Career indecision isn’t just about struggling to make a choice—it’s about feeling stuck, uncertain, and unable to move forward in your professional path. Whether you’re considering a job change or feeling unfulfilled in your current role, the lingering question “Should I stay or should I go?” can be paralyzing if left unanswered. And quitting is not always the answer.
The Cost of Career Indecision
Living in career limbo has real consequences. When you constantly question your professional future, your confidence dwindles, your performance suffers, and you remain half-committed—both to your current role and your potential opportunities. This prolonged uncertainty often leads to burnout, impacting not just your work but your personal well-being, relationships, and overall satisfaction with life.
If you’re caught in career indecision, it’s time to move from hesitation to clarity.
A 5-Step Framework to Break Career Indecision
Breaking free from career indecision requires a structured approach. Here’s how you can shift from feeling stuck to taking decisive action:
Step 1: Assessment
Start by getting specific about your current situation. Vague statements like “I don’t enjoy my job anymore” aren’t helpful. Instead, pinpoint exactly what’s causing dissatisfaction. Are you considering a move to a competitor, transitioning in-house, or pursuing a completely different path? Clarity begins with an honest assessment.
Step 2: Root Cause Analysis
Look beyond surface-level frustrations like long hours or difficult bosses. The deeper issues—feeling undervalued, lacking growth opportunities, or misalignment with company culture—are often the real reasons behind career indecision. Identifying these core concerns is crucial to making a confident choice.
Step 3: Strategic Planning
Once you’ve identified what’s holding you back, break it down into manageable components. If feeling undervalued is the root cause, examine specific instances and patterns. Explore both tactical approaches (such as initiating critical conversations with leadership) and mindset shifts needed for career growth.
Step 4: Practical Implementation
A strategy without execution won’t get you anywhere. Map out how your planned changes will fit into your real-world schedule and responsibilities. This step transforms ideas into actionable steps while preparing you for potential obstacles before they arise.
Step 5: Execution
Knowledge and planning must lead to action. This is where many people hesitate, but it’s also where true transformation happens. Whether you decide to stay in your current role or move on, commit fully to your decision and follow through with the necessary actions. Career indecision ends when you take control.
Moving Forward with Confidence
The goal isn’t just to make a career move—it’s about overcoming the fear, doubt, and uncertainty that have kept you stuck. Career indecision shouldn’t define your professional journey. By following this framework, you’ll gain the clarity and confidence needed to step into a future that aligns with your ambitions and personal fulfillment.
This isn’t just about finding another job. It’s about positioning yourself for success in the coming year. Whether you choose to stay and grow or explore new opportunities, the most important step is taking action with clarity and purpose.
The time for indecision is over. You deserve more than a career that leaves you second-guessing your choices. Make 2025 the year you move from “Should I stay or go?” to declaring, “I’m ready to grow.”
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What You’ll Learn From This Episode:
How to assess if you should stay at your current job
The importance of identifying root causes behind career dissatisfaction
A strategic framework for making confident career decisions
Why mapping out your plan is crucial for success
The key steps to move from indecision to action
Watch The Full Episode:
Full Episode Transcript:
Everybody, happy pre Thanksgiving. It's a little bit of rain out. Today's episode is called stay or go, and it's all about focusing on what exactly you need to break out of stuck. So let's just get into it right now. Welcome to billable hour burnout.
It's been a few weeks, guys. I can't wait to fill you in as to why. But welcome to Bill Broward burnout. If you need helpful tactical advice that actually helps you have the career of your dreams without the stress of the overwhelm, you are in the right place. If you wanna finally enjoy the life that you spent decades building, you are in the right place.
If you've come here, you're looking for more work life balance, more ease, more confidence in your job, and you're ready to make it happen without having to burn down your life. My name is Lauren Baptiste, your big four auditor and regulatory tax consultant turned life coach. And this is billable hour burnout. On the show, I share simple tactics and mindset strategies specifically catered to the modern woman in accounting, finance, consulting, and law. You ready?
Let's go. Episode 34 here. What is going on everybody? How have you been doing? I've been thinking about you so much, and I just haven't been able to get on.
I have been sick for 2 weeks. I am past it. Thank goodness. And just in time for Thanksgiving, but I had no voice. And so I was not able to speak.
I don't know. My voice is still a little it's not a 100%, but it's mostly there. So I'm here to do the show for you. But, yeah, I've been very sick, and I've caught up on a lot of Netflix. And so I've watched a lot of things.
