Afford Anything - The Psychology of Quitting Your Job, with Dr. Tessa West

Starting point is 00:00:00 Do you suffer from the Sunday Scaries? When you think about your job, your work, do you feel this existential dread, this sense of enri? Well, if so, Dr. Tessa West, a psychology professor at NYU, is here to help. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that understands you can afford anything, but not everything. Every choice carries a trade-off, and that applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention, to any limited resource. you need to manage. This is a show all about optimizing those trade-offs. My name is Paula Pant. I trained in economic reporting at Columbia and I help you focus on what matters. My guest today, Dr. West, is a psychology professor who has spent years, nearly two decades, studying human

Starting point is 00:00:49 relationships, first in the context of relationships relationships, and now in the context of the workplace. And she joins us to talk about five signs or five different ways that you might be disaffected with your work. Welcome, Dr. West. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Thank you for being here. Can you tell us about the research that you did that led to the framework of five major ways in which people feel a sense of disconnect from their work?

Starting point is 00:01:20 Yeah, so when I decided to kind of set out and organize people's psychological starting points, I came out of from the perspective of someone who's been studying relationships. for years. I think most of us know what it feels like when we're looking at the person next to us that we've been dating or married to for a while. And we start to get this nagging feeling that something isn't quite right. Maybe it's the case that this person's changed in ways we don't recognize them. Or, you know, maybe it's the case that we've somehow managed to find ourselves in a relationship where we're doing way more labor than we feel like that person's appreciating. These kinds of psychological feelings are things that most of us are familiar with. And I think, if you're

Starting point is 00:01:59 If we reframe a relationship at work as just kind of any other type of relationship, we can really start to anchor our experience on those feelings. We can find similarities between emotions, feelings of ambivalence, that kind of up and down that we experience in any other type of relationship and apply that to the workplace. So I took what we know from relationship science, from my own research at NYU, and I applied it to the relationship with the workplace, really kind of digging into those core existential feelings. that most of us have some experience with and applying it to our jobs. How, in what ways, though, do they differ? Because, of course, in a romantic relationship or in a marriage, there's a give and take. With a boss, there's not quite so much of a give and take. Yeah, this is a great question.

Starting point is 00:02:48 Can you really apply the logic of a close relationship to the relationship in the workplace and to all of the relationships you have with coworkers, with bosses, or even with the organization as a whole? At what point does that metaphor kind of fall apart and how much can we really apply? I think that at the end of the day, our feelings and how they manifest and how they influence our decisions, aren't that different when we're going from a marriage to interacting with your boss. What I mean by that isn't the types of questions you have or the goals you have. It's those things that stress you out at work, sort of anticipatory stress you experience,

Starting point is 00:03:25 walking into the workplace, having that interaction with a boss or a co-worker, those are the same types of emotions that we feel in any other type of relationship. And so I think although we have different barriers to kind of getting out of workplace relationships versus, say, a marriage or even a relationship with an adult child, the things that lead us to start contemplating exit, the things that make us unhappy, the ways we overly justify poor decisions, processes like the sunk cost fallacy, I've put so much work into this, I shouldn't walk away from it now, things like embeddedness. So this idea that your work and your home are kind of intricately interwoven in a way that is very difficult for them to pull apart is not unlike being in a marriage where you share a mortgage

Starting point is 00:04:11 with someone or a child and you have to have joint custody. These things that lead us to just question leaving, we know what that feels like in other relationships. And I feel like those same kinds of Basic psychological processes are occurring at work. Whether you can say the same thing to a boss when you're frustrated or you feel like you're drifting apart from that person compared to, say, your romantic partner, that's where the thing, you know, we have to kind of rethink this metaphor. But the underlying psychological experiences are largely the same across all types of relationships that we have. So what I'm hearing is that both at work and at home, there are significant logistical barriers to leaving. Absolutely. I think embeddedness is a concept we talk about in the workplace. It's something that organizations strive to actually get to happen to employees. You want people to have their children's

Starting point is 00:05:03 school very close to the workplace so that people can seamlessly drop off. You want people to have relationships and close friendships at work so that if they were to leave, they would feel that kind of psychological tension between losing close relationships and starting something new and exciting. And so this is a concept that actually is good for us at work, but can also kind of lead us to overstay our welcome in a job or overstay or welcome, even in a career that is no longer scratching that psychological itch for us. We are unhappy, but we feel guilty about leaving. We feel ambivalent. We feel like we're not just disappointing ourselves. We're disappointing those who invested in this path for us. And that is a psychological experience that most of us have had at some

Starting point is 00:05:46 point in our lives, whether with a relationship or with our career. Your research found five common sources of career frustration. Can you tell me about some of the data that you collected that led to that finding? This is a great question. You know, anytime people are unhappy at work and you want to categorize them, you really need a framework for how you're going to kind of put people into these different buckets. So what I first did was I surveyed thousands of people who are in various different industries and from over 50 different countries.

