Are You Going Through A Mid-Career Crisis? Here’s How To Break Out Of A Slump

Most professionals have at least one mid-career crisis . It can easily become a long-term setback, but it doesn’t have to be. Recognizing it early and creating a new career roadmap will help you avoid the crisis. You’ll springboard to a more satisfying career phase.

The first time you go through a mid-career crisis, you’re unprepared, and the people around you aren’t much help. This article explains what’s happening, why, and what steps to take. Once you understand how to navigate these transition points, it takes less time to put them behind you.

I went through my mid-career crisis in 2010. I should have been overjoyed with where my career was. I had won every award my company gave out. I earned yearly promotions and raises. The team I led was growing and taking on new projects. I was getting everything I thought I wanted and making excellent progress on my career roadmap.

So why was I unsatisfied? People around me started to pick up on it. I was still a high performer, but working with someone who’s obviously unhappy is hard. That’s the worst part about a mid-career crisis. I hit a slow downward spiral and didn’t see a way to break it.

Getting laid off in 2012 turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It forced me to consider new career options and make the leap forward I should have started sooner. My first mistake was ignoring the warning signs.

The Warning Signs Of A Mid-Career Crisis

Everyone is different, so this isn’t a comprehensive list, nor does everyone experience all the same signs. There’s also no standard timeline. Some stay on the same track for over a decade. Others hop tracks every 5 years. These are the most common indicators but not the only ones I have seen.

• Can’t stay motivated. Advancement and personal improvement are no longer enough to keep you motivated or engaged.
• Questioning leadership and strategy. Nothing is being done right, and you feel like your ideas are entirely ignored.
• Switching from project to project but can’t stay engaged to finish. You’re going through the motions without any of the emotion and intensity you used to have.
• There’s an internal struggle and concern that you’re no longer producing at the same level as you used to.
• A sense of isolation or not fitting in. It feels like everyone else is moving in a different direction, and you’re no longer sure of your place on the team.

Quarterly check-ins are the best way to spot these signs early. A career journal is an essential tool for tracking your perceptions. The journal’s purpose is to track events, your sentiment, and the feedback you’re getting from peers, leaders, and mentors. Sentiment and satisfaction are just as important as advancement.

In a mid-career crisis, steady or even rapid progress stops delivering the same sense of accomplishment as it used to. It’s hard to imagine, but we often move the goalposts without realizing it. Personal and professional growth rarely follows the same path for our whole career. It hops tracks as our interests and personality change. That hop is tricky to detect unless you’re looking for the signs.

How Is This Change Different?

You’ve navigated change before and adapted to continue moving forward. This is a different category. A mid-career crisis happens when you’ve outgrown your current career. Circumstances around you haven’t changed. You have, so your career roadmap needs to adapt this time, not you.

Change becomes inevitable, but a sense of loss holds many people back. It feels like the work you’ve put into this journey is being thrown away. That’s not true, but the perception is the most significant barrier to making a change. What often comes with that sense of loss is a fear that it’s too late to make a significant change .

Continuing to do what’s always worked and hoping this will pass is a trap. It won’t. The internal change has already taken place. We can’t feel satisfied until the person we have grown to become aligns with our actions. The source of dissatisfaction comes from pretending to be something we’re not, even when that’s who we were a year or two ago.

I often recommend Annie Duke’s book ‘Quit.’ It’s an excellent manual for decision-making in response to internal and external changes. Adapting requires reevaluating our assumptions and adjusting our decision-making frameworks.

‘Quit’ explains why it’s so hard to stop doing something even when it’s clearly destructive or no longer aligned with our needs. The decisions and roadmap that got you to this point won’t take you any further. You must quit your current path and create a new one.

Sunk costs hold most people back because it seems like you’re throwing your old career away. However, you’re not starting over again. Much of what you know will follow you into your new role. Look at what you’ve done as necessary to get you to this point and the foundation for what comes next.

Drastic change isn’t necessary for most people. You’re not going in a completely new direction. If you step back, the themes behind this change and signs of where you’re headed are apparent. Remember, the internal change has already taken place. Subconsciously, you have been gearing up for the new path forward. The signs and themes are not evident until you spend time looking for them.

Friends and family usually pick up on the changes but don’t want to say anything. If you can’t see it on your own, ask them for help.

Finding Opportunities To Start Your Next Phase

You’ll need to develop a new career roadmap, but treat it like a rough draft. It’s your best guess at what you want to do next. However, this will be a process of exploration. You might get it right on the first try, or it could take 2 to 3 iterations to find the next phase.

