A coachee of mine, a director at a large tech company, keeps a spreadsheet of reasons to leave her job. She started it in early 2025. It has grown to 23 rows: a manager she has outgrown, a product she stopped believing in, a promotion cycle that passed her over twice. She showed it to me in a session last month, and then she said the sentence that prompted this article: "I know all of this, and I still haven't applied to a single role in fourteen months." She has options and

I’ve bombed more interviews than I care to admit. Some of them I only realized after the fact. Others I felt in my body the second I walked out of the room. Through my coaching work, I keep seeing brilliant people tie themselves in knots before interviews. Imposter syndrome. Over-preparing. Second-guessing every answer. That familiar mix of nerves and self-doubt. It’s made me reflect on my own track record - the mistakes I made, the things I misunderstood, the moments I