And, you know, when I'm sick, it's always a good reminder to slow it down. I know a lot of us all often feel like we have to work through, push through, live through, and honestly, that's a choice. You know, while life is still life ing, we need to take care of ourselves. And I could have pushed through and started working probably sooner than I would have liked, but, I think that would have had a cost. You know, for the first time, I had to cancel an event.
I worked with a I've been working with a company that's super super supportive of it, and so they had no problem. Luckily, it wasn't like an in person thing. It was a virtual event. But I can feel it's hard. It's hard for so many of us as we're dealing with all of the things to try to juggle it all, and we have this tendency to find our worth and who and what we do instead of who we are, and that's just not how I like to roll, and that's not how I'm doing it.
So who's with me? But yeah. So I'm on the other side of being sick. I'm very thankful for my voice. I'm very thankful for my health.
And, speaking of, we're heading into Thanksgiving. So for me, for Thanksgiving this year, I am going to my grandma's in Queens, and a bunch of us were all just meeting and potlucking there, and we'll enjoy one another's company. We're keeping it really simple. And I'm gonna be spending the rest of the weekend doing a mix of little things that equal rest and joy and friends and family, and I couldn't be more excited for it. And so I hope that for you that this weekend is also filled with rest and, choice and space and recovery because December is the thing.
We jump into it, and then all of a sudden, it's that push to your end. So my hope is that if this is like your last proper time off before the holidays, make it count. You deserve it. Alright. Now what I wanted to do is jump right into today's topic because I get this question all of the time.
So many of you come to me with, should I stay at my job or should I go? What's the value of doing that? How do I make that happen? Right? What's the benefit or what's the detriment?
And this question comes up so often that I've actually decided to create a Black Friday offer around it. Now without giving all of the details here, I've say I've said this and I'm sticking true to it that you have to be part of my new email newsletter community to get all the dish. But it's really cool because I'm hearing so many of you being like, I think they need this, in terms of what I'm offering. That goes open on Friday. So if you want all the details, you're gonna wanna subscribe to my newsletter.
You can go to acalola wellness.com/newsletter and jump on. The next email goes out tomorrow, And then doors open on Black Friday to engage in this program that specifically answers what to do when you have this question of stay or go. Now what happens when you feel this question, right, when I'm thinking, should I stay or should I go? The real question or the real thought that's happening here is that I don't know. I don't know what to do.
And so what that means is it really feels confusing. You feel like you're living in indecision. And what happens is you'll start to notice your confidence will wane. You may notice that when you have this question of stare go, you're, like, half putting together your resume and you're half showing up for your job, but, like, you're not doing either that well. And what happens if you don't really move forward?
You end up staying stuck. And when this happens, right, we notice that it's not serving you. So I wanna get really clear first on the problem because when you don't understand the gravity of just holding this question, it will result in burnout if you're not careful. I know this from personal experience because I held that question when I was at my job for 13 years. I I was at the job for 13 years, and I held that question for 13 years.
I remember going into my first training, onboarding training of, like, welcome new hire training with a real estate book in my bag. And so I knew from the moment, how long do I stay until I go? How do I make this work for me? How do I, you know, what do I do? Right?
There were so many years, in 13 years of a career, sitting with indecision. And some of you are like, wow, Lauren, that sounds crazy. Right? That's just a wild thought to be holding. Do I stay or do I go?
But it's not that crazy when so many of you come to me being like, you know, I am up for my partner promotion, and I'm wondering if now is the time to leave. And this is where I hear this so often that I have to address it here in today's session. So if you're thinking that you're one of these that are like, you know, do I stay at my job? I make good money, but, do I go and try to find something better? But, right, this is the episode for you.
So what I wanna do is walk you through a process that I'm using as I'm talking through my Black Friday offer. Right? Wink wink. But as someone who's, like, really looking to analyze this and answer this one once and for all, because you really deserve it. Every day that you're stuck in this stay or go question is a day that you're not living with certainty or clarity.
What you're doing is you're perpetuating the thoughts that are keeping you stuck. And so what we really need to do is crack that. And so the 5 steps here that I'm gonna walk you through today are to help you identify where do I go if this is coming up for me. So the first step is assessing. Getting really clear on why you might want to quit your job, including what's happening, how it's affecting you, and then actually getting clear on what you want instead.
So many of us are like, I hate my job, the hours, the boss, the client, the, the team, the right? There's so many reasons why we can say we're not enjoying our job. But are you really clear on what components? Because if you just say, I don't enjoy my job anymore, I don't like my job anymore. My job is burning me out.