Starting point is 00:06:18 So I went with a very kind of broad starting point of who I wanted to study. I asked these individuals how unhappy they were at work, how long they've been in the workplace, and I asked them a series of questions about the psychological issues that they could potentially be struggling with, everything from feeling de-identified

Starting point is 00:06:37 or feeling like they were underappreciated. From this basic psychological survey I constructed, I was then able to categorize people into these different areas. And I think it's important to note that these can be very much overlapping. What I found in my work is that most people fall into at least two categories. And I did this by design. I think most of us, when we're unhappy, there might be one kind of core psychological experience anchoring us to our dissatisfaction. But there could be a whole bunch of other little things going on at the same time.

Starting point is 00:07:10 So when I conducted my original survey on this that put people into these, buckets, I really wanted to make sure people felt comfortable with identifying with more than one, but maybe have one type that really anchors them. People can be in various stages on this journey. Some of them are just starting to get this nagging feeling they're unhappy. Some of them have already started going out and looking for something and they're struggling with finding a good fit. Many of them are not even unhappy at work yet, but they're actually worried about their employees being unhappy. So let's talk about the five ways in which career dissatisfaction manifests, and let's go through them one by one. Let's start with crisis of identity. What is that?

Starting point is 00:07:53 So if you are feeling like you're having a crisis of identity at work, probably have spent a lot of time and effort dedicating yourself to one career path. Perhaps you spent a lot of money going to school, or you took a lot of training workshops. You've dedicated energy and resources, and often the energy and resources of the loved ones around you are kind of on this journey with you. A lot of these people have been working for a long time in one industry, but they're starting to question

Starting point is 00:08:20 the degree to which this identity is bringing them satisfaction. You know, in healthcare, for instance, we see a lot of this. I'm still highly identified with this, but it's stressing me out. It's burning me out. And so the crisis of identity person has spent a long time feeling like their career is a core sense of self to them. It's part of who they are.

Starting point is 00:08:41 They have a hard time disentangling other components of their self identity from the workplace, but they're unhappy or they're starting to kind of question the degree to which this identity is making them feel happy. And so their journey begins by questioning what would happen if they asked themselves a question, how would I feel if I could never do this again? And that's a bit of an existential question for a lot of people who've spent time and money and resources dedicating themselves to one career. So it can be a very scary place to be. Now, different people have different levels of identity centrality when it comes to their work. That's right. So when I thought about the crisis of identity person, I leaned a lot on social science research that pulls apart two components of identity. One is identity centrality. It's this idea that when I think about who I am as a person, how much of that is my career, is my job. You know, for me as a professor, it's really hard to think of

Starting point is 00:09:35 myself outside of that realm. But people differ in large degrees, the degree to which identity centrality is something that is really anchor to who they are. Some of us feel that our career super central to our sense of self. Some of us have a nine to five. We go home and we don't even think about work at all at the end of the day. You know, we've moved on. And so I think understanding that and how much identity centrality you have related to career is really important. And you have a matrix that you've developed. And it's an image, it's a matrix. It's a two by two Eisenhower matrix, right? So two columns, two rows. And it shows if you are low in centrality, meaning you don't heavily identify with your job, then depending on where you are in the satisfaction

Starting point is 00:10:19 spectrum, right, you might be like happily distanced from work versus get me out of here. That's right. And versus if you are high. centrality, meaning you highly identify with your job, then depending on your level of satisfaction, you're either thriving or you're miserable. That's right. I think most of us don't really think that we can be identified with something that doesn't bring a satisfaction. But a lot of us have actually experienced that.

Starting point is 00:10:48 And I think the first step for listeners is to really remind yourself that these are two separate things that in some cases are correlated and some aren't at all. you can feel highly identified with your job, but completely miserable doing it at the same time. Yet you show up day after day, hour after hour, you interrupt your vacations to work on things that make you utterly miserable. And I think that sort of scary quadrant of being high on identity centrality but low on satisfaction is something that a lot of us experience right before we burn out at work. You can also be, you know, happily distanced from your job. It's just not a key piece of who you see yourself as. And I think you want to find a job if you're to leave that fits that, that doesn't expect your

Starting point is 00:11:32 career to be a core piece of who you are. If everyone around you thinks of themselves as, you know, a part of this team of this organization and it's who they are as a human being and you simply don't, then there's going to be a mismatch between you and that organization and everyone around you as well. Given that a person's sense of self is so dynamic across the span of their life is a crisis of identity inevitable? Ooh, I love that question. It's very deep. I would say most of us will struggle with this at least once.

Starting point is 00:12:06 I think if you're having a crisis of identity at work, you are in good company. What's really important before you make any dramatic moves is you look for how stable that crisis is. And I think some of us can have days where we have good identity days and bad identity days, days where our career is really making us feel good about ourselves. We're successful. Our boss is rewarding us. The workplace is vibrant.

