Are You Coping or Thriving? Why "Fine" Is the Hardest Place to Leave

Hello and welcome to Courage Loading. I'm your host, Alicia Noble, leadership coach and career transition strategist. And I help women navigate the messy middle of career transitions because real change isn't just about what you do next. It's about who you're becoming in the process, the identities you shedding, the beliefs you did writing, and the courage it takes to lead yourself through it all. I believe every story of change begins with a single moment of courage. And this is where I help you find yours. So let's dive in. I recently came across some research that intrigued me. It cited that roughly only one in five people say that they feel truly engaged in their work. It surprised me because it means that the majority of people aren't thriving in their careers. They're merely coping. And somewhere along the line, we decided that this was normal. But here's what really concerns me about this statistic. This isn't just about work. This is about our careers. It's where so many of us spend so much of our time. It takes so much energy. So the difference between coping and thriving impacts so many other areas of our lives. When we disengaged. But coping become an acceptable baseline. And that gap, the one between a career that looks good on paper and one that actually works for you. That's what I'm talking about today.

Your career can look impressive on LinkedIn and still be wrong for you. It can have all the success signals, the title, the company, the pay, the sense that you're doing everything that you're supposed to be doing. And yet every Sunday night has that same quiet feeling of resistance trading the week ahead. The promotion comes. but the relief never does. You perform well, but it doesn't feel like you're actually moving forward. On paper, yes, it all works, but in practice it slowly drains you. Not in a dramatic way. It's more subtle than that. In a way that compounds over time. The problem isn't where you are, it's that you've stopped believing you can be successful anywhere else. Because when most of your week feels misaligned, the effects are not just showing up in your career, it's impacting your life. There's a psychological reason why being fine or being okay is harder to escape than being miserable. It's called the Region-Beta paradox from psychologist Daniel Gilbert. It explains that when things are truly awful, we take action because the pain is intense enough that the decision becomes unavoidable. But when something is only moderately unpleasant, maybe it's frustrating you or draining or misaligned, but it's still tolerable. We adapt, we learn to cope, we minimize it, and we tell ourselves it's not that bad. Your career isn't collapsing. Nothing in your life is breaking down yet. It just doesn't fit properly anymore. The meetings are fine. The team is fine, work is fine. We stay one more performance cycle, go through one more restructure. Just one more year. We tell ourselves to be sensible, to be grateful, to stop wanting more. And before we know it, a year becomes five, becomes ten. That's the region-Beta paradox. That's the first trap.

The second is the sunk cost fallacy. This is when we keep going with something, not because it's still the right choice, but because we've already invested so much that changing direction feels like a waste or a failure. This is when your brain starts frantically doing the maths on everything you've already put in the years the effort, qualification, all of the titles, reputation, the version of you that knows how to do this job well. And it sounds something like I've come too far to change direction now. I've put in so much hard work. How can I even think to step away from this? I'm so close. I can't stop now. But sunk cost has a very particular logic. It persuades us to keep investing in the same pattern because of what we've already put in. Not because it's still right for who we are now. So instead of focusing on what have I already invested? Why not ask? What do I actually want to build next? And whatever you choose. Everything you built comes with you. The judgement, the relationships, the way you read the room, navigate complexity and get things done. Those things don't belong to your job title or the organization. Those are your skills, and they'll transfer with you and serve you for whatever you decide to do next. Once you see those two traps, the next question is how are you weighing up risk when you make career decisions? I love the way James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, talks about categorizing decisions into hats, haircuts, and tattoos. A hat decision is immediately reversible. You try it. You hate it. You take it off. A haircut has a more visible impact in the short term, but it's still reversible, just not instantly. And a tattoo has more lasting consequences. Yes, you can remove it, but it will cost you time, money, and discomfort. Many career decisions that feel like tattoos are actually haircuts. They may result in a detour before you get where you want to be, but they are far less likely to cause the catastrophic, irreversible damage that the fear is telling you they will. And of course, there are genuine tattoo decisions in your career. Retraining from scratch in a field that takes years, walking away from specific financial benefits at certain life stages. These decisions have real consequences that need to be considered carefully. I'm not trying to downplay the importance of the decision making, but I am asking you to consider whether you're treating every single decision as a tattoo, because that's what leaves us paralyzed by the perceived permanence of choices that are, in reality, far more reversible than the fear is telling us when we label every decision as a tattoo. We stop experimenting. We wait for certainty instead of giving ourselves permission to test and learn, and the only way to discover a career that fits better is by trying a few haircut level changes. Noticing what actually feels right and using the data for your next step. And to bring all of these ideas together, I wanted to share an example from my own life. My career looked good on paper. I had a leadership role, and I was on a path that I once thought was out of reach for me. But at the same time, I couldn't shake the feeling that I wanted more. I wanted something different. I wanted to explore executive coaching, not as a hobby or a side interest, but as something that just felt more like me. And for a long time I'd been living in this region-beta paradox. Nothing was quite bad enough to force the change, but I'd lost the excitement and drive that I'd once had. When I eventually made the decision, it felt huge. I moved into a part time job, which also meant I needed to take a step down. And when you've worked hard to move up the ladder, that can really mess with your head. It felt like a tattoo decision. Permanent and irreversible. But it was simply a haircut. What nearly stopped me wasn't the fear of failure. It was the sunk cost. The sense that I'd already invested too much in the career I'd built and was now throwing it all away. But that wasn't true, because in reality, I was expanding my experience and my skill set, opening new doors, creating opportunities I couldn't even see yet. Everything I'd built was still with me. It was shaping how I designed the next stage of my career, even without having all of the pieces yet. There's a quote often attributed to Martin Luther King Jr that captures this for me. You don't have to see the whole staircase. Just take the first step. So if you've been nodding along during this episode, I want to leave you with two questions. What will it take to upgrade your career from coping to thriving? And what's the one hat or haircut decision you can make this week that will get you one step closer? Not a plan. Not a lifetime commitment. Just one step on the staircase. And that's it for today. Thank you for spending this time with me. If today's episode resonated with you, please follow and subscribe. And if you have a moment to leave a review, I'd really appreciate it. It helps more women find this conversation when they need it most. So until next time, this is Courage Loading. I'm Alicia Noble, and remember, every story of change begins with a single moment of courage. So what's yours going to be?