What's happening is that's too generic, and we need to get very specific on the components that you're not enjoying. Because if there's something if you were enjoying your job, you wouldn't be asking, do I have to stay or go? Or if you're enjoying it enough. Right? So, like, if you're saying on a scale of, like, joy of your job and 10 is high of I love my job and 0 is like I don't love my job, my guess is you're on the lower side of the spectrum.
Because if you are on the higher side and feeling mostly nourished by your job, you wouldn't be debating this question. So we wanna really get clear on why you're not enjoying your job and what it and what you think you would get when you go. Right? Are you leaving to go to a competitor? Are you leaving to go in house?
Are you leaving to start a yoga studio? Because I hear that from many of you. Right? You have to get really clear on why you might want to leave your job. So that's the first step, assessing.
So we wanna make sure we figure out what's going on because what happens is I was even on the call with a client just a few minutes ago, and she's like jumping to step 5 thinking she's being strategic. When I think I'm gonna get a new job and don't address the steps prior, you think you're actually shortcutting it, but what you're actually doing is shortchanging yourself. What we need to do once we assess is move to the second step of identifying the root cause. There's something that's holding you back. There's something that's having you, like, want to abandon your career, and we need to get really clear on what that is.
So we're assessing what's going on, and then we're we're nailing it down to the root cause. Because it's truly never the hours, it's never the tough boss, it's never those circumstantial things. It's usually, I don't feel like I'm valued here, I'm not respected like I want to be, I don't like who I've become in this job. So we need to be really mindful of that root cause. So we assess, we identify the root cause, and that's when we can get to work.
So this is something that I do with my clients and we do this over a period of time. But if we're really focusing on the stay or go, let's say the root cause of why you want to go is because you're not feeling valued where you are. That could look like a lot of things. That could be like, not giving the resourcing you need when you ask, but you notice your colleague always gets the resourcing. It could mean financially feeling like you don't get paid enough even though that feels like a privileged thing to say.
You're like, I'm getting paid maybe over a quarter million, and I still feel like this isn't worth my time. Right? So we're gonna need to get really, clear on all of that, and that's something that I'm gonna be doing with you when we when we connect. Now the 3rd step, if you're taking this journey, right, is to go through some strategy. Now when I do this, I love to, like, really pinpoint the thing that's keeping you stuck and then break it down.
We can see even in this idea of I don't feel valued, that it's more than just whatever feeling valued means. It means there's components to it that are making you dissatisfied, that are making you question, should I leave my job? And so when we break it down into smaller manageable pieces, you can then understand what is the tactical approach I need to take here, and then what's the mindset approach that I need. Now sometimes when we're doing this on our own, we can come up against a challenge because we can't always see that in ourselves. And that's why there's so much value in having that support to really break it down.
But let's say if you stick with the tactical because that's feeling like all you can access based on what you're looking at, then you wanna be like, okay. If getting valued means, like, it has a feeling, then I'm gonna break it down into these smaller components and I'm gonna answer and address each of those components. Who do I have to speak to? How do I have to show up for this conversation? What might I need to do to position myself and my schedule so that I am not overcompensating on nights and weekends and then getting upset when people aren't celebrating me, but they are expecting it of me.
Right? I talked to a bunch of you. Who is working this weekend? A lot of people. And so I just wanna, like, put it out there.
We need to strategically break this down because it's been decades that have kept you here. Okay. So now that we have our 3 steps so far, we assess, we identify the root cause, we coach strategically or we strategically plan it out, then we're gonna actually map it out. This is where we take everything that you've broken down. So let's say I don't feel valued.
I broke it down into the financial component. I broke it down into the I'm overcompensating and maybe my people pleasing on that component, and then maybe there's a third one, then what we're gonna do is then fit it into your calendar. We're gonna make it look real in your life. What I hear from so many of you are like, yes, I need those things. And yes.
I don't have time for that. Right? Or no. I don't have time for that. So what we need to do here is make sure that you can be strategic about how you actually fit it in.
It's one thing to draw it out on paper. It's another thing to be like, and how does this fit into my life? I've seen many get stuck here. And this is the differentiator of it working and it not working. Gary v said this thing, it's like, screw to do list.
Do the damn thing. And so this is where we need to make sure that we are doing the damn thing, and it needs to fit here. Otherwise, all the steps before it are a waste of time, truly. And so we need to make sure, right, as you're thinking about this, as you're like, do I stay or do I go? How do I answer for not being valued or whatever my reason is?
