I've had two stints in the merry world of banking.

The first stint began in 2008 as a fresh-faced graduate. Then I quit after 13 years. The second stint began in 2023 as a considerably less fresh-faced 37 year old.

But before I quit my job, I took a six-month sabbatical.

The weird thing is that deciding to take that sabbatical was infinitely tougher than deciding to quit my job. If anything, the sabbatical made quitting feel easy.

On the face of it, this makes no sense. After all, the sabbatical meant six months to write, play chess, practice card tricks, swim in my local lido and generally have a lovely time. But quitting meant voluntarily giving up a perfectly good salary and chucking away thirteen years of hard graft.

So why on earth did the "smaller" decision feel so much bigger?

Looking back, I can see it's because I spent years paying attention to what was loudest instead of what was truest.

When I was thinking about asking for a sabbatical, my head was full of thoughts like “what if my boss thinks I'm taking the mickey?", “is this career suicide?" and "I've spent thirteen years building credibility. Am I really about to gamble it on six months playing chess?". These thoughts filled so much space in my head that asking for a sabbatical felt almost impossible.

But what I couldn't see at the time was that these thoughts were just guesses about the future.

So while they were very loud, they weren’t true.

By the time I quit my job, I'd started to clock onto the fact that just because a thought is loud doesn’t mean it needs to get a vote. Sure, I didn’t throw caution to the wind and moonwalk up to my boss’s desk, throw her my laptop and say "I'm off to become a professional chess player". But I did decide to stop giving a vote to all that noise in my head.

So the difference wasn't that my thinking had disappeared. The difference was that I no longer confused volume for truth.

It’s just like the fire alarm test we have every six months in the office. It’s a loud fire alarm test. So loud that it crowds out everything else. And for a few moments, it feels like the building must be on fire.

That’s what the alarm is for, after all. To get attention.

But a fire alarm isn’t proof there’s a fire.

Same thing with me. I had my eye on a sabbatical for years before I found the nerve to ask. And all that time I stayed put, convinced I couldn't make the move until all the noise stopped.

If you've been stuck on a career decision for a while, there's a good chance you're doing the same thing too.

The good news is that you don't need to take years to work it out like I did. One focused conversation can be enough.

That's what my Career Clarity Coaching Calls are designed to do.

If you’d like to get more clarity on your career dilemma:

https://tomgrundy.coach/career-clarity-coaching/

To fulfilment,

Tom