7 Signs It's Time For a New Job (#85)

Feeling stuck, stressed, or simply “meh” at work? This episode is your wake-up call. If you’ve been wondering whether it’s time to leave your six-figure corporate job, listen in as I reveal 7️⃣ clear signs it’s time for a change. 

Whether you’re thinking about a new role in your industry, switching fields, or finally going all-in on your side hustle, this episode will help you recognize the signs—and trust yourself to make the move.

From burnout and boredom to ethical misalignment and missed opportunities, I’m walking you through the real-life red flags that high-achieving women often ignore until it’s too late. If you’ve been stuck negotiating your exit with yourself, this is your permission slip to stop settling and start designing a life that lights you up.

💡 REMEMBER:
You don’t need to feel totally miserable to make a change. Recognize the signs, trust your intuition, and give yourself permission to pursue the next chapter—before burnout forces your hand. 

📱 BOOK A CALL:
Ready to explore your Empowered Exit™? Book a free consultation and start exploring your corporate exit plan today.

If you're looking for additional support through coaching, visit my website to learn more about working together and my signature program EDIT Your Life™: www.karinfreeland.com/life-coaching

Then book a call here!

Not ready for coaching? Get a copy of my self-help book: Grab Life by the Dreams!

Transcript

Karin Freeland: 0:00

Welcome to Rock Your Reinvention, where I help high-achieving career women like you get unstuck, make your corporate exit strategy, and successfully transition to your next chapter. Hi, I'm your host, Karin Freeland, a certified life coach and corporate exit strategist. Whether you want to start a business, become a speaker, or something else, I'm here to give you the tools and strategies to shift your mindset, build your confidence, and take bold actions so you can rock your reinvention. Ready? Let's go. Welcome back to Rock Your Reinvention. We have another hot episode for you today. We are talking about the 7 signs it's time for a new job. Have you ever wondered if it was time to leave your job for something else? But then maybe you talked yourself out of it. You figured you were just having a bad day or maybe a bad week or maybe a bad year. well today we're going to look at seven signs that you can look out for to confirm if it's time to leave your job and when i say go and find a new job right it could literally mean anything another corporate job at the same company or maybe a different company it could be going to a non-profit it could be becoming an entrepreneur or anything else that you would get paid to do there's lots of other options out there and I don't want you to be thinking that it's one size fits all. So I hope that this episode will take some of the guesswork out of your decision to make a pivot or reinvent your career. So the first sign that you should be looking out for is you dread going to work. We don't need to sugarcoat this. I'm not talking about the occasional case of the Mondays, right? You're all out miserable. You might hit snooze a million times in the morning, show up late because you're kind of self-sabotaging and taking forever to get out of the house, or even just to get out of your bed into the couch and get on a Zoom call. You might feel sick before, during, or even after work. And if these things sound like you, it's time to dig a little bit deeper because what we need to understand is what's really bothering you. Where's the dread coming from? We want to get as specific as possible about this because that's going to give you clues to what you want to pivot to next. Is it the people that you work with or that you work for? Maybe you're bored and you're dreading it because you're not challenged enough. Maybe your boss is micromanaging you to the point where you feel useless. I know I had a few seasons like that. I was like, why am I even here? You just tell me what to do. You could tell someone for half the price, what to do. And they would just do the thing that you wanted them to do. Do you find yourself bad-mouthing your employer or your coworkers? Cause see, when you know what you dread, then you can make a better plan to successfully pivot because you can try to avoid those things in the future. If you love your work, but not the people, then going to a different company to do a similar job is probably a smart move. But if you hate the work and the people, well, then it's probably time to make a complete 180. Moving to another company doing the same thing isn't going to fix that underlying problem of you not enjoying your work anymore. So any sense of dread is gonna be a clear sign that this is no longer a good fit and that's okay. This is all part of the reinvention process. Congratulations, you finally realized, oh, I dread going to work. Now I can do something about it. I do wanna share a quick caveat though, a quick client story, because it isn't always about how miserable you are, right? There's no like miserable meter that, okay, if I hit this level of miserable, then it's time to go. And I had a client who just kept trying to negotiate her exit with herself, right? She'd have a bad day and say like, okay, today's the day. Now I'm going to do it. I'm really going to start building my exit plan and I'm going to leave. But then the next day she'd be okay, right? She'd have like a fine day, no big fire drills, no major headaches. So she talked herself into staying a little bit longer because she wasn't really that miserable. And I want to give you permission today to make a change without having to feel miserable or have like overwhelming dread, okay? Maybe it's more about trading okay or the status quo for something better. Maybe it's trading good for great or even good for just different. Sometimes we just need a pivot and we might go from good to good. So just pay attention if you're putting stipulations around making a change, like you have to have a certain level of unhappiness in order to make a change. You don't, okay? That is a convenient excuse and something that we often use to stay stuck. But if you are feeling dread, then you can definitely check that box and know that it is time to move on. The second sign that you know it's time for a new job is you have no room for advancement. Every job should be enhancing your skills because if you're not learning, you're not growing. And if you're not growing, you're stagnant, AKA withering away. This