How to Know You're Ready for a Career Change Even When You Don't Feel Ready
- 3 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 13 hours ago
Anne-Sophie Gossan, founder of Inner Spark Coaching, supports individuals going through career transitions so they find meaningful direction, reignite their spark, and thrive. She brings calm, clarity, and deep empathy and asks the questions that unlock their truths while holding space for both vulnerability and growth.
If you're currently considering a career change, you're one of a very large group in the United Kingdom (UK). The largest survey of active UK career changers to date found that three in four have been thinking about it for a year or more.[1] A quarter have been considering it for three years or longer. If you're one of them, you already know the frustrating part isn't wanting something different. It's the waiting. Waiting to feel sure. Waiting for the right moment. Waiting to feel ready.
The problem isn’t readiness. Readiness, as most people define it, rarely shows up before you act. It shows up after, which means that if you're waiting for that feeling before you make a move, you could be waiting for a long time without realising that's what you're doing.
This article looks at what readiness for a career change actually looks like, the real cost of staying in a role that no longer fits, and what to do about it starting this week, without needing every part of the plan figured out first.
Why "feeling ready" is the wrong thing to wait for
Most people believe motivation and readiness come first, and action follows. You'll start looking once you feel confident. You'll make the call once you're sure. You'll update your Curriculum Vitae (CV) once you know exactly what you want next.
Research in behavioural psychology tells a different story. Motivation tends to follow action rather than the other way around. Small, deliberate steps engage the brain's reward systems in ways that build momentum, rather than momentum being something you need before you can take the first step. In plain terms, the confidence you're waiting for is usually a result of starting, not a condition for it.
This matters in a career change because disruption of any kind (a redundancy, a restructure, a role that stopped fitting somewhere along the way) tends to strip away the exact conditions people think they need before they can move: certainty, energy, and a clear plan. Wait for those conditions to return before you act, and you may be waiting for something that was never going to arrive on its own.
The real cost of staying where you are
Staying in a role that no longer fits rarely feels like a decision. It feels like the default, the safe option, the responsible one. But staying has a cost.
Employee engagement in the UK has stayed close to the lowest levels in Europe. According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, only 10% of UK employees describe themselves as engaged at work (behind the European average of 12% and well below the global average of 20%).[2] Disengagement at that scale isn't only a productivity problem for employers. It's a daily experience for the people living inside it, and it tends to compound the longer it goes unaddressed.
Financial caution is often the reason people give for staying anyway, and it's a legitimate concern. But the same survey by Careershifters found that only 12% of people going through a career change name financial constraints as their biggest obstacle. Far more common, mentioned by almost half, is simply not knowing what they want to change to. If you don't address what's driving you toward a change, that cost keeps accumulating in the background, showing up as exhaustion, disengagement, or the sense of having drifted somewhere you didn't choose.
If you don't fix this, here's what it keeps costing you: not a single big loss, but a slow accumulation of energy spent managing frustration instead of building something better. That's a cost that rarely shows up on paper, which is exactly why it's so easy to underestimate.
Five signs you're ready for a career change (even if it doesn't feel like readiness)
Readiness for a career change rarely announces itself clearly. It tends to show up in small signals that are easy to dismiss individually. A few worth paying attention to:
You've stopped being surprised by your own frustration. It's become background noise rather than a warning sign.
You find yourself encouraging other people to make the same change you're avoiding, telling a friend to leave a job you'd never let yourself leave.
The plan you imagined for your career a few years ago no longer excites you, and you haven't replaced it with anything new.
You're more tired by the effort of staying than you would be by the effort of changing.
Small comments from other people ("you don't seem like yourself lately," "are you okay at work?") have started to hit differently than they used to.
None of these require certainty about what comes next. They're simply signs that something has already changed underneath the surface, whether or not you've fully acknowledged it yet.
One client I worked with recognised four of these five signs in herself before she ever said the words "I want to leave" out loud. She'd spent months telling friends to pursue their own career changes while staying quiet about her own. Once she noticed the pattern in her own behaviour, things moved faster than she expected. Her plan didn’t become clear overnight, but she stopped waiting for it to become clear before she started.
I know this pattern from my own experience too. I'd already qualified as a coach while still in my corporate role, but it wasn't until I experienced burnout, followed by redundancy, that I actually broke the pattern and left the corporate world behind. Did I feel ready? Not even close. I felt scared, but somewhere underneath the fear, I knew it was the right move, and that knowing turned out to matter more than the readiness I was waiting for.
Running from something versus running toward something
Not every career change starts from the same place, and the distinction matters more than most people realise.
Some people are running from something (a role, a culture, a manager, or a way of being at work they no longer recognise as themselves). Others are running toward something (not necessarily escaping anything specific, but wishing for more than their current career allows).
Most people are a mix of both, but usually one force is doing more of the driving. Knowing which one changes what the next step should actually look like. Someone escaping a difficult team needs a different plan than someone whose current role has simply become too small for what they actually want.
Skip this distinction, and it's easy to fix the wrong problem, taking a new job that solves the immediate frustration but recreates the same limits a year later.
What to do with these signs, starting this week
None of this requires a resignation letter by Friday. It requires a few clear steps that don't need the whole plan figured out first.
Write down the signs from this article that apply to you, in your own words, without editing them to sound more reasonable.
Ask yourself which force is driving you more, running from or running toward, and get specific about what's underneath it.
Tell one person. Saying it out loud to someone else is often the first real action, long before any practical step.
Give yourself a single, small next step this week: one conversation, one piece of research, or one honest check-in with yourself.
If this pattern keeps repeating without any of these steps, you'll keep managing the same frustration indefinitely instead of moving through it. Waiting for readiness to arrive before you move rarely produces readiness. It produces more waiting.
Where this leaves you
None of this means you need the next ten years mapped out. It means paying attention to the signs already in front of you and giving yourself permission to act on them before they feel obvious to anyone else.
If you recognise yourself in this – someone who already knows something needs to change, even without all the answers yet, I'm opening a small group programme this September called the Career Change Circle, built for exactly this stage. Six sessions, a small group of people working through the same thing at the same time, and a structure that moves you from thinking about a change to actually making one.
Register your interest to be the first to know when doors open, or book a free discovery chat if you'd rather talk it through first.
Read more from Anne-Sophie Gossan
Anne-Sophie Gossan, Transformational Career Coach
Anne-Sophie Gossan spent 25+ years in the corporate world navigating high-stakes environments and career transitions. She spent years building a career and a home, juggling the demands of raising two boys while holding down a very demanding job. When redundancy struck, it shook her confidence and identity in ways she hadn’t anticipated. She decided to qualify as a coach and to create Inner Spark Coaching: Reimagine Your Story, a safe space where her clients can reclaim the unstoppable version of themselves that’s always been there. Through coaching, conversation, and deep transformation, she guides individuals into their next chapter with clarity, confidence, alignment, and renewed purpose.
Sources:
[1] Careershifters, "State of Career Change Report 2026" (survey of 11,567 active UK career changers), April 2026.
[2] Gallup, "State of the Global Workplace: United Kingdom Country Level Data," April 2026.
[3] Christopher Spromberg, Psy.D., "Why Action Creates Motivation, Not The Other Way Around," Livingston HealthCare, April 2026.
