I Feel Stuck in My Career: What's Really Going On and What to Do Next

You are good at your job. Really good.

You have the title, the salary, maybe the international move that everyone back home thought was brave. And yet every Monday morning there is a small voice saying Is this it?

You type "I feel stuck in my career" into a search bar at 11 p.m. and get forty listicles telling you to update your CV and "find your passion."

Let's try something more useful.

I spent ten years in corporate roles before leaving in 2014 to build my own practice. I'm an engineer by training, so I tend to treat "stuck" less like a mood and more like a system that has stopped producing output. Something is jammed. Our job is to find out what.

Why do I feel stuck in my career when nothing is wrong?

Because "stuck" is rarely about the job. It is usually about the story.

When you are early in your career, the story writes itself. Learn, get promoted, learn more, get promoted again. The ladder gives you direction for free.

Then, somewhere in your late thirties or forties, the ladder gets short. Or you look up and realise the people at the top do not have lives you want. The external story ends, and you have not yet written an internal one.

Stuck is often what it feels like when the old reasons have expired and the new ones haven't arrived yet.

The illusion that you are finished changing

In 2013, Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson published a study in Science with more than 19,000 participants. People of every age reported that they had changed a lot in the past ten years, but predicted they would change very little in the next ten. The researchers called it the end of history illusion.

Gilbert summarised it beautifully in his 2014 TED talk.

"Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished." Daniel Gilbert

This matters for your career. If you assume the person you are now is the final version, you will choose work that fits her. And then you will feel stuck, because she keeps quietly turning into someone else.

A lot of senior professionals are not stuck. They have outgrown the role and haven't admitted it.

Is it burnout, boredom, or a wrong fit?

These three get confused all the time, and they need very different responses.

Burnout is depletion. You are tired, cynical, and less effective. A new job won't fix it if you bring the same habits along.

Boredom is under-stimulation. You have mastered the work and nothing is stretching you. You need a new problem, not necessarily a new company.

Wrong fit is a values mismatch. The job is fine, but it asks you to be someone you don't respect. Rest won't help. Neither will a bigger title.

In my sessions with senior professionals, the most common mistake I see is treating all three as burnout and prescribing a holiday. They come back rested and exactly as stuck. Naming which of the three is actually happening tends to save months, because each one asks for a completely different move.

A useful check. On holiday, do you miss the work at all? If you miss it but dread going back, think burnout. If you don't think about it, think boredom. If you feel relief at not being that version of yourself, think fit.

Why small progress matters more than big plans

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer at Harvard Business School analysed nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from knowledge workers for their book The Progress Principle (2011). Of all the things that could boost people's inner work life on a given day, the single most powerful was simply making progress in meaningful work, even small progress.

Read that the other way round, and it explains a lot of stuckness. Senior roles are often full of meetings, politics and decisions that take months to show results. You are busy, but you rarely see yourself move.

You don't always need a new career. Sometimes you need a visible finish line this week.

The special case of internationals

If you are working outside your home country, stuckness has extra layers.

Your visa may be tied to your employer. Your network is thinner. You may be operating in a second language, where you sound a little less like yourself in every meeting. And the move itself was supposed to be the big change, so admitting you feel stuck can feel like admitting the move failed.

It didn't. You simply did the brave thing once and assumed it would keep paying out forever.

Many of my clients live outside Türkiye, and the pattern I notice is this. Internationals often wait for certainty before making the next move, because the last move cost so much. But certainty in careers rarely comes first. It usually comes after.

How do I get unstuck in my career?

Herminia Ibarra, professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School, studied people who changed careers successfully. In her book Working Identity (2003) she argued that we don't think our way into a new way of acting; we act our way into a new way of thinking. Planning from the armchair rarely works. Small experiments do.

So, a few experiments rather than a to-do list.

1. Run a two-week energy audit. At the end of each day, note one task that gave you energy and one that drained it. Ignore job titles. Look for verbs. Teaching, fixing, persuading, building, analysing. The verbs tell you more than the nouns.

2. Have three curious conversations. Find three people doing work you might envy. Not to ask for a job. Ask them what a boring Tuesday looks like. Envy is information; boring Tuesdays are reality.

3. Build a side door, not an exit. A small project, a course, a talk, a piece of writing. Something that lets you try on a new identity without resigning first.

4. Write the obituary of your current role. Literally. What did it give you? What did you learn? What are you grateful for? It's much easier to leave a chapter you have honoured.

5. Ask a sharper question. "What should I do with my life?" is too big to answer. Try "What problem would I happily think about on a Sunday?" The machine gives answers. The human chooses the question. Career clarity usually starts with a better question, not a better answer.

6. Get an opposing voice. Smart people are brilliant at building convincing arguments for staying exactly where they are. I call this the Unopposed Mind, a brilliant mind with no one left to disagree with it. A mentor, coach, or honest friend who will push back is worth more than another personality test.

Feeling stuck is information

"We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness." Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

Stuck feels like nothing is happening. In fact, a lot is happening. Something in you has already changed, and the rest of your life is catching up.

The answer isn't always to quit. Sometimes it is to renegotiate the role, start something on the side, or simply stop pretending the old story still works.

So here's the question I'd like to leave you with.

If you knew for certain that you will be a different person ten years from now, what would you start doing for her this month?

With love,

Gizem

If this raised a question you'd like to think through, we can look at it together. Book a free 30-minute Discovery Call.