is a very clear indication that it's time to go somewhere else or maybe leave that field altogether. Now, by changing companies, you may find you have more room for advancement, and it may give you this additional surge of excitement for that new job. There could be lots of benefits to making a change. And one of the challenges that I see in the corporate world is like once someone has a certain perception of you, it is very difficult to change. Not impossible, but it is difficult. And so sometimes we are just perceived a certain way inside of our current organization. And when we make a leap out, then we have this ability to change other people's perceptions. and to actually be seen differently, thereby making opportunities for advancement more present, more tangible. But I do want you to be aware that sometimes we make a pivot, maybe because we don't have room for advancement and we go to another company and it's all great for like the first six months. And then the honeymoon phase wears off. And that's happened to me, that's happened to several of my clients. But what I will tell you is the good news here is that now you know with 100% certainty that corporate is no longer for you. And you can confidently start making that full-on exit plan to go do something totally different. And just so you know, that is one of the main things that I help my clients with. So if you're interested or you're in that season where you're like, no, no, I really know that I want to make my corporate exit plan. You can book an empowered exit call with me. It's a 45 minute call. We'll talk about what's holding you back, what your ultimate vision is, and we'll make a game plan for going forward together. That link as always is in the show notes. So make sure you go set up your complimentary call. I'd love to have a chat with you. All right, the third sign you know that it's time for a new job is you've got lack of enthusiasm. And if this resonates, I have definitely been there. You're just like no longer interested in your work. What used to make you tick is now, ugh, boring. You just could do it with one eye shut, you know, and like your hands tied behind your back. You might be phoning it in a little bit more than usual. Checking the time all day long, like, oh my gosh, it's still only noon. Like I have four more hours or five more hours of this. Make it end. If your job doesn't interest you, I mean, there can certainly be a couple of different things, right? And I know one of the big symptoms of perimenopause is losing interest in things that you used to love. So that could be a situation, right? You may want to go have a visit with the doctor and chat with them and see if there's something going on with the whole perimenopause. but it could also be signs of advanced burnout. And I see this in a lot of my clients. But no matter which one of those or something else that it might be, right, this is still a sign that you need to jump ship and find the thing that is gonna make you tick for this season of life and allow you to have a little bit more balance. Because here's the problem with lack of enthusiasm for your work. Over time, apathy at work starts to spill into the other areas of your life. You might stop caring about the things outside of work or the work that you used to enjoy, like volunteering or hobbies, right? You just start to feel like, oh, I don't care about my work anymore. Now I don't even enjoy this fun hobby. Now I don't even like doing stuff at my church or I don't like doing this other volunteering stuff. Everything starts to feel like a chore because you're so overtaxed. The opposite side of that, which I see sometimes in my clients, is that you find you spend so much time at work because, hey, you're an overachiever and anything less than perfection won't do, right? That you have no time for anything outside of work that you actually care about. The things that light you up, that make you feel more well-rounded and fulfilled, right? And that's not a good feeling for anyone. So you kind of stay stuck. You dive more into your work, work that you don't even care about. And it's just like this vicious cycle of unhappiness. So if you're experiencing a lack of enthusiasm, it's definitely time to start contemplating, what's next for me? The fourth sign it's time to move on is you're burnt out. And we just touched on that for a minute. But I want to expand because... This is something that I think a lot of people don't even realize they're in burnout often until it's too late. So the work might be really challenging or the environment is just so chaotic that you are overworked, right? You never get any downtime. There's always a fire drill. There's always the next big hoop. It's like, okay, if I can just survive till Friday. Okay, no, if I can just survive till the end of this month, if I can just get through that meeting or that trade show or whatever your big milestone is, but there's always another one. There's always a thing that you just have to get through. And it's been so interesting for me lately because my husband has definitely been experiencing some like stage three burnout. And one of the symptoms is often little things become really big things, right? Something that really probably isn't that big of a deal starts to feel like the end of the world. Now he's an electrician, so it's kind of a different world, but he came home the other day and he was complaining about something that to me sounded like not like a big deal, but to him, it was the most, it was just like, he couldn't believe that they were asking him this. So his boss was concerned that there were a few tools that went missing on the last job. And so now the boss wants pictures of all the tools at the end of the day. And I'm kind of like, yeah, that kind of seems like a no brainer, right? Like if you were the foreman on this job, shouldn't that be your responsibility to manage the tools and the people? Like, I don't know. It doesn't seem like a big deal to me, but he was just like, I can't believe he's asking me this. I'm not a baby. You don't have to babysit me like all these complaints. And it sounded like the end of the world to him. And I just stopped him and I was like, babe, it's time to go. It's time to go. This is the end of the road for you. And sure enough, on Wednesday, he put in his two weeks. And it's funny because he sounded just like me when I was in my last marketing job. And I remember my boss coming to me and being like, Karin, we ought to send out this email. Because