty that is uncomfortable. There is a stage in most career pivots where the old thing is no longer working and the new thing is not yet solid. That stage is genuinely hard. But it is a phase, not a destination.

It produces a version of your professional life that is more aligned with who you have become — not who you were when you started this career. Which is the whole point.

And it is almost never as binary as it appeared from inside the current situation. The women I have worked with who have made the best career pivots are almost never the ones who made the most dramatic moves. They are the ones who got the clearest about what they actually wanted, identified the smallest viable path to get there, and moved toward it deliberately and consistently.

You do not have to blow up everything you have built.

You do have to be honest about what you actually want — and willing to do the work of building toward it.

Where to Start This Week

I said at the beginning of this episode that I wanted to give you one concrete first step. Here it is.

This week, I want you to spend thirty minutes — uninterrupted, just you and a blank piece of paper or a document — answering this one question honestly:

If I could design the next chapter of my career from scratch — knowing everything I know now about what energises me, what I am best at, and what I actually want my professional life to look like — what would it look like?

Not what is realistic. Not what the market will support. Not what your family expects or what your resume most naturally leads to. What would it actually look like if you designed it from a place of genuine honesty about what you want?

Write it down. In as much or as little detail as comes naturally. Do not edit yourself while you are writing. Just write.

Then look at what you have written and ask yourself two questions.

First: how far is this from where I am now? Is it a small shift, or a significant one?

Second: what is one concrete thing I could do in the next 30 days that would move me even marginally in this direction?

That is your first step. Not the whole plan. Not the pivot itself. One step. Toward something that is more genuinely yours.

Because that is how this starts. Not with a dramatic leap, but with getting honest about the question — and choosing to take it seriously.

A Final Note

If what we have talked about today has brought something into focus — if you have been sitting with a version of this question for longer than you want to admit, and you are ready to stop sitting with it alone — I would love to help you think it through.

That is exactly what a strategy call is for. Not to tell you what to do. To help you get clear enough about what you actually want that you can make the decision that is right for you — with confidence, not just courage.

You can book one at tonicollis.com/lets-chat.

Thank you for listening. And as always —

Keep leading. Keep pivoting and keep being extraordinary. 

Until next time bye for now.