The quitting signs I ignored for two years.
Hello Friend!
I had breakfast this morning with a friend I cherish.
We don’t get to connect often. But when we do, we always leave a little smarter than we came.
She worked alongside me during my last two years of corporate life. She’s gone on to run a fairly large company as its CEO.
So we did what we always do. We talked about work. The good, the hard, the then and the now.
At some point, I found myself reflecting out loud on those last two years of C-level life.
And I could see it so clearly now.
I was completely burned out. I needed a change.
At the time, I was the Chief Innovation Officer for a large restaurant company. And if I’m honest, I never found good footing the whole time I was there.
But I didn’t know how to make the call that it was time to leave.
Leaving felt financially reckless.
I told myself I should be grateful for what I had.
And because I process the world through emotion, I assumed I was just being emotional. That it would pass.
It didn’t pass.
Today, I know without a single doubt that it was time for me to go.
Here’s what I wish someone had told me back then.
The feeling wasn’t the problem. The feeling was the signal.
Burnout, misalignment, and quiet dissatisfaction aren’t moods to push through. Researchers have studied them for decades, and they show up as recognizable signals long before we’re willing to name them.
If you’re somewhere in your own “last two years” right now, here are four of those signals worth paying attention to.
1. Your depletion has become the baseline.
You end most days emotionally or mentally empty. And the emptiness is starting to follow you home, pulling energy from the parts of life that matter most. This is the core of what researchers call burnout: exhaustion, creeping cynicism, and an increasing sense that your work doesn’t mean anything, even when you’re performing well.
2. Your values and your calendar no longer agree.
You have too little control over how, when, where, or with whom you do your most important work. Worse, the values you’re asked to uphold keep drifting from the ones you actually want to live by. Decades of research on person-organization fit and autonomy tell us this gap quietly erodes engagement until there’s nothing left to give.
3. The role keeps asking you to be smaller.
You have expertise and ideas that could create real value if you got to use them on your own terms. Instead, the role asks you to be quieter, less creative, and smaller than you know you’re capable of being. And when you picture three more years of exactly this, you feel discouraged instead of hopeful. That’s a future version of you quietly waving a flag.
4. The discomfort of staying is louder than the fear of leaving.
You’ve started seriously imagining a different model. Consulting. Coaching. Advising. Teaching. Building something of your own. You’re not naive about the risk, but the ache of staying exactly where you are has finally grown heavier than the uncertainty of exploring a new path.
None of these signals means quit tomorrow.
They just mean it’s worth paying attention.
So I built something for people standing exactly where I once stood: a scorecard called Is It Time to Redesign Your Work? It’s grounded in the research on burnout, job demands and resources, person-organization fit, autonomy, career adaptability, and financial well-being.
If any of those four signs landed a little too close, take the scorecard here.
Take the scorecard here:
I spent two years believing I was just being emotional.
I wasn’t.
I was being honest. I just didn’t have the language for it yet.
If you don’t have the words either, that’s okay.
Naming it is the first step.
Your coach,
Chris
Live fuller. Love what you do.
P.S. This one’s for those of you who already made the leap. You left. You do great work, and your clients get real results. But revenue still arrives inconsistently, and some quiet part of you wonders whether you’ll end up back in a day job, reliving the exact burnout you worked so hard to escape. I know that fear. And here’s what I’ve come to believe: inconsistent revenue is rarely a visibility, lead, or sales problem. It usually starts earlier, in what you’re asking people to buy.
On Friday, September 18 at 2 p.m. ET, Patricia Wooster and I are hosting a free live session, Why Good Work Isn’t Turning Into Enough Revenue. We’ll walk through the six decisions that make your expertise easy or hard to sell, and we'll diagnose real businesses from the audience live, so you can watch us separate the symptoms from the actual root cause. If revenue is the one thing standing between you and the freedom you left for, come sit in.
Reserve your free seat here.
