Is it me or is it them?Your results are in

It sounds like

• You want something and you talk yourself out of it in the same breath. You’ve done it so often you don’t hear it happen any more.
• Your reasons are very respectable sounding ones. They sound like a sensible woman being responsible, which is exactly why nobody has ever pushed back on or questioned a single one of them, especially you.
• You’ve been calling the same thing unrealistic for two years and you keep thinking about it anyway.

What it feels like

There’s a small tightness in your chest every time you tell yourself you can’t, gone in about a second, and you’ve never once stopped to wonder what it’s about. Underneath it, there’s something a bit like grief, which sounds dramatic until you notice you’ve been mourning the thing you wanted for two years running.

Where you learned it

You didn’t come up with those sensible sounding reasons on your own. You learned them, off a parent who talked about security a particular way, off a boss who told you what was realistic in a market like this one, off a woman at work who said it about herself and you filed it away for later. They arrived sounding like facts, so you’ve been treating them as facts ever since.

What it’s costing you

You’ve never actually tested whether you’re right. A reason you’ve inherited and never interrogated holds just as much power over you as a reason that’s real, so you’re running your life on rules you never agreed to.

Maybe your rational-sounding reasons are keeping you stuck as well as safe. And maybe it’s time to test them.

It sounds like

• You think you know what you’re worth on paper. Saying that number out loud, to another person, with your chest, is a different thing entirely.
• A rating, a nod in the right meeting, your name said out loud in front of the leadership team, and you feel unstoppable for a fortnight.
• When the recognition doesn’t come, you’re stuck between resenting them for not giving it and resenting yourself for needing it, so you go looking for what it says about you rather than what it says about them.

What it feels like

You’re lifted for a fortnight, then flat for a month, and none of it is based on what you’re actually doing — somebody else gets to decide your value and your mood along with it. There’s a loneliness in it too, because there’s nobody you could tell how much one sentence in a review changed your week without hearing how mad it sounds coming out of a grown woman with a career like yours behind her.

Where you learned it

It probably started young, when you learned that what other people think of you is the thing that counts, because thinking well of yourself makes you arrogant and heaven forbid you know your own value. Then it was compounded by working somewhere that hands out worth in cycles. Ratings, meetings, whether your boss happened to be paying attention that week. Fifteen years of having your value set by other people and you end up carrying their score around with you, and the weeks you get nothing back are the heaviest of the lot.

What it’s costing you

You can’t work out what you want next while the people you’d be leaving are the ones setting your value. Every option gets measured with their ruler, so every option comes back smaller than it is. And it suits them to have you stay where you are with a low bar for what you’re worth, because then you accept the little they hand you.

You’re not indecisive. You’re choosing your future with a bar for your own value that somebody else set, and a low bar now buys you a small future later.

It sounds like

• Fine, busy, you know how it is. You’ve said it so many times it’s out of your mouth before you’ve checked whether it’s true, and it’s certainly easier than saying you have no idea.
• There’s no single unbearable thing you could point at in an exit interview, and some part of you takes that as a reason to keep putting up with it, as though you need something more dramatic before you’re allowed to leave.
• You’ve caught yourself thinking that plenty of people would take this job, that you’re lucky to have it, and using that to shut the whole conversation down.

What it feels like

Numb, mostly, a bit flat. Not sad, which is what makes it so hard to justify doing anything about. Sunday evenings go flat when you start thinking about Monday, and it’s started turning up in things that have nothing to do with work, because you’re not that excited about the holiday either.

Where you learned it

You learned early what happens to a woman with a good job who wants more of anything. She’s greedy if she asks and ungrateful if she’s unhappy, so the only acceptable answer is fine. That’s the one you give, in the meeting, at dinner, and on your own in the car when you tell yourself it’s not that bad.

What it’s costing you

There’s no crisis on its way to make this decision for you. Fine could run another five years without anything dramatic happening at all, and you already know exactly what those five years look like.

Fine isn’t a high enough bar for your life.