Starting point is 00:12:33 We have a lot of friends. And then even within the same week, days where none of those things are true. So like a relationship where there's intermittent reinforcement going on, you have a good day, you have a hot date with your partner, and then you want to punch them because they're being rude to you or, you know, they've insulted you in front of their friends. These kinds of things can happen in the workplace is. well. And so it's really important for you to identify stability in your identity with the workplace before you move forward. Because I do agree with you. I think that most of us can feel that. We can, most of us will have that crisis at some point. The big question is, when is a crisis enough to take a step forward? When should I then make a move? Is this a real thing or is this

Starting point is 00:13:16 more of a transient state that I'm going through? Now, distinct from a crisis of identity, one of the other five major ways in which a person can be dissatisfied with their career is if they have simply drifted apart from their career. Would drifting apart not be the same thing as just low centrality? Ooh, I love that question. I think drifting apart, you are pretty confident that you aren't super identified with the career, but what's different is knowing the source of who's actually changed. I think with the identity crisis person, they are pretty confident that the career itself hasn't changed. The industry hasn't changed. It's them. They're the ones who no longer feel a key piece of this. But if you're low on identity centrality and you feel like it's the career

Starting point is 00:14:08 that's changed, it's the industry that's changed, then you're going to want to be in the drifted apart category. And I think kind of seeing the distinction between the source is going to be really critical in knowing how to move forward, whether you want to do something completely different than what you've been doing in the past, or you want to do the same job you used to have, but just at a different place. And the drifted apart person, their biggest challenge, I think, is actually figuring out if they're having a crisis of identity. And if not, then what exactly has changed that, you know, is immutable, is something that the whole industry has changed on, or something that's just local. It's their own company. And if they want to stay in that industry, finding an organization,

Starting point is 00:14:53 finding a boss who looks a lot like their old boss, they're much more nostalgic for the past. They like what they had. They miss it. They feel like this company, this job is no longer recognizable in the ways that it used to be. Whereas someone who's low on identity centrality, they don't miss, you know, the job per se. They want something totally different. They're not nostalgic for the way things used to be. They feel existential about wanting out. I think. So I do, I agree with you that they are probably low on identity centrality, but what's different is this driver, this desire to have something recognizable from the past. Right. And so common changes to a person's job, you have a list of them here. And that could be anything ranging from the people on

Starting point is 00:15:41 your team, the duties that you have, some of these are a bit more obvious. But some of them are not quite as obvious, like how often you meet with your supervisor or the number of people that you oversee or the pace at which you're expected to get things done or your travel schedule, your work-related travel schedule. Yes, I think a lot of the things that actually make us drift apart are smaller. Their daily experiences that affect our creature comforts. They affect the degree to which are stress spikes throughout the day. Most of us tend to focus on kind of big things when we think about drifting apart, big structural changes. Was there a merger in this company? Did you absorb roles of, say, four different people when those folks were laid off and you don't have expertise in those

Starting point is 00:16:26 roles, but now you're expected to do all of them. Kind of big picture things that we can write down on paper as being obvious sources of drifting apart. But most of the people I spoke to and I surveyed are actually drifting apart more through death of a thousand paper cuts. It's a it's a bunch of tiny little changes that have added up over time, from the hours spent working on something to the availability of a manager, to, you know, running into friends at the coffee machine that make this place no longer recognizable. The challenge is actually seeing how all these tiny things can actually add up and contribute to this bigger psychological threat you're experiencing. And I think because it's hard to see how these things are accumulating, you know, in a way that is changing the form and

Starting point is 00:17:12 function of our job, we often go for these big picture things that we tend to have a handle on, that feel more obvious, that everybody can see, that everybody agrees upon have happened. But those things are not always the ones that are actually driving the psychological experience. It's the little things that do. And organizational level changes can also drive that experience as well, the experience of drifting apart from your work. Absolutely. I think a lot of people, there will be big kind of top-down changes in the structure of the organization.

Starting point is 00:17:41 Maybe a new CEO was named, or teams and functions were brought together that used to be siloed off. The difficulty is seeing exactly how these big things affect the little things. And I think most of us, we can recognize when big changes have happened at work, and this is true for the people who are orchestrating these changes. What we're not great at is then sort of drawing the connection between those changes and the little things we feel. And I think even people who are charged with making those changes don't see this trickle-down effect. They have a hard time seeing how, say, naming a CEO is leading people to leave work 30 minutes early,

Starting point is 00:18:20 or have a hard time making social connections, or getting 20 minutes less out of their boss this week than they used to. It's just a big ass to go from big top-down change to little daily creature comfort change. And I think that's where most of us are struggling. both in terms of career goers and also people who are hiring and making these decisions themselves. And it could even be something as simple as the layout of the office, which then changes, inherently a change to the layout of the office changes the number of spontaneous collisions that you have in the hallways, right? And those little spontaneous social interaction. Absolutely. And I think, you know, in my workplace, we moved offices and we went to like glass doors,

