How do I know if it's the right time to make a move?

For a lot of people January is a month for change but if you're not a 100% on why you need to change then you could be faced with the decision on whether you're happy again in less than 12 months.?

When I started in recruitment my first month was more focused on training, learning the trade (science?) that is recruitment rather than just being thrown into the deep end, the sink or swim method. One of the training videos at the time that I watched was by the late, some might say great, Tony Byrnes. Over 20 years later a lot of the fundamentals I learnt are still what I stick by day in and day out.?

One of the things I learned from Tony was candidate qualification and particularly what was the candidate's hot button (this was the terminology?of the time), in other words what was their motivation (other than money) to make a move. The process of discovering?this started with the question on a scale of 1 to 5 how motivated are you to make a move from your job right now. You were always looking for 5 to be the answer and then you started pushing back on them to see if you could get them to change their number downwards.?

The push back questions included what have you done so far to change your circumstances internally, have you spoken to your partner about making a move, how would making a move now affect you financially - bonuses, equity, mortgage etc. This was done to see how far along they were in making the decision that the time was right to make a move and that they had exhausted any and all internal opportunities, spoken with their partner and were ready to move for the right opportunity. As a recruiter I was told you only worked with 5's and that you could turn a 5 into a 4 but you were only fooling yourself if you thought you could turn a 4 into a 5. The tagline used was if you worked with a 4 you would be left standing alone at the altar. The view was that a 4 was more likely to accept a counter offer or just get cold feet and pull out of processes midstream.?

Today for a lot of people it's their first day back to work after 1+ weeks off, I'm seeing Linkedin posts calling out that if you weren't motivated to hit the ground running today then it's time to make a move. I doubt many people jumped out of the bed this morning a la Dicky Fox from the movie Jerry Maguire and clapped their hands and said this is going to be a great day (if you did fair play to you) and that's ok. However if you're still not feeling it by the end of the day and dreading tomorrow and that continues for the rest of the week then maybe you should take action and I'm not necessarily?talking about changing jobs. Ask yourself on a scale of 1 to 5 how likely you are to make a move right now. If you're 5 then see if you can turn yourself into a 4 or lower and the best place to start is to write a list of what you like and don't like about your current role, company, manager. You'd be surprised how making a couple of small changes could make you a lot happier in your current role. Once you've done this and you're still a 5 then you have a blueprint of what your ideal job looks like, what is it about your current role that you wouldn't want repeated in your next one.?

Sometimes the best career move you can make is to stay where you are and change what is it about the role that is making you unhappy, that could be a better definition?of your role in the company, a change in teams, a change in manager. Don't change for the sake of change.??