Should I Stay or Should I Go? A Real Framework for Making a Career Decision in Midlife
by
Niamh Coughlan
At some point in the last few years, a question started showing up in my head with increasing regularity. Not loudly at first — more as a quiet background hum. Am I done here? Is this still right? Is this actually what I want to be doing?
I ignored it for a while, the way you ignore a noise in your car that you hope will just go away. Then it got louder. Then I started noticing it on Sunday evenings, then on Monday mornings, then, eventually, most days.
If you are reading this, I suspect you know the feeling. You are in a career — maybe a good one, maybe one you worked hard to build — and something about it has stopped fitting. Not necessarily in a dramatic way. Not a crisis exactly. More of a slow, persistent misalignment between who you are now and what you spend most of your time doing.
The question is: what do you do with that?
Because here is the thing nobody tells you about midlife career decisions: the answer is rarely as simple as 'stay' or 'go'. The real work is figuring out what you are actually dealing with, what you genuinely want, and what each path actually costs — before you make a decision that you will be living with for the next twenty years.
Why midlife career decisions are harder than they look
Career decisions in your 20s and 30s tend to feel more straightforward — not because they are easier, but because the stakes feel more recoverable. If you change direction at 27 and it does not work out, there is a sense that you have time to course-correct.
By your 40s, the risks change. There is more at stake financially. There may be a partner whose career and preferences are part of the equation. There are children whose stability matters. There is a professional identity that has been built over decades and that would take real effort to rebuild. There is the question of whether you have the energy for a significant change. And there is the spectre of regret — both the regret of leaving something that turned out to be fine, and the regret of staying in something that never became what you hoped.
All of that weight makes it very easy to do nothing. To keep explaining the discomfort as temporary. To wait for more information, for more certainty, for the right moment. And the years pass.
The other thing that makes midlife career decisions harder is that they are rarely just career decisions. For many of the women I work with, the career question is tangled up with a perimenopause transition that has changed how they think and feel and function. It is tangled up with an identity question — who am I now, outside of what I do? It is tangled up with a relationship dynamic, with children who are growing up and needing less, with parents who are growing older and needing more. You cannot cleanly separate the career question from the rest of it. Which is precisely why approaching it as a purely professional decision so often leaves people going in circles.
A career decision in midlife is rarely just a career decision. It is a life decision wearing a professional disguise — and it needs to be treated as such.
The stay / adjust / leave framework
When I work with clients on career decisions, I use a framework that has three options — not two. Most people frame the question as 'stay or go'. The third option, which is often the most useful one to start with, is adjust.
Here is what each path actually involves:
Stay
Staying is not just doing nothing. Actively choosing to stay — with clear eyes about what you are choosing and why — is a legitimate and often wise decision. The question is whether you are staying by choice or by default.
Staying by choice sounds like: 'I have examined this properly. The financial security matters to me right now. I can make adaptations within this role that give me more of what I need. I am going to be here for another three years and I am going to make that work.' That is a decision you can stand behind.
Staying by default sounds like: 'I am not sure what else I would do. It is probably fine. Things might get better. I cannot face the disruption right now.' That is not a decision — it is a postponement. And postponements have a habit of becoming permanent.
Questions worth sitting with if you are considering staying: What specifically would need to change for this to feel right? Is that change within your control? Is this a phase — something genuinely temporary — or is it structural? Have you been waiting for it to improve for more than two years?
Adjust
The adjust option is the most underexplored of the three, and often the most useful starting point. It means staying in your sector or organisation, but changing something meaningful — your role, your hours, your focus, your relationship to the work, your level of seniority.
Adjustment is worth exploring seriously before either staying or leaving, because it tests the hypothesis that it is your specific situation causing the problem, rather than something more fundamental. Some women I work with discover through this process that the issue was a particular relationship at work, or a specific set of responsibilities, or a commute, or a culture — and that adjusting removes enough of the friction to make staying genuinely workable.
Others discover through trying to adjust that the thing they want to change is structural — it cannot be adjusted within the current context. That is also valuable information. It moves you from 'maybe I should leave' to 'I now know I need to leave', which is a very different place to make a decision from.
Questions worth sitting with if you are considering adjusting: What specifically do I want to change? Have I actually asked for it, or just assumed it is not possible? What would need to be true for adjustment to make this work? What am I not willing to negotiate on?
Leave
Leaving is often the option that feels the most frightening and the most exciting in equal measure. For many midlife women, it also carries the most guilt — the sense that walking away from a career you built is somehow an admission of failure, or a betrayal of the version of yourself who worked so hard to get there.
It is neither of those things. Leaving a career that no longer fits is not failure. It is what happens when a person grows and the structure around them does not grow with them. It is normal. It is healthy. And for some women, it is exactly the right call.
What it requires is preparation — not panic, not impulsive action, but a clear-eyed plan. The financial reality needs to be understood, not estimated. The practical timeline needs to be mapped. The identity work needs to happen alongside the practical work — because 'what do I leave to do' is as important as 'when do I leave'.
Questions worth sitting with if you are considering leaving: What am I leaving toward, not just away from? What does the financial runway look like honestly? Who in my life needs to be part of this conversation? What does the version of me who has already left look like, and does that person feel real?
The question underneath all three options
Every client I work with on this eventually arrives at the same question underneath the career question: what do I actually want?
It sounds simple. It is not. After years of building a career around what was expected, what was achievable, what made sense at the time — many women in midlife have genuinely lost contact with what they want for themselves. Not in a dramatic way. In a very practical sense: they have not thought seriously about their own preferences in years. What they want has been filtered through what was realistic, what other people needed, what the career demanded.
Reconnecting with that — figuring out what the next chapter genuinely needs to include, as opposed to what it probably will include by default — is not a small piece of work. But it is the most important piece. Because a career decision made without it is almost always a decision made in reaction to discomfort, rather than in the direction of something real.
That is why I always start with clarity before strategy. Not 'what should I do?' but 'what is actually going on, and what do I genuinely want?' The stay-adjust-leave framework only works when it is answering the right question.
What to do if you are stuck
If you have been sitting with this question for a long time and not moving, the most likely reason is not that you lack information. It is that the decision feels too large to make alone, and the clarity work feels too uncomfortable to do without support.
That is not a character flaw. It is the entirely reasonable response to a genuinely difficult situation. The women I work with are not stuck because they are weak or indecisive. They are stuck because they are taking the decision seriously, and they need a structured, honest process to work through it — one that holds the career question alongside the perimenopause question and the identity question, rather than treating them as separate problems.
If that is where you are, the most useful first step is a conversation. Not a discovery call designed to sell you something — just an honest conversation about where you are and what kind of support might actually help. That is what the link below is for.
Niamh Coughlan is the founder of Messy Middle Coaching, working with women in their 30s, 40s and 50s on perimenopause, career transition and identity. messymiddlecoaching.com
