Why Am I Questioning My Career Again?

Patricia Ezechie

Sep 30

4 min read

Updated: 7 days ago

View across a rural landscape near Cairnryan, with cows grazing in the foreground, rolling land leading towards Cairnryan and the sea visible in the distance. Proactive Empowered Careers Podcast Episode 32 — You may recognise the landscape. But you're seeing it from a different perspective.

You know the feeling.

Something about your work doesn't feel right anymore.

And this isn't the first time you've asked yourself questions about your career.

You've done this before.

You reflected, made decisions, changed things and reached a point where you understood what mattered to you, and had a clear picture of where you wanted to go.

But now the questions are back.

Haven't I been here before?

I thought I'd already worked this out.

Finding yourself questioning your career again can be unsettling. It feel like you're retracing old ground or have somehow lost the clarity you worked hard to find.

But what if you're not back where you started?

When the answer that once fit doesn't anymore

Imagine someone who changed roles several years ago. At the time, the move was exactly what they needed. They wanted greater responsibility, more influence and the opportunity to stretch themselves. They thought carefully about the decision, made the move and grew massively as a result.

There is nothing they would change about that choice. Yet several years later, something feels different.

The responsibility they once wanted now feels really heavy.

The work still matters, but the way they want to spend their time has changed. Parts of the role that once energised them now leaves them depleted.

And things outside of work have become more important too.

Tthey find themselves asking:

What do I want now?

Which sounds remarkably similar to the question they asked before making that earlier move.

But it isn't really the same question.

Becase their experience has changed them. Their understanding of themselves has changed. Their life has changed. The environment around them may have changed too. They not back at the beginning, they're just looking at a familiar landscape from a different perspective.

You haven't gone back to the beginning

We associate progress with moving forward. We solve the problem, make the decision, learn the lesson and move on. That idea works neatly on paper, but as human beings we are a lot less tidy.

We continue developing.

We encounter new experiences.

We discover things about ourselves that we couldn't have known before living through them.

Our relationships, responsibilities, health, ambitions and priorities evolve. And an answer can be completely right for one stage of our lives and not be right forever.

That matters in careers because it changes the meaning we give to uncertainty.

Questioning something again doesn't automatically mean the previous decision was wrong. Becoming unclear again doesn't erase the clarity you once had. Wanting something different doesn't invalidate what you wanted before. And recognising that a role, organisation or direction no longer fits doesn't mean you failed to understand yourself when you chose it.

It just means you have new information now.

Becoming who you are doesn't happen once

This is one of the reasons why I think about career development as a cycle rather than a checklist.

Across the Proactive Empowered Careers® Method, I explore eight dimensions:

Connection. Curiosity. Clarity. Congruence. Confidence. Choice. Control. Commitment.

They aren't eight boxes we tick before arriving at a point where our careers are permanently sorted.

We return to them.

There may be a time in our lives when the question is about connection: Do I still recognise myself in the life I'm living?

At another point, curiosity may become important: What else might be possible?

We may need clarity around what matters now. Or find ourselves questioning whether our work remains congruent with who we've become.

Confidence can change. Our choices can change. What we can control or influence changes. What we're willing to commit to changes.

The questions return because we continue to change.

And every time we encounter them, we bring everything we've lived and learned since the last time to these questions.

A career isn't something you solve once

This is where so much of the pressure around careers comes from.

We expect ourselves to arrive at certainty. To identify the right direction, make the decision and then get on with it. Then when uncertainty reappears, we interpret it as evidence that something has gone wrong.

But our careers unfold alongside our lives.

There isn't one version of you making decisions in an unchanging world. There is a person continuing to grow and respond to new circumstances, new environments, new possibilities and new constraints. So the skill isn't finding an answer that will last forever. It's in developing the capacity to notice when the questions need asking again.

To reconnect with yourself.

To become curious about what has changed.

To understand what matters now rather than relying automatically on what mattered before.

And to make choices from where you are today.

The same landscape can look different

So if you're questioning your career again, don't have to assume you've lost your way. Look at what has changed since the last time you were here.

What do you know now that you didn't know then?

What have you experienced?

What matters now?

What are you noticing that you couldn't have noticed before?

You may recognise the landscape. But you're seeing it from a different perspective.

And that may be exactly why it's time to look again.

Listen to the full episode

In Episode 32 of Proactive Empowered Careers®, I bring together the eight dimensions of the Proactive Empowered Careers® Method and explore why career development is not a checklist we complete, but a cycle we return to throughout our lives. Because becoming who you are doesn't happen once, neither does creating a career and life that reflect who you are today.

🎧 You can listen to the episode below ⬇️