Starting point is 00:19:02 glass walls everywhere. And the change in the intercourse, personal dynamics was extraordinary. All of a sudden, certain people weren't stopping by other people's offices because they felt like they couldn't have private interactions. There was a lot of noise pollution. So my office is now across from a conference room and I can't have a meeting or, you know, do a Zoom call while other things are going on. We went from kind of a more integrated open concept office to a row of offices and we've had people retire because they were too far from the bathroom. You know, little things like that can really affect our job. And, you know, is my job as a professor and collecting data and writing books the same? Sure. But have I drifted apart a little bit because of

Starting point is 00:19:49 these day-to-day changes? The place feels funny. Doesn't even smell the same. And I miss having privacy. So, you know, so I do think that those little things should not be underestimated. Even things like room temperature can make people feel drifted apart. They're no longer comfortable. It's either too cold or too hot. And it's just a taxing experience to think about, do I have to bring a winter coat to work in the summer? You know, these little things do matter. You know, I've read that one negotiating tactic is actually intentionally making the room either too hot or too cold.

Starting point is 00:20:21 That is a cruel negotiation tactic. You are just preying on the comfort of someone's physical temperature. But yeah, you can get people out of a negotiation by making them physically uncomfortable in these various ways. And I think the workplace can be physically uncomfortable in ways that people don't often recognize. Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient, but they're not just fast and efficient. They're also powered by the latest in payments technology built to evolve with your business. Fifth Third Bank has the big bank muscle to handle payments for businesses of any size. But they also have the FinTech Hustle that got them named one of America's most innovative companies by Fortune magazine.

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Starting point is 00:22:23 for up to 70% off. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Sale ends December 7th. So let's talk about the third of five common sources of career dissatisfaction, and that is being stretched too thin. I think this is something that a lot of people can relate to. Yes, I think when I say, are you stretched too thin at work, in a room full of people, everybody will raise their hand, I think.

Starting point is 00:22:59 Who says no to that? Who says no to that? Most of us are taking on way too many roles at work. So kind of the first question around being stretched too thin are what are those official roles you're taking on? How many of those things are you volunteering for, which we often do an attempt to kind of get notice of people in power? There's a lot of lay theories around taking on roles and extra responsibilities because we think we'll get promoted if we do so. There's not a lot of strong evidence that it actually helps, but this is something that, you know, sometimes we do to ourselves.

Starting point is 00:23:33 So there's the kind of official on paper, what are your job titles, what are your roles? But then there's just this daily experience of not being able to juggle multiple tasks. And one thing I think is fascinating is when I started digging into tasks switching and interruptions, most of them we do to ourselves. So I think, you know, the dark side is most of us are stretched too thin. The bright side is when at least it comes to how to do work, not what you do but how you do it, we have a lot more control over that than we think we do. And we can build practices to reduce those so-called self-interruptions, looking at our phone in the middle of a meeting or minimizing

Starting point is 00:24:13 that tab from that thing we're writing to go online shopping or whatever. But that experience is something that we all can relate to. We self-interrupt all the time. Right. But the source of those self-interruptions, is that not boredom from being in the middle of the meeting? Yeah. I think that we are living in a very distracted time. I think most of us are used to having our phones nearby. We are used to spending 30 seconds on something, feeling impatient, and then switching gears and spending, you know, a couple minutes on another task. So it could be boredom. It could be that we've lost our attention muscle. You know, as a professor, I see this in the classroom a lot. The moment I am switching slide decks or telling the students they have a couple minutes to chat with a neighbor

Starting point is 00:24:59 next to them while I run to the bathroom, out come the phones. And I do think we have a little bit of a tick of just wanting to look at our phones, wanting to be distracted. It's a bit of an addiction to distract ourselves. So some of it comes from boredom. Some of it just comes from habit. You know, just pure habit of doing this. The moment there's a break in a conversation or something, you know, we self-destract. Right. And on the topic of habit, one of the best tips that I learned, this is from Dr. Cal Newport, who's been a guest on the show several times, he said, when you're waiting for the elevator, for God's sakes, don't take out your phone. Yep.

Starting point is 00:25:38 You know, what are you going to do on your phone as you wait for an elevator? That's right. So Cal is an expert in working smartly, not more, this business of if you want to be truly smart, you need in productive, you have to stop this constant interruption. And I think I borrow a lot from, you know, Cal's advice and work on. working less and but working, you know, knowing when you can have those critical hours of deep thinking and building that into your schedule in a way where you can protect it. But like training for a marathon, it actually takes a lot of work to give yourself one or two hours of blocked off,

Starting point is 00:26:18 you know, deep intellectual time every day where you put your phone away or whatever else is distracting you to get that deep work done. And like Cal has talked about, you actually don't need more time to produce better work. You need more uninterrupted time psychologically and environmentally. Right. And some of the hardest components of it is interrupting yourself. Right. Those internal disruptions. So how do you, though, manage external disruptions that happen at work? Because I know a lot of people who are listening to this are going to be saying, hey, I work from home and my spouse or my kids or my dog interrupts me all the time. Or I work at the office and, you know, people are constantly swinging by to interrupt me and ask a question or see if I want to grab coffee. Right. Yeah, we only have so much control over our environments. And so