This transition will take time, and this isn’t something you can resolve in a week or month. There’s no quick fix, and looking for one is a recipe for prolonging a mid-career crisis.

Choose opportunities that are right for you instead of settling for an opportunity that’s right in front of you. You need more than a change of scenery or a different company. Keep reminding yourself that this transition requires a new approach.

In the past, you’ve evaluated options that others brought to you. That approach has trained you to think your opportunities are limited by what you’ve always done. You have more options and career paths available, but people around you won’t bring you opportunities that align with your new roadmap.

You’re not sure what’s next, and as long as you don’t know what you want, it’s impossible for people around you to. Your options feel limited because your network only knows your career history. They can’t see your new career trajectory.

You must take the initiative and seek opportunities aligning with your new career roadmap. In some cases, you’ll need to make your own opportunities. That’s what happened to me. I started a business around data science at a time when most business leaders didn’t see the opportunity. It wasn’t a well-established role, and I had to create opportunities outside of traditional employment.

It isn’t easy to get advice from your peers and current mentors. They can rarely see past who you are today and the person they’ve gotten used to seeing you as. Most of your existing network has typecast you and won’t change their views until they see you in a new role.

I applied for product manager jobs, but my experience and achievements followed a completely different path. Hiring managers couldn’t see anything else, and I wasn’t even called in for interviews. The two tracks I wanted to follow were blocked.

Many will discourage you from transitioning because they have the same fear of change. That’s what happened to me. No one understood why I was moving outside my area of expertise. Quitting looks like the wrong choice to people who have never done it before. Why would you stop doing the things you’ve been wildly successful at so far?

The only people who will understand you are those who have made significant career transitions themselves. Most people struggle with a mid-career crisis and break out of it by chance. They know what you’re going through but don’t have a sense of how to help. Those mid-career crisis survivors will make a great support group, but you’ll need more to chart your own course.

Choosing Your Next Opportunity

The leader and team you choose for your next role are more important than the role or company. Surrounding yourself with the same types of people will make it harder to change your mindset. You need people who are more advanced and capable than you are today.

As an early career professional, this felt natural. It feels wrong at this point in your career, and you need to overcome that to succeed.

You will be moving from the top tier of your current team to the middle or even bottom of a new one. Your leader will seem like they are light years ahead of you. It’s like going from a high school senior to a college freshman. The hardest part is gaining confidence and believing in yourself.

The first person you prove it to is yourself. The most complex barrier to overcome in your first role is regaining the sense of capability and value creation. You won’t feel like a contributor until you prove it, which requires someone to take a chance on you.

You need a leader and mentors who know how to help people make the transition. Great leaders see it before you do. As an aside, no one makes it into the C-suite until they can see talent in someone before that person realizes it themselves. Finding a leader and team that can take you there is critical.

Avoiding Career Regression

I played safety in football, and my only job was to take the ball away from receivers. I got the most interceptions from receivers who didn’t believe they were ready for the ball. I learned to see and capitalize on that uncertainty. My high school coach had a few gems of advice. “If you don’t think you’re ready for the ball, you’ll prove yourself right.”

The team and leader are critical because you need to get that confidence to succeed. It’s common for people to take the next step in their careers and then quickly step back into their old role. The team and leader set people up to succeed or hang them out to dry and fail on their own.

The first 6 months of the transition are critical and when you need support most. People are uncomfortable during that time. Many see setbacks where there aren’t any. They compare themselves to people with years of experience and think they’re failing because they can’t perform at the same level. Self-sabotage comes next, and breaking that cycle is difficult.

Find people who know how to help you through the first 6 months. Wait to make a move until you do. People rarely succeed without a support system. It happens, but the risk of regressing is too significant. Most people who fail the first time don’t realize they were set up to fail. It makes the mid-career crisis worse.

I’ll finish with something I struggled with. Don’t be afraid of not having all the answers. That’s normal during the transition. Don’t worry if your new career roadmap has some gaps. You don’t have enough knowledge or information during the transition; some of it requires a leap of faith.

You’ll find people who have some of the answers along the way. In the first year, ask more questions than you answer. Ask for help and accept support when it’s offered. Those new behaviors aren’t an admission of incompetence. They are a sign of maturity and awareness of your limitations. The sooner you get comfortable with the learning process, the faster you settle into your new career.

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