#31 The harm of waiting "just a little bit longer"

Most of my clients don’t come to me at the worst moment. They come to me about a year after it.

They’ll say something like “I’ve been thinking about this for a while” or “I probably should have started sooner.” And when we unpack the timeline, there’s almost always a moment — a conversation, a reorg, a review that didn’t go the way they expected — where they knew.

Not knew-knew. But felt it. The thing that told them this wasn’t going to get better on its own.

And then they waited.

Not because they were lazy or scared. Because waiting felt reasonable. There was a vest coming. A reorg that might fix things. A new manager starting. A project wrapping up that would be a better time to transition.

There’s always a reason to wait one more quarter.

The problem is what happens during that year. And it’s not nothing.

Your story gets staler. The work you’re doing stops being the work you want to talk about. Your energy drops — not dramatically, just enough that you stop showing up to networking conversations and start skipping the LinkedIn posts you meant to write. The people you would have reached out to six months ago now feel harder to contact because it’s been too long.

And the biggest one: the roles that were open when you first felt the nudge? Some of them have been filled. By people who moved when you didn’t.

I’m not saying this to create panic. And I’m definitely not saying you should quit your job this week.

But if you’ve been sitting with that feeling for a while, there’s something worth trying before you make any decisions.

Two questions to answer honestly:

• What problem do I wish I was solving right now?

• And how often do I actually get to do that in my current role?

If there’s a big gap between those two answers, it’s not a crisis - just data. Information about where you are.

And then do one thing: tell someone. Not a recruiter. Not a hiring manager. Just a person who knows your work. Call them up, have a coffee, and say “here’s what I’ve been thinking about.”

See how it sounds out loud. See how they react. See how you feel about saying it aloud.

You might get a solid re-connection out of it. You might get useful pushback on your thinking. You might just get the relief of having said it to another human.

Any of those is a better place to be than where you are right now — which is knowing, and not moving.