Stuck in your job? Stop coasting and start moving

**Nat:** I don’t want to upset anyone here, but I’m pretty sure I’ve heard over the last year or so (and we’ve heard it from recruitment agencies as well) that the number of job listings has dropped. That means there’s less movement in the market. People are staying in their jobs longer. We’re less likely, especially in uncertain times, to walk away from a job that maybe isn’t perfect, because leaving feels too scary, too hard, too unsettling. We base this podcast around what people tell us and the conversations we have, and a lot of the ones we’re having at the moment are with people who are staying in jobs they feel they can’t quit. Ten years ago, or five years ago when the economy was in a different place, they would have. I presume you’re finding the same thing, Kristen?

**Kristen:** Yeah, it’s a global thing. It’s not just little old New Zealand. All over the world, companies are very much in a holding pattern, and we’ve seen redundancies skyrocket, so there are more job seekers flooding the market. When you have a job, you’re in a really good position. It’s a straight flip from 2023, when lots of people were getting poached left, right and centre. Or you could negotiate a pay rise. You’d say “I’m thinking of leaving” and they’d say “here’s some more money, stay.” It’s completely flipped. We’re now in what’s considered an employer’s market, which means if you have a job, you should probably stick around. On top of that, we’re going into Christmas, which probably isn’t the wisest time to be thinking about leaving, because most countries kind of shut down and don’t really start talking to people until a few months after. So we’re in a bit of a holding pattern.

**Nat:** You’re right. I always thought that was a Southern Hemisphere thing. I assumed that in the Northern Hemisphere (and obviously in countries that don’t celebrate Christmas and New Year) it might be a week or two of holidays. Is that true? I don’t know.

**Kristen:** In North America, like in Canada, we definitely hit the ground running with work in January. But hiring is a multi-month process. You might restart it in January, but you’re not starting it before Christmas. So there’s just a natural lag. You’re not about to kick anything off in November, which means you’re not starting interviews in January. You might kick things off in January, which means you’re not interviewing until February and not hiring until March.

**Nat:** I was just about to throw my toys out of the cot and ask why you guys get so many more holidays. Because I know there’s a big summer gap in July and August as well, and I was like, you don’t get to have both!

**Kristen:** No, I think it’s just a natural lag. But yeah, it’s really flipped. I was watching something the other day, I can’t remember what it was called. There was quiet quitting, wasn’t there? We, as employees, were in such a luxurious position in such a hot market that we were quiet quitting. I think that meant we stopped working so hard. We were disengaged from our current role and either looking elsewhere or just coasting. And I saw a reel the other day that was like, “Quiet quitting, can we have you back?”

**Nat:** It’s changed so much. In 2020 and 2021, salary inflation was skyrocketing. Tech companies were poaching people left, right and centre, and it felt like you could do whatever you wanted and ask for whatever you wanted. That was a mere four years ago.

Before we move on to what happens when you can’t quit, I want to give a shout out to those who are currently between jobs. If you’re listening to this going, “First world problems, having a job and complaining about it,” I totally get it. I spoke to someone on Friday who has been out of a job for nine months now. It’s gruelling, but she’s very much not alone. We’ve covered this a bit in the past, but I didn’t want to ignore that group, because there are so many people in that position who’d probably listen to this and think, “Tiny violin.”

**Kristen:** Well, I’d say this episode would be perfect for all their friends who don’t realise how good they have it and are griping and complaining. Take this podcast, send it to all your friends who are employed and say, “See? Get over it.”

**Nat:** Next thing, because you like to put a stake in the ground: when do you think it’ll turn around? When will we go back to being comfortable moving between jobs, or taking a bit more of a risk knowing there’ll probably be a job out there? What’s your bet at the moment?

**Kristen:** Well, not my bet, but I was looking at the economists’ bets this morning. Things are starting to loosen right now, which means we should see green shoots, as they say, and some movement in the labour market in 2026. One interesting thing most of them are saying is that it’s going to be gradual. All of a sudden things aren’t going to get better, with every company going from freeze mode to go mode. We’ll start to see a little sector recovery here and there, and companies saying, “We just need more people on the ground,” or “We finally want to invest in this thing we’ve been talking about.” So it’s going to be slow and steady, sadly.

