When Your Career Feels Out of Your Control
You've been having the same conversation with your manager for more than a year.
They know you want to progress. You've been clear about that. You've taken on more responsibility, stepped in when things needed doing, supported colleagues, delivered what was asked of you and quite a lot that wasn't. You've been told that there should be opportunities when the structure changes, when budgets are clearer, when somebody leaves, when the next round of roles is approved.
So you wait.
The restructure happens, but nothing really changes for you. A role appears, but it isn't quite what you were led to expect. Someone else is given an opportunity you hadn't even known was available. Your manager tells you to be patient.
And eventually the frustration becomes about much more than the promotion.
You begin to feel trapped.
You can't make the organisation create a role for you. You can't make your manager recognise what you bring. You can't decide who gets promoted, how budgets are allocated or what happens in the next restructure.
And all of that is true.
But perhaps there is another truth sitting alongside it.
While you've been waiting for somebody else to decide what happens next, when did you stop asking yourself what you might choose to do?
How our careers can begin to feel as though they belong to someone else
I don't think this happens because people suddenly decide to hand responsibility for their careers to somebody else.
It happens much more subtly than that.
In the example above, there is a perfectly good reason to wait. Your manager really does have influence over whether you are promoted. The organisation really does control which roles exist. There really are decisions being made elsewhere that affect what happens to you.
So naturally, your attention goes there.
You watch the restructure. You wait for the conversation. You try to interpret what your manager says. You wonder whether the opportunity will appear.
And gradually, the question What are they going to do? can begin to crowd out a different question:
What am I going to do?
That is the shift I find interesting.
Because once the centre of gravity moves outside us, we can begin to experience our career primarily through other people's decisions.
And sometimes those decisions will be unfair.
Good work isn't always recognised. Opportunities aren't distributed equally. Bias exists. Gatekeeping exists. Some people have far easier access to visibility, sponsorship and opportunity than others. Organisations make decisions for reasons that have very little to do with what an individual deserves.
And sometimes this isn't the result of one disappointing experience, but of being weathered by many of them.
You put yourself forward and are overlooked. You contribute and somebody else is
heard. You work harder, prepare more, prove yourself repeatedly, and still watch opportunities go elsewhere.
After enough of those experiences, it is understandable that something begins to change.
You don't only lose confidence in the system; you can begin to lose confidence in your own ability to affect what happens within it. You ask less. Expect less. Perhaps eventually you stop imagining possibilities that experience has taught you not to expect.
That isn't simply a failure to take responsibility for your career.
It is a very human response to what you have experienced.
But if those experiences have gradually narrowed what you believe you can influence, part of reclaiming choice may be learning to separate what the system has taught you about itself from what you have come to believe about yourself.
Because those are not the same thing.
A system that repeatedly fails to recognise you is telling you something about the system.
It doesn't necessarily tell you the truth about your value, your capability or what might become possible somewhere else.
And this is where knowing ourselves becomes so important.
When our understanding of ourselves is sufficiently grounded, the environment is no longer our only source of information about who we are. We can recognise what is happening around us without allowing it to become the whole story we tell ourselves about ourselves.
We can return to what we know.
I trust myself because I know myself.
And from there, the question can begin to change again.
Not only What are they going to do?
But What am I going to do?
How a career built through choices can stop feeling chosen
This may become easier to understand when we look beyond one manager or one opportunity and consider how careers develop over time.
Very few of us create a career through one enormous decision.
We accumulate it.
We choose a first role because it looks interesting or sensible. We take an opportunity because somebody sees potential in us. We become good at something, so we're given more of it. A promotion comes along. Our salary increases. We develop expertise. Responsibilities outside work grow, and stability begins to matter differently.
None of those choices has to have been wrong.
They may have been exactly right for the person we were and the life we were living at the time.
But every choice also takes us a little further in a particular direction.
We become more experienced in some things and less connected to others. People begin to know us for particular capabilities. Our professional identity becomes more established. Our lifestyle begins to reflect the income and working patterns we've built around it.
