Why Is It So Hard to Leave a Job You’re Good At?

I spent 30 years building a career I eventually chose to leave.

I wasn’t fired. I didn’t hate my boss. I wasn’t miserable every second of the day. I was anchoring the news in New York City, which was the job I had spent most of my adult life working toward.

And that was exactly what made leaving so difficult.

Because we know what to do when something is obviously bad for us. At least in theory. We leave the toxic relationship. We quit the terrible job. We get ourselves out of the situation that is making us miserable.

But what do you do when your life is good and you still want something different?

For a long time, I thought wanting more wasn’t a good enough reason.

I had worked too hard to get there. I had a salary, benefits, security and a title that had become deeply intertwined with my identity. People knew me as Tamsen the news anchor. More importantly, I knew myself that way.

Walking away didn’t just mean changing jobs. It meant letting go of a version of myself I had spent decades becoming.

So instead of listening to the feeling that something had changed, I tried to reason my way out of it.

Maybe I was tired. Maybe I needed a vacation. Maybe I should be more grateful. Maybe everyone feels this way about work sometimes.

Meanwhile, my life was giving me clues.

I was spending almost every free hour working on the things I cared about outside of the newsroom. I was talking to women about menopause and women’s health, working on my documentary, researching my book and imagining what I could build if I had more time to do it.

I wasn’t running away from my career. I was being pulled toward something else.

And I think there’s an important difference.

We tend to treat staying as the responsible choice and leaving as the risky one. But staying has a cost too.

There is a cost to spending another year somewhere because you’ve already spent 20 years there. There is a cost to being excellent at something that no longer excites you. There is a cost to continually postponing the life you keep thinking about because the life you already built looks too good to walk away from.

I eventually realized I was asking myself the wrong question.

I kept asking, Is this bad enough to leave?

What I should have been asking was, If I weren’t afraid to leave, would I still choose to stay?

That question changed everything.

It didn’t mean I handed in my resignation the next morning. I still needed a plan. I still had responsibilities. I still had to figure out what came next.

But I stopped requiring my old life to become terrible before I gave myself permission to want a new one.

I think that’s where a lot of women get stuck.

We become incredibly loyal to the women we used to be. The woman who worked three jobs to get through school. The woman who moved across the country for an opportunity. The woman who fought for the promotion, built the reputation, finally got the office or the title she dreamed about.

Leaving can feel like telling her all of that work was for nothing.

It wasn’t.

That career gave me 30 years of experience I use every single day in the life I have now. I didn’t throw those years away when I left. I took them with me.

Maybe that’s the better way to think about changing careers.

You’re not erasing the life you built.

You’re deciding it doesn’t have to be the only life you get to build.

On this week’s episode of The Tamsen Show, I’m breaking down the five signs that helped me realize it was finally time to leave my job, including some I didn’t recognize until I was already on the other side.

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