And then how do I solve for it in a way that's real in my calendar? Right? That is critical. So that's the 4 those are the 4 steps. The last and final step is execute.
Right? It's one thing to know the things. It's another thing to write it down, and the last thing is to, like I just said, do the damn thing. So when you move through this, right, you no longer are asking yourself, do I stay or do I go? You now know either I'm staying or I'm going and I have reasons for it.
I now know what I need to do tactically in my schedule, for example, and I also know in my mindset how I need to execute. And so what happens is when you go through this process in a robust way, what you will start to do is feel energized. You'll start to feel motivated. You'll feel ready to take action whether you stay or you go. You have a really clear realistic plan that's specific to your needs, your goals, and you know exactly what resources you need to get there.
Because here's the thing that's true. It's really not about you staying or going. It's about breaking through the stuff that you're experiencing and having the clarity that you deserve. So whether you say or go, it's making sure that you're positioned for 2025 to have your best year yet. And that's what I'm very passionate about for you.
So if we're going through this process of stay or go and how do we go about this, it starts with assessing, identifying the root cause, that strategic planning, kinda like putting it into the calendar, and then that final piece of execute. And those are the steps. Now to some of us, that might feel easy. It might feel too simple. For some of us, that might feel really hard and complicated because we've been spinning on this question for over a decade, like, I had been and, like, my clients who come to me experience.
And, hopefully, maybe you weren't you haven't been spinning in it for that long. But maybe you're still just spending in it for, like, a year or 2 or since COVID. Right? It's real. And so I just wanna put that out there because so many of you make that mean something about you and that, like, I'm not as passionate anymore.
I'm not driven anymore. I'm not good anymore. Maybe I've hit my best days or behind me. Not true. But if this question keeps coming up and you keep not answering it, here's what I know that is true.
It starts to bounce back at you. It starts to look like poor performance reviews. It starts to look like a smaller bonus. It starts to look like you're stressed out and you feel like you can never catch up. It starts to look like you're resentful of your job and you resent how you're showing up to your husband.
This is what needs to change. Right? It's not just knowing the outcome of that answer, but it's finding peace with that journey along the way. So this is something I'm really passionate about. I'm really excited about.
And the reason why I am talking about this is because you deserve better. That's just kinda where I'm at right now. You deserve far better than the life that you're settling for. And 2025 will be another year of the same unless you decide to answer this question once for all and for all, to do something different. And so with keeping my secret safe, my secret but I will tell you is that you should be on my newsletter.
Because if you've been thinking about this question for a really long time, you deserve to have the answer. You deserve to have it answered. You deserve to go into 2025 no longer stuck, but feeling motivated and excited and driven to do to do the damn thing. So I'm gonna leave you there. So it's just kinda my last call to get on my newsletter because once these emails go out for Black Friday, it's very limited spaces and seats, and it's something you just don't wanna miss.
If it's something you've been stewing on for so long, it's something you don't wanna miss. So go to acolola wellness.com/newsletter, and you can join. Get the all the info when you subscribe, and you will be positioned for your best 2025 ever. I mean, it's like your only first 2025, but let's make it your best year ever. Alright, everybody.
Thank you for joining for today's episode. I have no doubt that 2025 can be the year that you feel good again. And so it doesn't take a lot of effort. It just takes the decision that it needs to be better and that you want support doing it. And so you can reach out to me, acalowawellness.com.
I'm on Instagram, thelaurenbaptiste. I'm on Linkedin atlaurenbaptiste or acalowa wellness. I'm on Facebook, Lauren Baptiste Coaching. I'm on YouTube. I'm everywhere you're hanging.
So there is definitely always a way to access me and contact me. And I wanna make sure that you are just best set up because I'm tired of you being tired because you deserve the best year yet. Let's change this all for 2025. Okay? Deal.
Alright, everybody. Thanks for listening to today's episode. Keep sharing what's important to you and what you value and how I can best support you. I can't wait to show up for you in 2025 bigger and better than ever before, and I'm just pumped. Yeah.
I'm seeing some comments on Instagram. Stay it's them stay or go. It's stay or glow. That's the choice for 2025. Right?
You could stay or go, or you could choose I'm gonna stay and glow. So all good. Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. I hope you have the best weekend. I hope you have a nourishing, restful, enjoyable time with your loved ones or even just enjoying some time for yourself.
I can't wait to make 2025 the year for you. But for now, I'll see you after the holiday. Take care.