Two Questions You Should Ask Yourself If You're Afraid To Make A Career Change

This is a guest post by, Jason Feifer, Editor in Chief at Entrepreneur Magazine. Make sure to subscribe to his One Thing Better Newsletter. To read this entire post make sure to become a premium subscriber.

Here’s Jason!

Are you ready for a change?

Statistically speaking, you probably are. Only 23% of workers are “engaged” at work, meaning that they find their work meaningful and feel connected to their colleagues — and that’s a “record high,” according to Gallup’s annual State of the Workplace report. Consider it: Less than a quarter of workers are truly happy, and that’s when things are going well.

So, why aren’t you making that change? My guess: You don’t know how to answer two important questions.

First: “What comes next?”

Second: “Am I giving up everything I’d done before?”

That second question is especially hard, because it feels invalidating. Change often feels like loss — as if we’re discarding everything we’re comfortable and familiar with, in exchange for an unknown set of burdens ahead.

But that’s not true. As editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine , I get to study how people become adaptable and thrive in changing environments (and I write a weekly newsletter to help people do it). And I’ve discovered this: There is an important difference between leaving something and building upon something.

In this post, I’ll show you that difference — and help empower you to take your next, necessary step.

A better way to understanding quitting

Why do we stay in jobs that don’t fulfill us, or relationships that no longer sustains us? Economists might say it’s the sunk cost fallacy , which is a fancy way of describing this human impulse: We believe it’s worth continuing to do something, because we’ve already invested in doing it.

But the costs of chasing sunk costs is high? I once interviewed decision-making expert Annie Duke, who put it like this: “If you're stuck in something that isn't worth pursuing, you're not allowing yourself the other opportunities that you might also pursue.”

Now let’s apply that thinking to a friend of mine we’ll call “Eric.” He once was part of the 23% of engaged workers in the world, and he still takes a lot of pride in his work. But his company has changed significantly. He hates his boss and feels beaten down by the company culture.

Could he just go to another company? Maybe, but not easily. He’s a magazine editor, where the job pool is shrinking. That’s especially true at his senior level.

“What if you left media?” I asked him.

“I don’t know how to do anything else,” he said. “I’d have to learn something new and work my way up.”

And there it is —?the fear of starting over. I wanted to show him that he’s wrong.

So I ran him through an exercise that you may find helpful too.

What are your core skillsets?

In this exercise, we’re going to identify the tasks you perform every day — and then identify the underlying skillsets that drive those tasks. The purpose is to identify a kind of continuum: We want to see how the things you do today can translate into seemingly unrelated work tomorrow.

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