Feeling professionally stuck is one of the most exhausting and diminishing experiences an adult can endure. It wears you down and slowly extinguishes your light - the very thing that made you a compelling hire way back when!

And I know this, because I’ve been there…and I had to learn the hard way that my very own well-intentioned brain was actually part of my problem.

The Mind Reinforces Obstacles

Too many ambitious professionals are afraid to move to the nearest exit because they are wrestling with three common thinking errors.

Yes, you heard that right…these are not external obstacles, they are internal processing errors, and the three most common ones that keep intelligent and responsible professionals in a career rut are:

LOSS AVERSION

A perception bias that values your potential ‘losses’ in status, income, lifestyle, etc, as much as 2x greater than your potential gains in a new role or organizational context

STATUS QUO BIAS

A heightened attachment to existing comforts like familiar working relationships, an established commute, system fluency, etc., to justify avoiding any disruptive change

SUNK COST FALLACY

A defiant commitment to the strategies, projects, or plans you’ve already invested time, money, and energy into, long after they stopped producing positive or desired results.

Now, to be fair, every single human being is susceptible to these thinking errors, so I don’t recommend trying to eradicate them altogether…but what I can recommend is getting better at listening for them, so you hear how you’re keeping yourself stuck.

Listen For the Buzzers

Because thinking errors are inherently internal, it is imperative that you pay closer attention to how these biases are shaping (aka limiting) your internal logic and external choices.

The first way to do this is to listen more carefully to hear the cop-outs and questions that are messing with your motivation, like a game buzzer.

“I won’t know what to say when people ask me what I do…”

“What if I can’t earn as much as I earn here?”

Bzzzztt. This is textbook loss aversion.

“At least everyone knows me here, and I know how to work through the dysfunction here.”

“What if the next job just has different problems?”

Bzzzztt. This is textbook status quo bias.

“I can't walk away now…”

“Maybe if I work harder, I can make it better…”

Bzzzztt. This is textbook sunk cost fallacy.

And the deceptive genius of these cop-outs and questions is that they make you focus on your obstacles more than your options, which is why you end up hanging on and trying harder for far too long!

Fortunately, there’s a way to work around them…

Don’t Try Harder, Ask Smarter

To work around your thinking errors and uncover better-for-you alternatives before it’s too late, you don’t need to try harder; you need to ask yourself smarter questions.

Instead of asking some version of: What will I lose?‍ ‍

ASK: What is staying actually costing me?

Instead of asking some version of: How much have I invested here?

ASK: Would I accept this job today if it were offered?

Instead of asking some version of: How much longer can I tolerate this?

ASK: What would be a more worthwhile challenge?

Questions like these generate candid self-insight, which can ignite your motivation, lift you out of a career rut, and push you towards new ideas, options, and outcomes.