Staying Curious and Unstuck in Your Career

Hi {{ first_name }},

I had three separate conversations this week that were, underneath, the same conversation. So I'm writing this one to all of you at once.

You are still showing up. Still doing the work. Still answering the emails. Still performing at a level nobody would look at and say something is wrong here.

But something is wrong. Not catastrophically. Not in a way you could easily name, or explain to someone who asks how work is going.

It's more like a slow leak.

Something that's been quietly losing air for longer than you want to admit.

One client said it perfectly without even realising it. She told me she'd spent years being the fixer — the one who walked into broken organisations and made them work. And somewhere along the way she realised she was exhausted. Not just from the work. From being needed in that particular way.

Work becomes your identity until it becomes your frustration.

We pour ourselves into it. We define ourselves by it. We measure our worth against it, our progress, our value, whether we are enough. And it works, for a while.

ONE SMALL MOVE

This week, notice the moment in your day when the air goes out of you. Don't fix it. Don't analyse it. Just write down what was happening in the five minutes before.

Four days of that will tell you more than four months of thinking about it.