**Nat:** I think it’s already happening. You do hear rumblings that job listings are picking up, mainly in our local area. I’ve noticed it by single-digit percentages. So things are definitely moving. The other thing for those who’ve been out of work for a while is that the norm seems to have gone from one to three months to nine to 12 months. That’s perfectly normal, and it doesn’t say anything about you. It’s about trying to hold on, keep your confidence and keep feeling fresh in the job hunt despite the knock-backs. Even in PowrMatch, our peer coaching, a few people have gone in and come out feeling really demoralised, because people give them all sorts of job-hunting tips and they’re like, “Yeah, I’m doing all that.” Sometimes it is just the market, and you can be doing everything right. So we’re thinking of you all if you’re currently looking.

But for those sitting in a job feeling, shall we say, hard done by, feeling a bit blah, feeling like “I don’t really like this job, I’d like to leave, but it feels too risky,” let’s talk through some tips if you’re in that boat. Given the wider context, there’s a pretty strong chance a bunch of people listening are feeling a bit over their current role but staying on regardless.

**Kristen:** Yeah, I love that. I’m going to start with: change what you’re learning, or add something new to your learning. If you’re on top of your role and delivering, it’s the perfect opportunity to add something new to the mix and be a beginner again. We get a lot of Powrsuiters joining who want to build influence, or build their public speaking and communication skills. Those are a couple of strong ones I’ve been seeing recently. So pick that skill and do it. And yes, you can come and do it at Powrsuit. I point people in all the right directions to do just that. Some people talk about Toastmasters. Or volunteer to present at the all-hands or the monthly update, or suggest that you give the update, so you’re learning by doing. Now is the perfect time to pick something and go ahead and learn it. You don’t need approval or permission. Just do it.

**Nat:** Yeah. And I really like tying that to this busyness epidemic. Maybe the first thing to do is start working on how you work, if you’re looking at the next role and the next step up. It’s such a common thread with people who struggle to get started with Powrsuit (and we find it changes pretty quickly for a lot of people once they join). That sense of overload and busyness, that there’s no time to do anything. Even just starting with “How do I intentionally set aside 30 minutes a week, or 30 minutes a month, to invest in myself?” This is the time to do that, because if you can’t do it now, you won’t be able to do it in the future. It’s the whole definition of insanity thing: expecting something to change without changing anything. So even if your first step is getting into the habit of carving out time, then when the next opportunity comes along, you’ll have a really good structure to help you get set up in that role. We know people get nervous going into new roles because they don’t know everything anymore. Having that habit in place will help you feel a lot more confident taking on something different.

**Kristen:** And probably the mindset is: that is the job. I was reading someone’s intake form recently, and it said, “I want to build better relationships with my colleagues and influence stakeholders in my organisation.” And I’m like, that is the job. That’s the thing they have to master to progress in that organisation: having great relationships. Our sessions on building social capital inside Powrsuit, for example, are perfectly suited to that. You’ve got to learn to build great relationships with key people in your organisation just to get your stuff delivered and get great outcomes. That’s part of the job. So it’s about switching your mentality to “This is another thing I need to learn to navigate this place better.” Investing in development and self-leadership is part of the job.

**Nat:** Yeah, I love it. I want to go back to something you said about reading someone’s intake form. For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, it’s the self-assessment you do when you start at Powrsuit. Members fill out a bit of information about who they are, what their goals are, and how they rate themselves on various skills. We use that as members get up and running to point out the best place to start, and then six months or so in, so they can track and see measurable change in those skills. So it’s a nice thing to do if you’re in that “I’m not sure what’s next” place. It helps you be more intentional about measuring where you are and where you want to go, and take ownership of getting there.