It sounds like

• You’ve had the therapy, or the coach, or you’ve spent enough time around therapy-speak that your pattern is “really obvious”.
• You can explain that pattern perfectly, and you’re still looking for the way to force yourself out of it as fast as possible — if I can just make myself do this differently — rather than dealing with what put it there.
• And you’re in roughly the same place, having roughly the same conversation, two years on.

What it feels like

Frustration, turned inward, and inward is the one direction it does no good. It lives in your jaw and your shoulders, and it wakes you at three in the morning to go over the same ground you covered last week. Being able to see the pattern this clearly and still being in it means you’ve started using it as evidence — not smart enough, not confident enough, not disciplined enough to beat it into submission — which is the last thing it needs.

Where you learned it

Maybe you’re the parentified eldest daughter, maybe you’re a millennial woman who grew up in a world of therapy-speak and attachment styles, so it became a second language you can get by in without being fluent. That level of understanding has probably helped you excel at work, too. Work out what’s happening, say it in the room, get the credit for it. In your own life it doesn’t move you an inch, because the understanding feels so much like progress that another six months go by and nothing else gets asked of it.

What it’s costing you

Understanding and analysing it has become the thing you do instead of actually moving. Every round of it gets more pronounced and adds another layer of blame — you can see it so clearly, so what’s wrong with you that it hasn’t shifted — and none of it goes near what put the pattern there in the first place. You’ve been running a very thorough investigation into yourself, when the culprit was never in the room.

Knowing a reason and actually doing something to change it are two different jobs. You’ve done the first one to death.

It sounds like

• The busiest weeks are the hardest weeks, and you’re grateful for them, because there’s no space in them for you to ask yourself the question or hear your own answer.
• You booked the leave and spent it clearing the backlog, and told yourself that counted as a rest. Besides, you’re not one of those people who can stand still, and your productivity is a badge of honour.
• Somebody suggests you take a proper break and something in you goes tight, because you know what comes up in the quiet. Even when you’re not moving you’re not resting — Instagram, the phone call with the friend who needs you, another list of things to do, there’s always some noise to hand.

What it feels like

Tired. Not the holiday kind of tired, the kind that sleep doesn’t touch. Your body’s been waving at you about this for a while, in your shoulders, your jaw, awake at three in the morning staring at the ceiling, the aches that only turn up on the first day of any break. Stopping feels unsafe, so you keep going, and the busyness keeps the whole question at a comfortable distance.

Where you learned it

Fifteen years of being rewarded for output will teach anybody that the effort is the point. Then there’s the version you got as a woman on top of that, where rest is what you earn after everyone else is taken care of, if there’s any left, and a woman who stops is a woman who’s let something slip. Nobody has ever had to enforce that rule on you. You do it yourself, on a Saturday, and you learned it early.

What it’s costing you

Questioning your life and your career needs space, and you’ve stopped making any without ever deciding to, so another two years go by in a blur of delivery. Nothing gets decided at that speed. That’s the point of the speed.

And if this has gone past tired — if it’s the kind a fortnight off and a full night’s sleep don’t touch — then that’s a conversation with your GP before it’s a conversation about your career. The career question keeps. It’ll still be there, and you’ll answer it better.

You’re not a workaholic. You’ve been using the work to keep something else at bay.

It sounds like

• Asked what’s next, you answer with what you’re done with, and then you change the subject, because “not this” isn’t an answer and you know it.
• You’ve read a job spec twice, decided against it, and been unable to say what you were holding out for instead — only that it isn’t more of the same.
• You feel disconnected from what you actually want, and you’ve decided there’s something wrong with you for only knowing what you don’t.

What it feels like

Foggy about the future, restless with nothing obvious to be restless about. Working out what you want feels enormous, and you’ve put so much weight on getting the choice right that you can’t move at all.

Where you learned it

Nobody has asked you what you want since you were about twenty-two, and back then the answer was supposed to be a job title. Everything since has been a choice between things other people put on the table, so you got very good at the only move that was ever available to you, which was ruling things out.

What it’s costing you

You can’t plan towards “not this”, you can’t decide anything with it, and you can’t leave on it either. It’s half a decision — an important half — but it doesn’t give you a direction, and that’s why you’re still where you are.

A woman with no idea what she wants couldn’t be that specific about what she doesn’t. That’s half the work already done.