And somewhere along the way, something that began as a direction can start to feel like a destination.
This is what I do.
This is what I'm qualified for.
This is the level I'm at.
This is how my career works.
What was once one possible path begins to feel like the only realistic one.
And that is how a career constructed through hundreds of choices can eventually leave us feeling as though we have none.
When possibilities disappear before opportunities do
This matters because having choices and being able to see choices are not the same thing.
An opportunity can exist and still be almost invisible to us if we cannot imagine ourselves inside it.
Maybe I think I'm too old to change direction.
Or I've spent twenty years becoming known for something and cannot imagine what else anybody would employ me to do.
Perhaps moving sideways feels like failure.
Or my salary has become both a genuine financial requirement and evidence of how successful I believe I am supposed to be.
Perhaps I've absorbed an idea about what somebody with my background, qualifications or career history does next.
After a while, we don't necessarily experience those things as beliefs.
They begin to feel like descriptions of reality, so the field from which we choose becomes smaller.
This is why simply telling somebody who feels stuck that they have lots of options rarely helps. They may be able to see the options perfectly well on paper. The problem is that they cannot see themselves inside those options. And until that changes, an option isn't really experienced as a choice.
This is also why Choice comes where it does in the Proactive Empowered Careers Method®.
Because exercising choice meaningfully begins with reconnecting with ourselves, becoming curious again, understanding ourselves more clearly, noticing what does and doesn't fit and beginning to rebuild our confidence from a more grounded place.
The world may not have changed at all.
But the person looking at it has.
And when we begin to see ourselves differently, we can begin to see possibility differently too.
Not every constraint is in the same place
This is where I think conversations about choice can become unhelpfully simplistic.
Constraints are real.
We have mortgages, rent and bills. We have families and caring responsibilities. Health may affect what is possible. Geography matters. The labour market matters. Discrimination matters. The economy matters. We may need a particular level of income or flexibility that genuinely rules certain possibilities out.
None of those things disappears because we decide to take greater ownership of our career.
But external constraints aren't the only constraints we live with.
There are also the ones that have found their way inside.
And sometimes, as we've already seen, they arrived there through experience.
Being repeatedly overlooked can become "There's no point putting myself forward."
Having our contribution dismissed can become "Perhaps I don't have as much to contribute as I thought."
Spending years in one kind of work can become "This is all I'm qualified to do."
A system can impose a real constraint upon us at one point in time, and we can continue carrying the meaning we made of that experience long after the particular situation has changed.
Alongside those are the other assumptions we've absorbed: the expectations we've carried for so long that we've stopped questioning them, the rules we've created about what a successful career is supposed to look like, the stories we tell ourselves about what we're capable of, what we're allowed to want and what people like us can reasonably expect.
And I think it is important not to confuse all of these things.
Because if a constraint is external, we need to work intelligently with the reality of it.
But if what is constraining us is an assumption, then maybe we can examine it.
If it is a story, perhaps we can question it.
If it is a conclusion drawn from an environment that repeatedly diminished us, perhaps we can ask whether that conclusion still deserves to travel with us.
If it is something we have never considered because it didn't fit our previous understanding of ourselves, perhaps we can become curious about it.
The question isn't simply,
What is stopping me?
It might also be:
Where is the constraint actually located?
And once we understand that, we can begin to distinguish what we need to accept, what we might influence, what we can change, and what may never have been ours to carry in the first place.
Where waiting becomes a choice too
And that brings us back to the person waiting for the promotion.
Maybe the organisation really has failed them.
Maybe the manager should have done more.
Maybe another opportunity genuinely will appear in six months and waiting for it is a completely conscious decision.
The point isn't that waiting is wrong.
The question is whether we know that we are choosing to wait.
There is a profound difference between:
"I've looked at what is available to me, considered what matters, and I'm choosing to stay for now."
and:
"I have to stay because there is nothing else I can do."
