We tend to talk about career change as if something has to go visibly wrong before we're allowed to want something different. But careers, like the rest of a life, evolve with the person living them.

There's a quiet cultural expectation that adulthood is when you finally figure yourself out, choose the education, choose the career, build the life, and eventually just know. Know what you want, who you are, where you're headed. But identity doesn't actually work that way.

You can genuinely achieve the thing you spent years working toward and feel strangely little from it, sometimes even trapped. That doesn't mean you were wrong to want it. The promotion may have represented recognition at a time when being recognised mattered enormously to you.

When your life starts to shift, it can be difficult to understand what’s happening. Explore the different phases of change, from feeling that something is different to letting go, moving through the in-between, and finding your way forward.