I’d also like to follow up on the stakeholder thing, because I think that’s another hugely overlooked opportunity, and one we see all the time. Most people we connect with want to network more. They want to build their network, meet more people and have better relationships with their colleagues. And very few seem to action it. I know there are a lot of psychological barriers. It can be uncomfortable to get out of your comfort zone. It can be weird to meet new people and not quite know what to say. But I think it’s incredibly important to keep doing it. We often talk about asking someone out for a coffee once a month, even a virtual one. And if you’re not super focused on an outcome at the moment (you don’t have your next job lined up, you’re not working towards a specific goal) that’s almost the best time to start. In my experience, you just have these incredible conversations. You get to know someone with a slightly different perspective. It helps you keep your mindset in check when you’re going through a tough time, and they become your weak ties. It’s something I’ve taken great delight in recently. Last week I had drinks with two different people on two different days, people I’ve met maybe once or twice each. There was no agenda. We just wanted to catch up and see how each other was going. This is the perfect time to meet people you find interesting, without an agenda, and chat about what’s on your mind. If you want more structure around that, at Powrsuit you can join PowrMatch. You get put in a group, you don’t have to choose the people, and you just have those conversations. I presume you feel the same, but I’d like to know your thoughts. I find it really energising to meet cool people doing cool things and have a chat.

**Kristen:** Yeah. And you can do that in work hours too. Of course, coffee and so on. But also think of really simple, low-hanging fruit. If you grab lunch, you’ll often find the same groups go and grab lunch together. That’s a really common routine. It’s your work besties, which is amazing. But find new people to grab lunch with. Just be like, “Hey, so-and-so, do you want to grab a quick bite?” Even if you’re not buying lunch, walk with them while they do, or go and eat lunch with someone new. That’s an easy way to build weak ties as well.

**Nat:** I had this situation in Singapore, which was really delightful. I’d finished running a workshop and had to go and meet someone else, and someone just said, “Hey, I’ll walk with you, I’ll grab my lunch from there.” Very casual. We had a great chat on the way, and it was only about 10 minutes. The best part was that she spotted some beautiful pastries, then rang the cafe and got them to give me a pastry, which was such a sweet, lovely thing to do. But it all came out of that 10-minute chat (“How did you get into this job? What are you up to at the weekend?”) and finding a few things in common. Now I feel really comfortable following up, because breaking the ice one-on-one felt more in-depth than a group setting.

**Kristen:** Yeah, yeah. Change your people up. I’d also like to put in a plug for changing up a bit of your work. You can do this by getting curious: reading company updates, listening at all-hands and team meetings. You’ll start to hear about little projects happening around the business. There’s always an opportunity for people who are proactive, who recognise their strengths and where they can add value, to say, “Hey, I’d love to work on this.” Have a chat with the people running new projects and see whether they could use your skill set or how you could add value. Get curious, and talk to your manager about how to do it. That’s an obvious way to bring fresh learning, fresh people and fresh work into the mix.

**Nat:** Yeah. And that goes to what we often say about self-leadership. You can’t control everything, but you can control more than you think. Rather than blanket saying “I hate my job, I can’t wait to move,” ask yourself what you could do to make your job more interesting and build the skills you might want for the next role while you’re here. That simple mindset change can make a big difference. And I don’t think those opportunities need to be big. It doesn’t even have to be a project. Everyone’s talking about AI at the moment, so there’s someone in your organisation doing something with AI. Shoulder-tap them and say, “I’d love to learn more about this.” Or if you see something being delivered, go and ask what happened and how it worked. It can be really small things, but they make a big difference. They help you find things that keep you engaged and moving forward.

**Kristen:** Making changes, yeah. I even love the idea of going to your financial controller or CFO and saying, “I’ve heard of profit and loss statements and balance sheets. Can we grab a coffee or lunch and you show me through one?” Start picking people’s brains. These are skills we should all have a broad, solid understanding of, and it’s easy to ask the obvious people in your organisation.

