Career Change: Are You Running Away, or Moving Toward Something?

A forty-two-year-old manager arrives with a clear plan: open a guesthouse. He has been talking about it for eight months. He has run the numbers, visited two regions, drafted a budget. On paper, it holds together.

Then he is asked to describe a typical day in that guesthouse. Three sentences in, he is back in his open-plan office, his director, the Monday meetings. He has never really pictured the day itself. What he has pictured in detail, for eight months, is the absence of everything he currently lives.

This is not a bad plan. It is a plan that does not yet have any content of its own. And that difference, if it goes unnoticed now, is paid for two years later.

The article below deals with doubt and work exhaustion. If this is your situation, the tests can help you take stock before interpreting your own urge to leave.

Two engines that look nothing alike

In motivation psychology, Andrew Elliot's work established a distinction that seems obvious once stated and never is before: a goal can be framed as an approach — obtaining something — or as an avoidance — not enduring something. "Becoming a trainer" and "no longer being in sales" are not two ways of saying the same thing. They are two different motivational structures.

What research associates with these structures is consistent. Approach goals come with attention directed at what is progressing, persistence that survives obstacles, and satisfaction that does not depend solely on the final outcome. Avoidance goals come with vigilance directed at what threatens, success that is experienced as mere relief, and one specific fragility: once the threat is removed, the engine stops.

That last point is what matters here. An avoidance-driven plan reaches its goal on the day you leave. The next morning, nothing is pushing anymore. The career change, meanwhile, has only just started — and it demands two to five years of effort at precisely the moment the fuel has run out.

This is not a moral hierarchy

The point is not that one is noble and the other is not. Avoidance motivation is a useful function: it is what pulls your hand off a hot surface. Someone enduring an unmanageable workload or corrosive management is right to want out, and the urgency they feel is a reliable signal, not a weakness.

The problem is not escaping. The problem is mistaking the urgency of leaving for the direction of a project. The first says you must move. It says nothing about where to go.

The three-question test

These questions are best asked when things are calm, and in writing. They do not deliver a verdict but a proportion: most plans contain both engines, and the ratio is what counts.

1. Can you describe where you are going without ever mentioning what you are leaving?

Take five minutes and describe your plan — the activity, a typical day, the clients or public, the core skill, what you will be doing on the first Monday. One constraint: you may not use "no more", "no longer", "without", "instead of", and you may not mention your current job.

If the text holds, your plan has content of its own. If it empties out, if you stall after three lines, that is not a disaster — but it means what you are calling a plan is still a subtraction. A subtraction does not turn into an occupation on its own.

2. When exactly does your energy rise?

Observe yourself over a week. At what precise moment does something accelerate: when you think about the new activity, or when you think about no longer being where you are?

The clearest marker is Sunday evening. If the idea of the plan lightens Sunday evening, there is approach in it. If Sunday evening stays exactly the same and relief only appears when you picture handing in your notice, the engine is elsewhere.

3. Is what you are escaping attached to this job, this manager, this occupation — or to this period of your life?

This is the question that saves the most years. Write down what has become unbearable. Then, for each item, ask one question only: would this disappear if I changed employer and kept the same occupation?

Workload, unpredictable management, absence of recognition, contradictory objectives, a deteriorated team: these are attached to a job and an organisation, not to an occupation. They rarely follow the occupation. They often follow the company.

If, on the other hand, what has become intolerable is the nature of the activity itself — the content of the tasks, what it demands of you, what it produces in the world — then the occupation genuinely is the issue, and a career change is the proportionate answer.

There is a third case, harder to see from the inside: what has become unbearable is neither the job nor the occupation, but this period of your life. Bereavement, separation, health, a child in difficulty, accumulated exhaustion. Work then becomes the place where everything crystallises, because it occupies the largest surface. A career change decided in that configuration is often judged, two years later, as an answer to the wrong question.

Getting the facts down before deciding

These three questions assume you know what actually happened — and that is rarely the case. After several hard months, memory does not store facts, it stores a global impression, and that impression has an inconvenient property: it is identical whatever the cause. One bad quarter and three years of wear leave the same recollection.

Hence the value of going back over dated facts before deciding. What you were doing two years ago and what you do now, what changed and when, the specific episodes, how often, what was said and by whom. ScanMyJob exists for this: producing a dated record of facts from what you describe, so you can move past the global feeling and see whether the deterioration is tied to an event, a person, a period — or to the activity itself.

That record decides nothing for you. It simply gives question three an answer based on something other than an impression.

Leaving does not settle what will replay elsewhere

This is the point few career-change narratives are willing to write down, because it is discouraging. It is also the most useful.

