The quiet signals that come before a career change

Almost no one arrives at a coaching conversation with a clean, well-formed decision. They arrive with a feeling they've been arguing with for a year — a Sunday evening heaviness, a flatness in meetings that used to energise them, a habit of describing their job in the past tense.

These signals are easy to dismiss because each one is small. Individually they look like tiredness. Collectively they're data. The work is to stop treating them as noise and start writing them down, dated, in plain language.

Try this for two weeks: at the end of each day, note one moment that drained you and one that didn't. Don't interpret them yet. Patterns show up faster than opinions do, and they're far harder to argue with.

When the pattern is clear, the decision usually stops being 'should I leave?' and becomes something more precise: which specific part of this work do I want more of, and where does that exist? That's a question you can act on.