Is career coaching worth it when you don't actually want to quit?

It's Sunday evening, and you've got a job site open on your phone. You're scrolling through roles you'd never apply for, in cities you don't want to live in, at salaries that wouldn't change much. After 20 minutes, you close the app feeling slightly worse, and on Monday you go back to the same desk.

A lot of people who come to career coaching start from that place. They assume the coaching will help them find the way out. Some of them do leave, and that's the right call for them. A surprising number stay, and stay, well, because once we looked closely, the problem turned out to be something other than the job itself.

The hidden assumption in career coaching

Most of what's written about career coaching treats it as an exit strategy. You're unhappy, so you work out what you'd rather be doing and make a plan to get there. For someone in a genuinely wrong role, that's exactly what's needed.

Dissatisfaction is a blunt signal, though. It tells you something isn't working without telling you what. Sometimes the job has drifted away from what you were hired to do. Sometimes you've changed, and the role hasn't kept up. Sometimes the work is fine, but you've lost any sense of say over how it's done. Each of those calls for a different response, and only one of them clearly points to the door.

I often see people stuck in what I call doomjobbing: scrolling listings as a way of managing frustration. It feels like progress because you're looking at options. In practice, it lets off just enough pressure to keep everything exactly as it is.

Four options rather than one

When I work with someone who feels stuck, we start by laying out four possible responses. You can accept the situation as it is and make peace with it. You can change something within it. You can leave. Or you can tolerate it, carrying on while quietly resenting it.

The first three are choices. The fourth is usually what happens when no choice gets made. Research on decision-making has shown that people stick with their current situation far more often than the merits would suggest, simply because it's the default (Samuelson and Zeckhauser, 1988). Tolerating is rarely a decision anyone sets out to make. It's what fills the space when the other three feel too uncertain.

What strikes me in coaching sessions is how often "change" gets skipped entirely. People jump straight from "I'm unhappy" to "I need to leave", missing the option that sits in between.

Changing the job without changing jobs

Organisational researchers have a name for this middle option: job crafting. Wrzesniewski and Dutton (2001) described how people actively reshape their work in three ways. They alter the tasks they take on, the relationships they build, and the way they understand the purpose of what they do. None of this requires a new employer, and much of it doesn't require anyone's permission.

In practice, it can look quite small. Someone takes on mentoring a junior colleague because it reconnects them with the part of the work they used to enjoy. Someone else renegotiates a responsibility that has crept into their role and drains their week. Another person changes nothing about their tasks but starts to see the work differently, and finds that changes how it feels to do it.

Small changes like these can shift how a job feels far more than people expect. And if they don't, you've learned something useful. You'll know the problem is the role itself, and you'll leave with much more clarity about what you're looking for.

What career coaching looks like when leaving isn't the starting point

When I coach someone who isn't sure whether to stay or go, we don't begin with CVs or job searches. We begin by separating the job from everything around it: the manager, the workload, the commute, the stage of life you're in, the story you've been telling yourself about where you should be by now. Usually one or two of those threads are doing most of the damage.

From there, we look at what you'd genuinely miss if you left, and what you'd be relieved to lose. We try small experiments in the role you already have and pay attention to what happens. Some people find that a few deliberate changes make the job workable again, even enjoyable. Others find that nothing shifts, and that's an answer too.

Either outcome is a good one. The aim of career coaching isn't to get you to leave or to persuade you to stay. It's to make sure that whichever you choose, you've chosen it, rather than drifting into it on a Sunday evening with a job app open.

References

Samuelson, W. and Zeckhauser, R. (1988) 'Status quo bias in decision making', Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 1(1), pp. 7–59.

Wrzesniewski, A. and Dutton, J.E. (2001) 'Crafting a job: Revisioning employees as active crafters of their work', Academy of Management Review, 26(2), pp. 179–201.