When I started this career coaching business, I thought I'd spend my days helping people pivot.

Changing roles, companies, or industries. Launching new values-aligned, lucrative businesses. Kicking down the front door of their corporate drudgery past, revealing their new meaning and money-filled future.

And we still do that a lot!

But an increasingly large part of my job is helping people stay sustainably—at least for now.

Sometimes that’s because they're the breadwinner or caretaker and people are relying on their salary and benefits. Sometimes there's been a lot of change in their personal lives, and they want work to remain constant. Sometimes they have a hunch that they'll burn out no matter where they go…

And structurally, the market's pushing them to stay too. Since 2022, we've moved from The Great Resignation (employee has the upper hand) to The Era of Forever Layoffs (employer has the upper hand). AI has gone from a nerdy "machine learning" team trying to modernize the company's product to chatbots that roughly half of U.S. adults now use. And job cuts are hitting formerly stable sectors like the federal government.

As a result of these economic, technological, and political forces, "Job Hugging" is in vogue, and leaving isn't (or doesn't feel like) an option.

But staying ≠ accepting the status quo

No amount of breathing exercises, mirror mantras, or positive psychology on its own can fix your purpose and meaning void, being chronically undervalued, a yawning values-misalignment chasm, or a system that's extracting more than you want to give and leaving you zapped of time and energy for your life.

Here's what it can look like to shift the status quo and stay sustainably:

• Chief Data Officer taking more PTO and unplugging from work while continuing to deliver stellar results and achieve F.I.R.E. over the next few years
• SVP, Compliance setting boundaries around wellness habits and company travel to spend time with family and build runway to become a doula
• Senior Software Engineer proactively advocating for title and salary adjustment in startup without formal process (and ultimately using to get a new job)
• Brand Strategist & Storyteller reducing scope to align to CMO’s KPIs, freeing up bandwidth to build his own fractional studio and client base
• Chief Product Officer setting expectations with her team that she closes her computer and turns off notifications at 5pm and will be back at 9am

If you’ve been trying to stay sustainably, but keep hitting a wall, hit reply instead. Tell me what's making it hard right now: Being undervalued? Values misalignment? Creeping burnout symptoms? I read every one, and I'll point you toward what's worked for the people above.

Onward!
Grace