The external circumstances might look identical.
The relationship we have with them is not.
One contains participation. The other can gradually produce powerlessness.
And this is where waiting for permission, waiting for somebody to open the door or waiting indefinitely for someone else to provide an opportunity becomes important.
Because waiting isn't always neutral.
Our careers continue while we wait.
Another year passes. Our expertise deepens in a particular direction. Our reputation becomes more closely associated with particular work. Organisations change. Opportunities appear and disappear. Our lives change too.
A direction is being created whether or not we are consciously participating in it.
So if we don't shape that direction, it happens anyway.
Bringing some of the direction back to ourselves
This is the point at which conversations about taking control of your career and exercising greater career agency can suddenly become enormous.
If I'm responsible for my direction, does that mean I have to leave?
Change career?
Walk away from everything I've built?
Start again?
No.
Because if careers are shaped by accumulated decisions, we can also begin reshaping them in the same way.
A conversation can be a choice.
Exploring an idea can be a choice.
Learning something because it interests us rather than because our current role requires it can be a choice.
Putting ourselves forward, repositioning ourselves, speaking to someone outside our usual world, saying no, testing an assumption, investigating something without committing ourselves to it... all of these can alter direction.
Maybe only fractionally, but fractions accumulate too.
And each small act does something else.
It brings some of the centre of gravity back towards us.
Instead of only waiting to see what happens, we begin participating in what happens next.
Your career still asks something of you
There will always be parts of our careers that we cannot control.
Other people will make decisions that affect us. Organisations will change. Systems will advantage some people and disadvantage others. Opportunities will appear at inconvenient times. Things we deserve won't always happen, and things we choose won't always work.
Agency doesn't make any of that disappear.
But that isn't the whole picture either.
There are things we can control.
We can control what we decide to do next. We can decide which conversations we have, what we explore, what we learn, what we apply for, where we put our energy, what we say yes or no to, whether we continue waiting and whether an environment that repeatedly diminishes us is somewhere we are prepared to remain indefinitely.
And there are other things we may not control but can still influence.
That distinction matters.
Because when most of our attention is focused on what we cannot control, it is very easy to experience ourselves as powerless. We can spend enormous amounts of energy wishing another person, an organisation or a system would behave differently while losing sight of the places where our own choices still exist.
So maybe what agency is doing is asksing us to bring our attention back. To
What can I control here?
What can I influence?
What is mine to decide?
And equally, what isn't mine?
Not so that we ignore injustice, excuse poor behaviour or pretend genuine constraints don't exist.
But so we don't surrender what is ours because something else isn't.
We don't control our careers completely.
But neither do they simply happen to us.
We participate in shaping them.
And sometimes participation means recognising that the environment we're in is unlikely to give us what we need, and to begin choosing to look for one where we can be seen, heard and valued differently.
Sometimes it means staying, but staying consciously.
Sometimes it means challenging something.
Sometimes it means changing our expectations, our positioning or our direction.
Sometimes it means taking one very small step that reminds us that we still have choices.
So when your career feels out of your control, maybe the first question isn't:
How do I take control of everything?
You can't.
But you can ask:
What can I control here , and what can I influence?
Because those questions direct our attention back towards our agency, our choices and to what still belongs to us.
And once we can see that clearly, choices becomes visible again, and we can then decide what we are going next.
Listen to the full episode
In Episode 29 of Proactive Empowered Careers® Podcast, I explore Choice, the sixth dimension of the Proactive Empowered Careers® Method, and and why choice is about more than simply deciding what to do next.
🎧 You can listen to the episode below ⬇️
Continue exploring
You can also continue exploring the wider ideas around identity, curiosity and career change here:
How reconnecting with ourselves begins with noticing our own signals again.
When Your Life Hasn't Caught Up With Who You've Become
Exploring what happens when who we've become and the life we're living no longer quite align.
How the environments in which we work can shape what we believe about ourselves and what feels possible.
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