I did email marketing in my team. We ought to send out this email about EV charging. And I... was over the moon about how stupid this was. And I was so frustrated. And I'm like, we can't even sell it here. Like we don't have the sales team to enable this. We're going to lose people from our, our database. And once they're gone, we can't get them back. Like I had a million reasons why this shouldn't, we shouldn't do this. Right. But like, really all I had to do was be like, yes, ma'am. No problem. We'll send the email. Like it was such a It could have been such not a big deal, but because of the level of burnout and stress, I was just so upset. And you might be finding yourself in the same situation. And if everything feels like a burden, everything feels like the end of the world, girl, it's time to go. And that's okay because you are worthy of a better quality of life. And if you want to dig into burnout a little bit more, if this one's like, oh my gosh, this is so me right now, go listen to episode 16 of the Rock Your Reinvention podcast, where I bust three myths about burnout. And I think that that will give you some more insight as well. The fifth reason that you need to leave your job and look for something new is your life outside of work is suffering. And suffering can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, right? It might be neglecting your health. Maybe you're not getting enough exercise. Maybe you're feeling sick or exhausted all the time. Maybe your balance is just totally out of whack and you are feeling really bad about not having more time with the And this could be both romantically or your friendships. You know, a lot of my clients come to me and they're like, I don't have any friends. I'm like, oh yeah, I remember that season of life. And it's not fun. It can be very painful. And you might not even be the one realizing your personal life is suffering. Sometimes it's your loved ones who are coming to you and they're picking up on things like your mood swings or how short you are, right? You're always short-tempered or snapping at the kids or your spouse. And they might be the ones bringing this to your attention and saying something about it. I remember in my case, oh my gosh, even my poor sweet little dog, Peanut. Oh, rest his soul. I can't wait to see him someday and give him like the biggest hug and just love on him again. But he was such a good dog and he was an absolute nuisance for me. And I feel so bad saying that out loud. Like who says that about their dog? But I was in total survival mode at that time. And I was just like, you're under my feet. I can't get anything done. This dog's always in the way. It needs walks. It needs this. And I just didn't have the capacity to handle anything else outside of my work life because it was so full on. But a lot of that also was my overachievement tendencies, right? You might be spending all Sunday just giving yourself a pep talk. Like, okay, I can do this. It was just one more week. Hang in there. Keep adulting. And now you're not even enjoying your weekends because your whole weekends become a pep talk to prep you for the next Monday. And you probably feel like you never have time for anything outside of work, right? I was just sharing with a client, too. Like, at one point, I couldn't even enjoy sex. I was just so in another place we'd be doing it. And I'm like thinking about my to-do list and even sex felt like something on my to-do list. Right. Just like cook, check this off. Okay. And how sad is that? I didn't want to be distant or emotionally unavailable for my husband. I mean, that's not what I signed up for when we took our vows, but at the same time I was running on complete empty. I was like running on fumes and coffee. And when we get to this state, it's time to reevaluate our priorities and make a shift because I believe that life is way too short to settle for this hectic survival mode where work is always number one. So if you are feeling like your life outside of work is suffering, I promise you, there is somewhere else that you can work and make good money if that's a priority for you and find balance and actually have a personal life. It is possible. It does exist. And I see my clients do it all the time. I got two more for you. The sixth sign that you are ready to make a pivot and find a new job is that your ethics and the company's mission no longer align with your values. And I think we underestimate the importance of this one. And ethics and mission was so big for me when I was changing jobs and leaving corporate. I remember when I was in telecom, I had very different ideas about how plugged in we should all be and how many devices people needed and at what ages people needed those devices. And, you know, my company wanted every kid plugged into an iPad and a watch and a phone as early as possible. And I just had two young kids and I would look at them and I'm like, this isn't healthy. I don't want to get behind this anymore. What am I exposing them to? You know, I'm the parent that makes them put a pillow on their waist when they're using a tablet or any device, because I don't want it to, as I say to them, fry their balls. But you know, like the radiation is not good for their sperm. And I don't want them to not be able to have children someday because they sat with an iPad on their lap when they were kids. So you know, do you, I'm no judgment here, but like for me, there's just all of a sudden was like this big misalignment, right? Between what I could get behind and the company that I wanted to work for. And then I went into energy and everything was great. And I'm like, yeah, I'm working on renewables. I'm saving the earth. This is great. And then all of a sudden they come to me and they're like, oh, we want to get into the cannabis market. And I'm like, wait, what? Huh? the cannabis market because it takes a lot of energy to produce cannabis. So they wanted to get in with like solar and all these different things. But I was like, I've seen way too many people become addicted to weed and then completely blow their life and get into other things and just never amount to anything like way too many friends. And I'm like, I can't I can't do this. I can't support that. And so once again, I found myself like I need to make a pivot. There is a massive misalignment here. So the question to yourself is, what values do you feel are being compromised? How is the mission misaligned from yours? And it might be time to listen to those concerns and jump ship.