Starting point is 00:27:10 you can try to build some norms around when you want to be interrupted. You can work on that with your interpersonal relationships with people to kind of set some standards. But I also think there's a lot of little things we can do to build what are called artifacts in our workplace. So some of the most interesting research on how people are efficient in high task switching, high interruption environments is they learn how to put little clues in their office space, you know, on their computer to remind them where they have stopped working on something or where to start again. And these can be post-its. You know, one person in a study I review in this book has a folder in their email where, you know, they put all the important emails under Z, Z, Z,

Starting point is 00:27:51 so they get kind of filtered into a certain box that they can then check at the end of the day. So I think little artifacts like this can do wonders and actually helping you remember where you've left off. I think what's key is to know that the reason why we aren't productive at work when we're interrupting isn't just because we're not able to finish something. It's because we're actually not able to encode in our minds the work we've already done. And so from a basic neurological perspective, task switching affects your performance at work. It affects your productivity because it creates a memory problem. You are not encoding. You are not stitching together memories of the work that you've done in an effective way. And so when you hop back into that document you were working on, you actually don't

Starting point is 00:28:39 remember what you had done before in a way that is very integrated. You might kind of remember working on it, but you don't remember your train of thought. You don't remember why you said a thing that you said. You don't remember where you planned on going next. It's really about how we're encoding those memories of the past work we've done and wanting to set the stage for creating effective memory building in the future so that we can pick up where we left off and not start again every time we're opening that document. So little artifacts in the workplace can do a ton. The other thing I would tell people is it's not how much you get done. It's how you're organizing your work. And I talk a lot about working spheres, this concept that when we work on something and we want to create good memory for the productivity

Starting point is 00:29:24 we've already done, it needs to be pretty high level. So you don't want to work on email and then texting and then, you know, expense reports. Those tend to be the categories in which we bucket our work. Instead, you want to work high level. I need to work on this report for a client. And that includes doing research, reading old emails, and maybe having a meeting with a boss. Three or four different tasks that you've done that seem really disparate, but they aren't because they're all integrated around one high-level goal. And that's how you should be organizing your work in terms of these working spheres, not in terms of tasks that you're doing, you know, throughout the day. If you were to do that, let's say that as you organize around a high-level goal, you do have

Starting point is 00:30:07 to access email as part of that. And that can set off a distraction spiral because then you see everything else that's come in. How do you manage for that? Yeah, I think you have to manage for that in the same way that you manage for not eating cookies when you're on a diet. You know, you have to assume the worst of yourself. So I think we will be distracted and we follow a lot of lures in the workplace away from our goals. And so the default is for you to not accomplish the goal that you set out. Don't assume that you're going to be able to override those in the moment distractions. Build a system in place so that you can't be tempted. And I think turning off email notifications is really key during some of your downtime when you're you feel a little bit spent and your brain isn't

Starting point is 00:30:53 as quite efficient as it was in the morning or whenever your smart time is. That's when you want to do your kind of categorizing work, bucketing those emails into that folder. So then when it comes to that job of just looking at those emails, you're not actually searching through your current email where you can see new things popping up. You're searching through a folder you've already created of those old emails. So you've removed that temptation. You don't buy the cupcakes. You don't have the bottle of wine in the house, you have to know what your temptations are and what your weaknesses are before you actually even walk into the task so that you can't be pulled. And I think for most of us, the emails that trigger our stress are things from bosses or coworkers or that

Starting point is 00:31:32 answer to an important question we've been waiting on. And because we're emotionally involved at work, we tend to kind of act on those triggers and that's what distracts us. So know what those psychological triggers are, know what emotions are going to happen when you see those things, popping into your literal and metaphorical inbox, and then build practices around that. So you're not going to be acting on those emotions in the moment. All right. Of the five ways that people feel career dissatisfaction, we have talked so far about feeling a crisis of identity. We've talked about drifting away from your work, which often happens when your work changes. We've talked about being stretched too thin. Now let's talk about the fourth way, being the runner up. I think most of us know

Starting point is 00:32:18 what it feels like to be picked second, to get close to that promotion or that raise, but just not quite make it. And the runner up suffers from just always getting really, really close and not being able to close the deal and critically not knowing what they're doing wrong. So I think some of us, we fail to get promoted, we get great feedback about what we need to go in, what gaps we need to fill in. But most runners up are actually really suffering in darkness. They have no idea. You know, they might have some lay theories. They've talked to a couple people at work, but they're getting vague feedback or they're getting feedback that's just telling them, well, this one person was just a little bit better than you. When that happens, you know, over and over again, we start to question our own missteps.

Starting point is 00:33:07 And I think this feedback gap, this communication gap between the runner up and their industry or their boss or even their boss's boss is really, you know, what is the core psychological problem that they have to solve. You know, what am I doing wrong? And why isn't anyone telling me what I'm doing wrong? There's a list of 13 common items that people often get wrong. Where did this come from? Where did this research come from? So I surveyed a combination of people who have felt like they were runners up. They have failed to get this promotion.

