Why Do I Stay in Jobs I Have Outgrown?
The Pattern
You have known for two years. Maybe three. The job no longer fits you. You have stopped learning. You have stopped being seen. You have stopped wanting to be there. And every Monday you go back. You wonder if you are afraid of change. You are not, exactly. You are inside a body that reads the familiar as safe, regardless of whether the familiar is actually serving you.
Origins & Context
The behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky documented the human tendency known as loss aversion: the felt cost of losing what one has is greater than the felt benefit of gaining what one could have. Applied to career, this means the discomfort of the outgrown job consistently feels less threatening than the unknown of the new one, even when the math favors leaving.
The psychologist William Bridges, whose work on life transitions is foundational, distinguished between the external change of a job leaving and the internal transition required to be the kind of person who is in the next one. The internal transition is the harder work. Staying in the outgrown job lets the person avoid the disorientation of the neutral zone, even though the staying itself has become a slow erosion of who she is.
You are not afraid of change. You are inside a body that reads the familiar as safe, regardless of whether the familiar is actually serving you.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You notice it in the way you have updated your resume four times without sending it. You notice the bookmarks of job listings you saved months ago and never returned to. You notice the way you can describe in detail what is wrong with your current role and still cannot find the energy to leave it.
You notice the small bargaining. After this project. After the bonus. After the next promotion. You notice that the after never arrives, because the body that is making the bargain is the body that has decided the staying is safer than the going.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as Loss Aversion (Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky), the documented bias by which the felt cost of loss exceeds the felt benefit of equivalent gain. It is also named as the Neutral Zone Avoidance (William Bridges), the unwillingness to enter the disorienting middle space between an old identity and a new one. The contemporary version is named as Career Inertia (Herminia Ibarra in Working Identity), the documented tendency to stay in roles long after they have ceased to fit.
Related entries in this library: Self-Abandonment, Authentic Desire, Healing Is Direction Not Destination.
Nikita's Note
You do not have to leave today. You do have to be honest, today, that you are staying because the leaving feels harder, not because the staying is right.
The honesty is the first move. Once you have admitted you are inside a body that prefers familiar erosion to unfamiliar growth, the rest becomes negotiable. Start applying. Start exploring. Start the small experiments that build the next version of you in the off-hours, until the off-hours version is big enough to walk into the daytime.
From the work
You are not afraid of change. You are inside a body that reads the familiar as safe, regardless of whether the familiar is actually serving you.From She Was Not Low Maintenance, She Was Trained by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in She Was Not Low Maintenance, She Was Trained — available on Amazon.