**Nat:** Yeah. And that leads into taking what you currently do and adding more to it. That sounds like the commercial side. Often in a role you get handed a piece of work, or there’s a project, and you just do your part of it. How can you extend out and understand the other moving parts? That could be risk and compliance impacts, financial impacts, or the upstream and downstream impacts on the work you’re doing. Use it as an opportunity to get more contextual awareness and cross-functional understanding, and start to see the things that may have been invisible.

**Kristen:** I really like that. I was talking to some lawyers the other day, and they said that as soon as they say they’re lawyers, people react almost like “You’re the boring people, you’re the ones who’ll shut things down.” And I thought, what an opportunity for the people they speak to to challenge that mindset and ask, what can I learn from them? What kind of work do they do in the organisation? Challenge the biases we sometimes have. It goes back to some of what we teach: you can often only see a little bit of the puzzle, and as you progress through your career, expanding your view of the puzzle of work is one of the most valuable things you can do.

**Nat:** I even think about the biases we have about people, like “Oh, that’s the finance team” or “That’s the risk and compliance team.” You can find new work besties in those teams. When you lump people together as a team, you can miss that there’s someone in there you’d really click with.

**Kristen:** That goes to a whole other issue. I find the way organisations are structured to compete internally so mucked up. I notice it all the time when people in corporate environments say “That has to go to finance” or “The business says this,” and I’m like, what is risk? Is that a person, or a group of people? Are we meant to be working together or against each other? Because that feels weird. But change that mindset. Rather than seeing a whole function of the business as a competitor, or something that shuts you down or makes your life harder, get to know them. There’s so much value in that, because the further up an organisation you go, the more you have to work with people across different functions and understand what they do. So it’s a great opportunity.

The next one for me would be documenting your wins. We’ve been doing our Friday wins publicly for probably over a year now. It felt pretty quiet to start, like we were celebrating into the void, and we shared religiously every week (apart from one) something we’d won that week. Really small or really big, work or life, it doesn’t matter. And there’s a legitimate reason we do it: the power of positive thinking. If you celebrate your wins, you train your brain to focus on positive outcomes. You make them clearer, which makes you more likely to achieve good things. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in the last couple of months people have started mentioning it to us. Someone said last week, “Someone on my team took inspiration from that, and now we do Friday wins every week as a team.” It’s funny, because we speak into the void a lot and you don’t know how people are taking things. But we’ve got a few Friday wins fans doing it on their own or with their teams. It’s absolutely something you can do every week. Maybe not everything’s in your control at the moment, you’re not particularly motivated in your job, or you’re struggling because you really want to move to the next thing and it feels hard. But what went really well this week? Finishing the week on a high can move your mindset away from doom and gloom to “There’s still some good stuff happening,” and keep your brain focused on that. Not toxic positivity, but fighting our natural instinct to focus on the negative, which really does hold us back.

**Nat:** Yeah, that’s a nice idea. Another tip is to reshape what you can. If there are meetings that no longer serve anyone, be the person who calls them out and asks how to improve them. And you raised something there. If there have been redundancies, morale feels low, everything feels flat and people are genuinely bummed, what a perfect opportunity to bring in a ritual just like that. “Hey, let’s get together for 10 minutes every Friday,” on Zoom or in person (if you’re all in the office on a particular day, choose that one), and introduce a new ritual like wins. What are our wins right now? Start to change the culture from the inside out. Reshape what you can, however small it is. Try something new.

**Kristen:** I think that’s a great idea. I was speaking to one of our friends ages ago, and she’d introduced a win of the week, but it was almost the opposite. They worked in a very high-pressure agency where a lot was outside their control: difficult customers, really technical stuff. So every week they gave the award to the biggest blowout, the thing that went most outrageously wrong, and celebrated that they got through it. I thought that was a nice twist. I like it because we’re all active contributors to culture. Sometimes when we’re stuck in a woe-is-me mindset, we become contributors to a negative culture. Whereas if you can flip that and start a positive spiral, even with a really small action, you can get some nice things going.