Starting point is 00:33:42 And I also surveyed decision makers, people who are making decisions about who should get promoted. And I look for common themes across both groups of people. I think the decision makers had a much easier time identifying what those common reasons are. Runners up themselves could kind of feel them in the air, but they had a hard time knowing which may be applied to them. And so this is the one chapter or the one type where I really needed to bring together perspectives from both sides, those who are giving promotions and those who have failed to get a promotion, to really kind of come to a core set of reasons why people on average are actually really struggling to get ahead. And so to go through these 13 common reasons,

Starting point is 00:34:28 people don't respect me as much as I thought they did. Ouch. Yeah, low status. Wow. Okay, so that's reason number one, we're starting strong. All right, people, number two, people don't value my contributions as much as I thought they did. Number three, the roles and responsibilities that I hold are not as important as I thought they were, especially when it comes to getting a promotion. These are some tough pills to swallow, right? Just to give you a sense of what some of these are, that person in charge of making promotional decisions got feedback from my colleagues about me. That was negative. I mean, these are some real. hard truths for any worker to hear about themselves.

Starting point is 00:35:08 Absolutely. I think some of these are, you know, really basic issues around having less status at work than you thought you did. So people don't admire, respect me, value my contributions as much as I thought they did. I thought I had higher status. Some of them are about career missteps. I'm taking on roles that maybe make me visible to the people who are making decisions, but they're not actually relevant to the job that I would be doing should I get promoted.

Starting point is 00:35:37 And that's kind of one of the more common missteps people make. Say they lead an employee resource group that makes them very popular among the peers. It gives them a once a quarter opportunity to meet the CEO and press them and talk to them. These things feel like they ought to get you promoted, but they're not actually yoked to performance on the dimensions people care about. And then I think there's a whole category of things that are, not really about you. They're about your boss or manager. That person isn't respected as much as you think they are. They walk into that discussion with other managers and people look at them and go, okay, that's nice that you have this employee you want to promote. But you're number 13 on the list of

Starting point is 00:36:18 people who get to promote someone right now and you know, you're not anywhere close to the top or they just don't do a great job of selling you in the moment or pushing you or kind of forcing you into those conversations. And so a lot of people don't realize that their own boss or manager, while wonderful to them face to face, has less status or less power than they think this person actually has behind the scenes. So you're the star player on a losing team. Yeah, or a mediocre, you're a star player on a mediocre team. So you're not bad enough to be told you're not great, but you're just not good enough to make it to that next step. You're in that kind of awkward in between stage. Wow. Yeah. In a large company where you are being represented at the higher levels

Starting point is 00:37:02 by the person who is directly above you, that can be impactful. Absolutely. And it's a really hard one to actually perceive because most of us don't interact with someone who has more power than us. That's more than one level above us. You know, if you have a middle manager, you're not going to go to the person who oversees that middle manager. It's non-normative. It could even be seen as offensive. And so knowing the pecking order of an organization and knowing how much power and status, the person who's advocating for you has something that requires networking and, you know, finding those nodes in the network who know the lay of the land. They know how that person is treated when others aren't around. Most of us have met a boss or manager who acts like they hold all the power in the world.

Starting point is 00:37:47 And then we see maybe an accidental meeting. We walk by that conference room and realize that person doesn't have as much respect as we thought they did. People are cutting them off or they're sitting in a weird corner. They're not allowed to sit at the main table. I remember the first time I realized this about a boss who told me that she was very powerful. And I accidentally walked into a meeting of all the managers is when I worked in retail and realized that no one actually respected this person. They didn't even give her a literal seat at the table. And it was a real wakeup call that, wow, I'm living in a bit of a bubble. And I have no idea how the kind of status hierarchy is working in this place. Right. And so coming to that realization can naturally make someone feel a little disengaged

Starting point is 00:38:29 from their work. Absolutely. And I think this is one of the kind of more shocking experiences people have. I thought my manager could get me this boss or raise. It's not that they don't respect me. It's that people don't respect them. You know, that's a tough bill to swallow. Right. And so the fifth form of career dissatisfaction. So just to go over what we've talked about so far, we've talked about a change in identity, which often happens when you yourself change. We've talked about drifting apart, which often happens when your boss or organization changes. We've talked about being stretched too thin, which is, I think most of us can relate to. We've talked about being the runner up. And now the fifth one, the underappreciated star. Yeah. So how does, I think a lot of people

Starting point is 00:39:27 people feel underappreciated at work. You know, the runner up, it's, all right, you're the runner up. You were being considered for promotion, but you got passed up. You know, you're the runner up. It's easy to visualize that. How does that differ from an underappreciated star? This is the question. I think the underappreciated star is probably often more of a runner up than they realize. I think a true underappreciated star has to be, you know, has to sort of interrogate their own star status. You know, am I as much of a star as I think I am? Do I have a skill that is rare here or rare in the industry? Is it something that I'm being recognized or acknowledged for an explicit way, but just not in the ways I care about? So maybe everyone's telling me I'm

