Why you keep almost leaving but never do
Every Sunday night, the dread kicks in. By Monday morning, you’ve talked yourself out of it again.You tell yourself this quarter will be different. That the workload will ease up. That you just need to push through a little longer. You’ve been telling yourself that for two years. There’s a psychological model that explains exactly why you’re stuck in this loop. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Kurt Lewin was a social psychologist who studied how change actually works. The real mechanics. He found that people move through three stages: Unfreeze, Change, and Refreeze. This week on The Balanced Badass Podcast®, I walk through all three stages and show you exactly where burned-out professionals get stuck at each one. Including why some people make a big career move and end up right back where they started.
Here’s the problem. Almost every piece of career advice you’ve ever gotten starts at stage two. Figure out what you want. Update your LinkedIn. Start networking. Talk to a recruiter. That advice assumes you’ve already finished stage one. You haven’t. Unfreezing means loosening your grip on the current version of your career, your identity, and your sense of who you are at work. When you’ve spent years building expertise, earning a reputation, and tying your self-worth to a title, questioning the job starts to feel like questioning yourself. I see this constantly. Someone who knows the role is wearing them down but can’t bring themselves to move. Not because they don’t have options. Because their identity is welded to the work. A decade in a field they never actively chose, performing at a high level out of competence and habit, not because it connects to anything real inside them. That’s momentum disguised as purpose. And the thing that keeps you frozen? Occasional good weeks. One tolerable stretch where the pressure eases up just enough for your brain to grab onto it and call it evidence. Evidence that you were overreacting. Evidence that the job is fine. It’s not evidence. It’s a pressure valve. It gives you just enough relief to pull you back from the edge without actually changing anything. So you re-grip. You recommit. The cycle resets. Stage one doesn’t ask you to have a plan. It doesn’t ask you to know what’s next. It asks you to stop pretending the current situation is working. That’s it. Acknowledge that what you’ve been doing isn’t sustainable, even if you don’t have a single clue what comes after. For most burned-out professionals, that’s the hardest part. Harder than the job search. Harder than the pay cut conversation. Harder than telling your family. Because unfreezing means sitting in the discomfort of not knowing, without rushing to fill it with the next thing. Some people do make it to stage two. They leave. They take the new role. They make the big move. And then they end up right back in the same situation a few years later. Different company, same pattern. That’s a stage three problem. They changed, but they never refroze into something different. They carried the same identity, the same beliefs about what work should look like, into a new container. The container changed. They didn’t. Lewin’s model isn’t complicated. Three stages. But each one has a specific place where high-achievers get stuck. And the stuck point is different depending on which stage you’re in. So here’s a question for this week. Which stage are you actually in right now? Are you still frozen, gripping a version of your career that stopped working a long time ago? Are you mid-change but without a clear direction? Or did you already make a move and find yourself repeating the same patterns in a new place? The answer changes everything about what you do next. Take care, Tara |