Which I suppose leads us to the final one: a mindset shift. I find myself saying this to a lot of people when they come to me and say, “I don’t really know what to do next.” I ask, “Have you got a job?” “Yes.” “Wow. So right now you’re being paid to figure out what you want to do next.” It’s that little change from “I don’t know what I’m doing next and I’m not happy in my job” to “I’m being paid to do my job, yes, but also to figure out my next step.” No one’s forcing you to stay. But there are definitely benefits: money, and probably a lot of other stuff that comes with work. It can feel hard when you’re not delighted by your job, but think about the benefits of being there and being paid while you work out what’s next. All the stuff we’ve just talked about (contributing to the culture, learning new things, expanding your knowledge) is pretty cool in this economy.

**Nat:** One extension to that is an actual mantra. We’ve talked about a bunch of things today: learn a new skill or capability, build new relationships, crack into another team and figure out their superpower, get on a new project. These are small, actionable steps, and there might be a goal of mastering something or meeting someone new. So turn that into a goal: “I want to have learned X, or met X, or found my feet in X by this date.” Then you can change your mindset with a simple mantra. Instead of “I feel really stuck here” or “I feel unfulfilled” or “This culture right now is…” (which will no doubt be looping in people’s heads), you say, “I’m choosing to be here to achieve X.” That might change every month, two months or three months as you pick things up. “I’m choosing to be here to develop my public speaking skills,” and that’s the focus. When you nail that, it might be something new: “I’m choosing to be here to build one new strategic relationship a month with a senior exec,” or whatever it is. Even that mantra of flipping it to choice often serves us well.

**Kristen:** Yeah. And it is a choice. Maybe that’s a good final reminder to leave on. You can leave your job. You might have to make some substantial sacrifices in your life, but you can. So you are in fact choosing to stay, and if you choose to stay, why not make the most of it? There’s something really nice about taking ownership: “I’m choosing this, and I’m going to achieve this during my time here.” In my experience, everything ends up better when you decide to opt in. It’s hard to get out of our own heads in tough times. But it’s obvious to the people around you when you’ve mentally checked out, and that’s not great for them either. So I love that as a final line: “I’m choosing to be here to…” and then answer it. The answer might change every week, but finishing each week with it is a nice place to start.

**Nat:** Love it, love it. I don’t have any final words. I was going to find a quote and I didn’t find a quote. So, all to say, everyone: we’re all feeling it, and it’s been a tough year. The point we’re trying to make is that we can do something. We can take one step forward that’s in our control. Have you ever stayed in a job longer than you wish you had?

**Kristen:** No.

**Nat:** I have. I stayed in one job longer than I wanted to (to be fair, probably about six months), but I did do that last thing. I fought my gut reaction, which was “I don’t want to be here,” and set those micro goals: “I’m staying here to achieve this, I’m staying here to get this done.” Rather than sitting back going “It’s too hard and I don’t like it here,” it helped me stay positive and focused on what I wanted to try and achieve. And that got me to the point where there was nothing more I wanted to achieve there, so I could leave quite comfortably.

**Kristen:** Yeah. I was trying to reflect on that this morning. My brother’s advice is that when you wake up and you’re no longer having fun, that’s the time for action. What we’re giving people is action in an economic environment that’s very different from what I had earlier in my career, when there were jobs aplenty. There were a couple of economic crises during my working life, but I happened to be having fun during them, so I wasn’t in that position. For me, when I was no longer having fun and the job was no longer serving me, I could start the networking and looking at what was out there. So the timing lined up, I think.

**Nat:** Yeah. And the only reason I say it is that I don’t know if it’s just economic. Sometimes we stay even if we’re unhappy because there’s something we want to see through, or we feel ownership over something, or something might change, or there’s a fresh opportunity coming. There could be any number of reasons we stay in roles longer than, on reflection, we would have. And I don’t know if you can see that in the lead-up. But as long as you always know why you’re there, you can reconcile being there.

**Kristen:** Yeah, yeah. Agreed, agreed. OK, I’ve got to go to the airport.

**Nat:** All right, go well. Everyone, check out powrsuit.com and we’ll catch you next time. Bye!