Starting point is 00:40:14 great, but I'm not being compensated for it. And the critical question for these people is, am I comparing myself to the right group? Is the social comparison other, the proper one? And I think where most people misstep here is they assume that they're stars because they are stars locally. Maybe they are the best on their team, or they're the best in, you know, the particular regional office they work in. But when it comes to getting promoted or when it comes to compensation, those aren't the people they're being compared to. They're being compared to people who work at the organization as a whole or to other people who have applied for a job. And so the real challenge for the underappreciated star is to know whether they would be treated as a star elsewhere,

Starting point is 00:40:59 whether, you know, should they go on the market, they're going to be compensated in the ways they think they deserve it because they are stars relative to everybody else in the pool. And I think kind of one of the dark truths for these folks, a lot of what they discover is that even if they are stars, star status doesn't matter that much for most organizations. The difference between a 98th percentile person and a 90th percentile person doesn't warrant a $200,000 difference in compensation. And I think being an underappreciated star, you really need to know, does this industry care about stars?

Starting point is 00:41:37 Does it make, is there a huge difference in performance and status, you know, in recognition, if I'm pretty good or amazing? and most organizations are fine with pretty good. And so I think if you're going to be bitter about being underappreciated star, you need to first realize or interrogate that industry to see if star status is something that's valued at large. So for the people who are listening, you can relate to one or more of these. What should you do? Does it mean that it's time to leave your job?

Starting point is 00:42:09 Does it mean that you should make a career change? Does it mean that you try to improve things at work? I think the first step is to first assess your psychological starting place. So take some of these quizzes, take some of these self-assessments, and do them multiple times. I think you don't need to be leaving. You shouldn't be applying for jobs yet. If any of these types resonate with you, you need to think deeply about what your psychological starting place is.

Starting point is 00:42:37 And then I think the next kind of exploratory step is to network to see if a particular career is a right fit for you. I think one thing I learned is that there's often hidden norms of the workplace, things that people are doing that nobody told them what happened before they started that we don't talk about often. They're not on company websites. They're not on LinkedIn groups. You know, they're not posted in job ads. So uncovering all of those hidden pieces of a job, all the stuff that people are doing day to day

Starting point is 00:43:07 that nobody really talks about, those are the first things that you want to uncover when you're thinking about leaving, going into a new industry or just going into a new company. And so there's a lot of exploration you need to do by your own psychological state and about those hidden norms and kind of hidden roles and jobs that people are doing long before you should actually be applying for anything. I think so lots of kind of deep work that you should be doing. And you can take your time to do this. There's really no rush. There's no hurry. It shouldn't be done in a week or something like that. You can stretch this out. Okay. And then final question. How do you, if you're, how do you, how do you know what the next best alternative is? So if you're thinking about going into working for a different

Starting point is 00:43:47 company within your same field, how do you know that it's going to be any better? And likewise, if you're thinking about switching fields or industries or careers altogether, how do you know that that next one is going to be any better? Yeah, I think this comes down to the complicated nature of the interview process. And by that, I don't just mean interviewing with a hiring manager. I mean interviewing people who have worked for that company or still work for that company. And uncovering all of those hidden pieces of information that I mentioned earlier, I think we are often afraid to ask tough questions in interviews. What does it look like to fail here?

Starting point is 00:44:25 What are the biggest mistakes people have made? What is the origin of the job at? How many times was it taken down and put back up and rewritten and gone through this iterative process to find a job that fits, whether that's in a company or in a new field of all together, you need to assume that whatever you're reading online, whatever is posted is 5% of the whole story. And so your job is to play detective, to be an anthropologist of the workplace, to really dig into what is this place like, really? You know, why is it that they've cycled through five people in this role? And what I've learned is people are actually pretty

Starting point is 00:45:01 willing to be honest when you ask those tough questions. People are just afraid of asking those tough questions because they think it's going to make them look like they're not engaged, they're cynical, or they're not truly interested in a job. So they only ask the easy, nice questions. They don't ask the tough ones. But hiring managers and current employers, they love it when they're asked those tough questions because they know you're being serious about this relationship and you want to know what the potential shortcomings are. You want to know what's going to trigger your stress at work, what the Achilles heel is of this workplace so that you can build around that or make sure that you have those strategies in place to manage them.

Starting point is 00:45:36 It's a lot like talking about finances with a potential partner. It's uncomfortable, but you want to know if someone's in a bunch of debt when you get married and, you know, what their beliefs are around traditionalism and children and religion and so forth, uncomfortable but necessary questions that you will both benefit from if you ask those tough questions. And so I think finding a job that fits really comes down to embracing those slightly uncomfortable, pervasive questions. around the strengths of a job, but also the weaknesses of one. And whether those weaknesses are things that are deal breakers for you or things that you can work around.