Karin Freeland: 19:15

All right, and the seventh sign it's time to get a new job is your side hustle is taking off. So if you have started a side gig and things are starting to pick up, especially to the point where your day job is getting in the way of that side hustle, It is time to jump in with both feet and pursue this full on. No more backup plan, right? Because the great thing here is that you've already tested this business idea. I mean, you know it works. So why not make it your plan A, right? Why not go all in on that and be your own boss? And hopefully you've built up a bit of a cash cushion so you can make that transition more seamlessly. I mean, I know when I left my job, I was consulting on the side for almost two years while I was building up my coaching business, you know, and both of those jobs were part time. So I kind of had like two side hustles in a way. And consulting paid me so much that I was able to save up a pretty significant amount of money in a short time so that I could stop consulting and then go all in on my coaching business. Now, You may not have that big of a cushion, but if you could get even like a six months salary, right, six months window, then I say go all in. And if you're consistently thinking about that side hustle, if you find yourself so much more lit up and happier when you're doing that work, I mean, it's just a clear sign that you're ready for entrepreneurship. So trust yourself. Whatever you do next, though, do not stay put. You don't need any more signs. I see this temptation all the time. Well, just give me one more sign, God, whoever your creator is. One more sign and then I'll believe you. And then you get the sign and you're like, no, no, was that really a sign? I don't think that was a sign. Give me another one. We just keep negotiating our exit. You don't need to have all of these signs either, right? So if you were like, well, I only had two or three of those signs. Who cares? That's enough, right? You don't even need any signs. You could just feel in your gut, no, I think it's time for a pivot, and that's enough. Some of these signs might be really strong, and some of them might be like, no, it's not really a big deal. Again, it's okay, right? It's enough. Trust your intuition, believe in yourself, and start making a plan to finally pivot. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you're inspired to take action by committing to one of the tips or strategies we talked about in today's episode. If you want more accountability and support, I've got your back. Book a complimentary empowered exit strategy call today. Visit karinfreeland.com to learn more and book your 45-minute session.