I joined a running club in January. In Holland. It was, without question, one of the dumbest decisions I’ve ever made!
See I’d always wanted to be a runner. Runners are cool, right? That effortless stride, the sunrise jogs, the casual “oh yeah, I just did a 10k before breakfast.” I wanted to be that person so badly.
The problem? I am absolutely terrible at running.
And I’m out there in my brand new running gear, wheezing my way through a park at 7am while everyone else glides past me like they were born to do this.
I HATED it!
Yet every week I showed up and forced myself to do it. Feeling certain that eventually it’d click for me!
It did not click.
But I kept going. Because I’d decided this was the thing, and quitting felt like failing.
Then someone took me to a CrossFit class. Within ten minutes, something clicked. The weights, the structure, the intensity. It was hard, properly hard, but it felt like my kind of hard. I left buzzing instead of broken. And years later I still leave every class buzzing!
My body was never built for running. It was built for lifting. I just didn’t know it, because everyone around me ran.
And this is exactly what happens in careers.
How We End Up on the Wrong Career Path
Most of us make our first big career decision pretty young. Usually influenced by the people around us, what they do, what they value, what seems like a “good” job.
And then something quiet happens: your world gets smaller.
If you go into finance, most of your friends end up in finance. Your network is finance. Your frame of reference for what a successful career looks like is shaped entirely by one industry.
The same is true for law, consulting, tech, academia. Whatever world you enter, it tends to close in around you. Not because anyone is keeping you there, but because it’s all you can see.
So when the dissatisfaction starts to creep in, when the promotions stop feeling like wins and Sunday nights start feeling heavy, you don’t think “maybe I’m in the wrong room.” You think “something must be wrong with me.”
The Most Expensive Thought You’ll Ever Have
“Something must be wrong with me.”
That thought keeps people stuck for years. Sometimes decades. Because it turns an external problem (you’re in the wrong environment) into an internal one (you’re broken).
You’re not broken. You’ve just been surrounded by runners your whole career, and nobody ever showed you the weights room.
I see this with my clients all the time. Talented, capable people who have built impressive careers in fields that genuinely don’t suit them. They’re not failing. They’re succeeding at the wrong thing. And that’s a completely different problem with a completely different solution.
The solution isn’t to try harder. It’s not to get another promotion or do another course or push through for one more year. The solution is to step outside the room you’ve been in and look around.
Why Clarity Doesn’t Come from Thinking Harder
When you’re feeling stuck in your career, the instinct is to think your way out. You sit with a journal, you make pros and cons lists, you have the same circular conversation with your partner every Sunday evening.
But here’s the thing: you can’t think your way to clarity when all your reference points come from the same place.
It’s like trying to solve a puzzle when you can only see three of the pieces. You need new inputs. New perspectives. New rooms.
There are hundreds of ways to build a brilliant, fulfilling career. Most of us are aware of maybe five of them. Not because we’re not smart enough to find the others, but because our world got small without us noticing.
How to Make Your World Bigger
If you’ve been stuck in the “something must be wrong with me” loop, here are three things you can do this week to start breaking out of it.
1. Have a career conversation with someone outside your industry.
Find someone whose job makes absolutely no sense to you and ask them how they got there. Not on LinkedIn. In person, over coffee. You’ll be amazed at the paths people have taken that you never knew existed.
2. Go to an event you’d normally never attend.
An industry meetup outside your field. A creative workshop. A talk on something you know nothing about. The point isn’t to network. The point is to expand what you think is possible.
3. Ask yourself: if I were starting over today, would I choose this again?
Not the salary. Not the title. The actual work. If the answer is no, that’s not a crisis. That’s the beginning of career clarity. [Link to coaching page: https://www.alicegravescoaching.com/coaching]
You’re Not Stuck. You Might Just Be in the Wrong Room.
The running club taught me something I now see in my coaching work every single day. The problem is rarely that you’re not good enough. The problem is usually that you’re trying to be good at something that was never yours to begin with.
When I picked up those weights for the first time, I didn’t become a different person. I just found the thing that matched who I already was.
That’s what career fulfilment actually looks like. Not forcing yourself to love something because everyone around you does. Finding the thing that feels like your kind of hard.
If you’ve been telling yourself “something is wrong with me” for months or years, I’d love to talk. Book a free clarity call and let’s figure out what room you actually belong in. Click HERE to book a call with me
You can also grab my free career clarity workbook to start exploring what’s really going on before we talk. DOWNLOAD HERE