By Audrey Denise B. Cachuela
You’ve had the thought more than once. Maybe on a Sunday night when the dread showed up earlier than usual, or in the middle of a meeting when you caught yourself and realized you’d stopped caring what happened next. It’s the kind of thought most people don’t say out loud the first few times it comes, because admitting you want out of a career you worked hard to build feels like a bigger, more dangerous thing to say than it actually is.
Laura Simms has spent 15 years sitting across from people in exactly that spot, successful by every visible measure and privately unsure they can keep doing this, and what she’s learned is that wanting to leave and being ready to leave are two completely different things. Treat them as the same and you rush, and rushing is how you take one career problem and turn it into two.
Most advice pulls you toward one of two extremes, either pushing through and waiting for the feeling to pass, or walking out and treating the exit itself as the win. Neither one asks what’s actually driving the discomfort, or what it would take to trust your own decision once you’ve made it. Those are slower questions, but they’re the ones worth answering, and you don’t need a breaking point to work through them. You just need to slow down long enough to tell the difference between a feeling and a plan, which is the step almost everyone skips.
The Signals Worth Taking Seriously
A single bad week comes and goes, so it’s the pattern that keeps circling back that deserves your attention, the kind that shows up as dread creeping earlier into your weekend, an exhaustion a full night of sleep stopped touching a while ago, and the low-grade sense that you’re hiding whole parts of yourself just to get through a Tuesday. This takes a physical toll too, and poor working conditions have been tied to burnout, disrupted sleep, depression, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease (Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2024), while the meaning drains out for a lot of people at once, with the share of employees who feel connected to their company’s mission falling from 38% in March 2021 to a record low of 30% in February 2024 (Source: Gallup, 2024).
The part that traps high performers is that being genuinely good at something can disguise a bad fit for years, and one of Laura’s clients caught it perfectly when she described herself as “highly valued and appreciated for work I don’t love doing.” As Laura tells people, “Competence does not equal calling,” and the excellence tends to be the very thing keeping a person stuck, because everyone around her, sometimes including her, keeps reading all that success as proof she’d be crazy to leave. The trouble is that the signals are loud enough to tell you something is wrong without telling you what, and the real source could be your workload, your manager, or the whole industry you’re standing in, each of which needs a different response. Skip that diagnosis and just bolt, and you can change everything about your job and still land back in the same dissatisfaction inside six months.
One exception cuts through all of it. If a workplace is threatening your safety, involves harassment or abuse, or is putting you at real legal risk, you get support and you get out, and you don’t wait to feel ready first. Readiness is what you build when you’re planning a deliberate exit on your own terms, and it was never meant to keep you somewhere that’s harming you.
Why Exhaustion Talks You Into the Wrong Exit
When you’re depleted, the signals still tell the truth, but you lose the ability to read them, because a tired mind stops investigating and starts grabbing at whatever promises the fastest way out. Once escape is the only goal, a crushing workload and a values mismatch and plain fatigue all melt into one demand, get me out of here, and instead of asking what kind of work would actually suit you, you start asking what gets you out the door soonest.
Relief, as it turns out, makes a terrible career strategist. A slightly kinder manager looks like paradise when yours is the problem, a remote role feels like salvation when it’s really the commute wrecking you, and a bigger paycheck feels decisive when what you’re feeling is undervalued. Any of those might help, but none of them guarantees the actual work will fit you, which is how people move away from whatever’s loudest without ever deciding what they’re moving toward, until the relief wears off and the same mismatch turns up again wearing a different logo.
The advice that holds up is fairly unglamorous: figure out what’s truly wrong before you do anything, get specific about what you want instead, start looking while you’re still drawing a salary, and work out the timing of your resignation before you hand it in (Source: Glassdoor, 2026). None of that is a trick to keep you where you are. It just stops a single bad day from choosing your next ten years.
What Being Ready Actually Looks Like
Reading the signals well only gets you halfway, and the other half is knowing whether you’re in any shape to act on them, which tends to come down to three things holding together. The first is direction, the one people fake the most, because “anything but this” feels like a direction right up until you notice it’s just a door marked exit. A real next step is specific enough to test, whether that’s a defined role, a business idea worth trying, a move into a different field, or the skills you already have pointed at a new audience, because two jobs can carry the same title and feel like two different lives depending on the pace, the people, and what gets rewarded.
The second is a plan, since a good instinct only becomes a workable move once you’ve accounted for the money, the timing, the skills you’re still missing, and the evidence you’d want before betting on it. Laura calls this a crossfade, borrowed from music, where one track is still playing as the next comes up underneath it, and in a career it means you research, test, and build relationships in the new direction while the old paychecks keep landing. A crossfade can run for months, and it doesn’t have to end in a dramatic scene where you slap down two weeks’ notice, because sometimes it simply resolves into a reshaped role or a different team you’d never seriously considered.
The third is how the whole thing feels, and it’s the piece people misread most. Real confidence sounds like being able to explain why you’re making this move, what you’ve learned about where you’re headed, and what you’d do if part of the plan didn’t pan out, whereas defeat is the voice insisting you can’t take one more day and that anything would be an improvement. Those feelings are real and worth taking seriously, but they make a shaky foundation for deciding where the rest of your career goes. Put the three together and a private frustration becomes a move you can still stand behind six months later.
Why Time Off Alone Won’t Give You the Answer
Plenty of people try to shortcut this by stepping away first and figuring out the rest later, and time off genuinely helps, because it lets a nervous system that’s been running hot for months finally cool down. What it can’t do on its own is answer the question, and “quit and figure it out” feels freeing right up until you’re three months in and staring at the same blank space. Time is really just an empty container, which is why you can fill six months with journaling and travel and career quizzes and endless googling and still describe your situation in the exact words you used at the start.
What separates real exploration from expensive stalling is whether each thing you try is testing an actual question, so a class earns its place only if it answers something specific, like whether the subject really holds your interest or whether the skill you assume you’re missing is the thing in your way. Good exploration shrinks your uncertainty a little each time, and if your research keeps expanding while your choices never narrow, more time off won’t break the logjam.
How to Leave Without White-Knuckling It
All of this becomes a plan the moment you separate what belongs to this employer from what belongs to the work itself, so the real question is whether the strain is coming from the workload, the environment, a clash of values, the daily tasks, or a loss of meaning that would follow you into almost any similar role. Once you know, you make the direction testable by talking to people already doing the work you think you want and pushing past their highlight reel to ask about the tedious parts, so you’re checking whether you want the real career instead of the polished version in your head. Then you get practical about what has to be true, financially and professionally and personally, before you hand in notice, and you give yourself a timeline that creates real focus instead of an arbitrary date picked to force yourself to move.
Wanting to quit might be the most honest thing you’ve admitted about your career in years, so take it seriously, but don’t ask it to do more than it can, because all it can really do is flag that there’s a problem. The real work happens well before anyone types a resignation letter, back when you’re still preparing for the career you actually want while you’re still inside the one you have. So for anyone still asking why they can’t just feel grateful for a career that looks good from the outside, Laura offers the reframe she comes back to again and again. “That’s not being ungrateful,” she tells them. “That’s being unfulfilled.”
If that’s where you’re sitting, Your Career Homecoming works with people who are done white-knuckling it and finally ready to build something they can actually stand behind, and her free WHOLE Method masterclass is where most of them begin.