Starting point is 00:46:11 Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they want to hear more of you? You can check me out at tessa westauthor.com for all information about my books and at tessa westlab.com for all of my research. Tessa westlab.com. Yes. Great. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Starting point is 00:46:30 Thank you, Dr. West. What are five key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Each key takeaway is one of the five sources of career burnout. Key takeaway number one, crisis of identity. You experience crisis of identity when you feel a disconnect between your career and your sense of self. And this often occurs when you've invested significant time and resources into a career path, but you then begin to question if that career. path is really bringing you satisfaction and you begin to wonder about that high identity centrality that

Starting point is 00:47:09 you've always had. You question maybe you should disconnect your identity from your job. So if you are feeling like you're having a crisis of identity at work, probably have spent a lot of time and effort dedicating yourself to one career path. Perhaps you spent a lot of money going to school or you took a lot of training workshops. You've dedicated. energy and resources and often the energy and resources of the loved ones around you are kind of on this journey with you. If this resonates with you, remember, it's never too late to reassess your career path and align it with your evolving sense of self, because the sense of self is dynamic. And also, you don't need to base your identity around your work, at least not as much as you

Starting point is 00:47:55 might be doing. So that's key takeaway number one. Key takeaway number two, drifting apart. You might feel this if you feel like your job or your industry has changed in ways that no longer align with your values or your preferences. So it's not you that changed. It's that there have been organizational changes or maybe there are changes in the broader industry. And the career that you are in doesn't look anything like the career that you started in. You know, the way that this career was five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, whenever it was that you started in it, It doesn't look anything like what it looks like today. If that's the case, then that can be a source of career burnout.

Starting point is 00:48:38 If you're low on identity centrality and you feel like it's the career that's changed, it's the industry that's changed, then you're going to want to be in the drifted apart category. So embrace change as an opportunity for growth and consider how you can adapt or find a new path that better aligns with your values and with who you are. Key takeaway number three, stretched too thin. You feel overwhelmed by the number of roles and responsibilities that you've taken on. And that leads to constant task switching and interruptions. And that can often lead to burnout and lead to wanting to quit. I think when I say, are you stretched too thin at work in a room full of people, everybody will raise their hand, I think.

Starting point is 00:49:24 Who says no to that? So focus on prioritizing your tasks and on setting boundaries so that you can regain control over your workload and improve your overall productivity. Sometimes what you need isn't a career change. It's just a rethink over what is mission critical, what is core to your role in the company or to the work that you're trying to do? What's core and what's ancillary? Because so often the ancillary can crowd out the core. So that is the third key takeaway and the third of five sources of career burnout. Key takeaway number four, The runner up.

Starting point is 00:50:02 You feel like the runner up. If you repeatedly come close to getting promotions or advancements, but then you fail to secure them, often without clear feedback on why you're being passed over. So you constantly feel like the silver medalist. You constantly are like, second place. I think most of us know what it feels like to be picked,

Starting point is 00:50:29 second to get close to that promotion or that raise, but just not quite make it. And the runner up suffers from just always getting really, really close and not being able to close the deal and critically not knowing what they're doing wrong. So don't be discouraged. Use each experience as a learning opportunity and look for specific feedback to improve your chances of future advancement. That's the fourth key takeaway. Finally, key takeaway. Number 5. The underappreciated star. You feel like this if you believe that your skills and contributions are not being adequately recognized or rewarded within your organization. And that can often be due to misaligned perceptions of your value relative to the broader industry. And sometimes

Starting point is 00:51:19 it can also be because the person who is advocating for you, your supervisor, person that you're directly reporting to may not have enough credibility within the organization to adequately advocate for you. And if that happens, if you're an underappreciated star, whatever the reason, you're likely going to burn out. And I think where most people misstep here is they assume that they're stars because they are stars locally. Maybe they are the best on their team. Are they're the best in, you know, the particular regional office they work in. So be active about showcasing your achievements and look for opportunities to demonstrate your value on a broader scale within your organization or within your industry and document,

Starting point is 00:52:04 document, document, quantify as much as you possibly can and show how what you contribute is aligned with what the company is trying to do, right? Show the magnitude of your impact. So those are five common sources. of career burnout and that often leads to quitting your job. So why, you know, to the question, why do people quit their jobs or why do people make midlife career changes, which is so common in the fire community. Those are five reasons why. And that research comes from Dr. Tessa West. So thank you to Dr. West for sharing your research with us. And thank you for being part of the Afford Anything community. If you enjoyed this episode, please do three things. Number one, most

Starting point is 00:52:48 importantly. Share it with a friend or a family member. That's the most important thing that you can do to spread the message of financial independence, financial psychology, increasing your income, investing, real estate, and entrepreneurship. It's double eye fire. Number two, please follow this show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and on YouTube. And while you're there, please leave us up to a five-star review. And number three, subscribe to our newsletter. Affordaithing dot com slash newsletter absolutely no cost to you thank you so much for being part of this community my name is paula pant this is the afford anything podcast and i'll meet you in the next episode

Afford Anything - The Psychology of Quitting Your Job, with Dr. Tessa West

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