A move motivated solely by escape often reproduces the same problem in a different setting. Not through fate, and not because "the problem is really you" — that formula is both false and shaming. Simply because what has not been identified cannot be avoided.

Someone who leaves because they cannot set limits takes that difficulty with them, and self-employment will charge them more for it than salaried work, not less. Someone who leaves because they were never recognised will find the same hunger elsewhere if the imbalance between what they give and what they receive has never been put into words — this is the mechanism described by Siegrist's effort-reward model, and it is not specific to any sector. Someone who leaves in a state of exhaustion starts their new occupation without the reserves a start-up phase requires.

What travels with you is not a flaw. It is an unaddressed configuration.

The setting changes, the load comes back

There is something avoidance-driven plans systematically underestimate: dream occupations, seen from a distance, have their own load. A guesthouse means daily cleaning, permanent availability and unhappy guests. A move into care work means continuous emotional exposure. Going independent means an income insecurity you feel physically.

An approach-driven plan knows those constraints and accepts them, because it was built with them. An avoidance-driven plan has not seen them, because it never looked at the destination — it was looking at the exit.

Escaping is legitimate — but it calls for a departure, not necessarily a new profession

Here is the practical conclusion, and it is lighter than it sounds.

If the test shows your engine is mostly avoidance, that does not mean you should stay. It means the proportionate answer may be a change of employer, not a change of occupation.

That answer costs far less. It requires no long training, no restart at the bottom of a ladder, no eighteen-month income gap. It uses the skills you already have, which are your main asset. And it works as a test: if the same occupation becomes liveable elsewhere, you have just learned that the occupation was not the problem — information that two years of retraining would have taught you at a far higher price.

If, on the contrary, the same occupation in another organisation reproduces the same exhaustion, you now have a solid answer to question three, and the career-change plan rests on something more than frustration.

Treat the two separately

The most effective approach is to split the two projects explicitly, because they have neither the same timescale nor the same interlocutors.

The "get out" project is short and concrete: make the current situation liveable or leave it. It runs through internal mobility, a job search, conversations with employee representatives or your union, and — if your health is involved — your occupational health service or your GP, who are bound by medical confidentiality and can act on the working situation without disclosing what you tell them.

The "move toward" project is long and exploratory: create exposure, meet people who do the work, test on a small scale, let a direction emerge. It is not decided under pressure, and above all it is not decided while the first project is on fire.

Running both at once, under the same urgency, produces the most expensive decision of all: an occupation chosen for its distance from the old one.

Key takeaways

Two career changes that are identical on paper can run on opposite engines. An approach-driven plan describes a destination; an avoidance-driven plan describes an exit. The difference is not visible in the words of the plan — it appears when you forbid yourself from mentioning what you are leaving.

The outlook is not the same. An avoidance-driven plan achieves its purpose on the day of departure and finds itself without fuel exactly when the real effort begins.

Escaping is not a failing and often not a mistake. But the urgency of leaving tells you that you must move; it does not tell you where to go. Confusing the two is what costs the most.

And the question that sorts best remains the simplest: would what you are escaping disappear if you changed employer without changing occupation? If yes, the proportionate answer is a departure. If no, the career-change plan has a foundation.

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FAQ

How do I know if my career change is really an escape?

The most reliable marker is descriptive, not introspective. Describe your plan in writing while forbidding yourself any reference to your current job and any negative phrasing — "no more", "no longer", "without". If the text fills a page, the plan has content of its own. If it empties out after three lines, what you are calling a plan is still a subtraction. That is not disqualifying: it simply means the destination still has to be built, and it is better built before you leave than after.

Is it wrong to want out just to stop being where I am?

No, and it is very common. Wanting to leave a costly environment is an adapted reaction, not a motivational defect. What causes trouble is not the wish to leave, it is asking that wish to serve as a plan. The urge to escape says you must move; it indicates no direction. Separating it explicitly from the question of where to go lets you handle the urgency through a change of job or employer, and lets the plan take shape without being decided under pressure.

Should I change occupation or just change company?

Run every intolerable element through the same filter: would it disappear if I kept this occupation with a different employer? Workload, unpredictable management, absence of recognition and contradictory objectives are attached to an organisation and rarely follow the occupation. If, on the other hand, it is the content of the activity itself that no longer works — what it demands, what it produces — then the occupation is the issue and a career change is the proportionate answer. Changing employer first costs far less and informs you far faster.

How long should I wait before deciding?

There is no standard delay, but there is a useful criterion: do not decide while the current situation is at its worst. A decision taken in the middle of overload, or just after a striking incident, selects the most distant option rather than the most accurate one. Making the present liveable first — internal mobility, dropping an assignment, a conversation with an occupational health professional bound by confidentiality — then asking the question again a few weeks later produces a different answer in a large number of cases.