Making a change... What Could Go Wrong?!
You're scared of the worst case scenario, but do you even know what it is?
Posted 06-20-24
When I’m coaching a client who feels trapped in their current job, we often devote some time to thinking about worst case scenarios. Great job, Coach - stuck people definitely need more negative thinking. Yeah, sounds like one of those ‘COACHING INSTRUCTORS HATE HIM’ moments - but it’s not, I promise. If you don’t already do this, it will help you - read on.
The purpose of worst case scenario thinking is to put some concrete names and structure around the swirling cloud of unexpressed fears and doubts most of us deal with when contemplating a job or career change - or really, any significant life change.
I can be a very ‘all or nothing’ ‘black and white’ thinker, so for much of my 20+ career doing dreadfully-boring-yet-surprisingly-lucrative-back-office-y stuff, I considered my only two options to be ‘stay in current career - miserable, but solvent’ or ‘explore whether a new career might make me feel happier, except in this scenario I and my entire family immediately starve and perish.’
As with most apparently either/or scenarios, it’s juuust a little bit less drastically dichotomous than all that.
Our brains didn’t evolve to make us happy. Our brains evolved to keep us alive. Despite many truly bad things going on in the world right now, along with the inescapable multimedia drip-feed of hyperbolic catastrophizing to draw your eyes, ears, and clicky fingers, most of us live lives that are far safer and better than those lived throughout 99.99% of human history.
I’ll debate this premise in the Comments if you’d really like, but in short: despite endless war and the ongoing pillaging perpetrated by the new robber barons of late stage capitalism, I’m still typing this on a wafer-thin magic box, and you’re probably reading it on a handheld computer 10 times more powerful than any computer built before 2010, we both have ready access to safe, climate-controlled, indoor spaces to live our lives and perform our tasks, and many of us are so coddled that we literally have to schedule time to put on special quick drying wick-away stretch clothes to simulate the effects of manual labor.
(Ok, that wasn’t so short. And yes, many people are truly struggling on fundamental levels, lack any real safety net, and face significant personal and structural barriers to positive change. But, if you’re reading a substack article written by an executive career coach, chances are you’ve got a few more resources to draw on.)
Please excuse the oversimplification of brain science in the name of making a clear point.
Our brains evolved to protect us from existential risks - in technical terms, stuff that can kill us - and the vast majority of us very rarely, if at all, experience such risks in our daily lives. But, despite all their computing power, our brains are still fundamentally just… organs, which is to say: they process inputs and produce outputs. So, even though we live in the complete absence of, say, saber-tooth tiger encounters, when we deal with the minor fears that can arise from a modern everyday situation, the same neural pathways are activated.
In other words, your brain is ready to tap into your fear of death to keep you safe from harm, despite the fact that such harm presents as an unwanted calendar invite in Microsoft Outlook.
This is why I ask my coaching clients to envision worst case scenarios. When we contemplate a significant change to our routine lives, like exploring a new job or career, our brains will kick in with the mechanism that prevents us from charging into the brush - lest we abruptly cross paths with something territorial, and tusked. Stay right where you are, thinks your brain, we know it’s safe here, and there’s berries. You like berries, right? Why do you need to go out there? Enjoy the berries.
This ancient thinking pattern is triggered by our once-reasonable fear of the unknown. 20,000 years ago, when you debated a tentative traipse into a new span of darkened forest, you truly didn’t know what was out there, and you really couldn’t know until you stomped some leaves. But now, while you can’t ever truly know what’s going to happen until it does, you can make a lot of educated guesses about what could be lurking in the direction of your next step. And most of the time, you’ll find your nebulous fears turn out to be… toothless. (Sorry)
Let’s say you make $100k building widgets for DrabCo Industries. You’re the family breadwinner: your job pays the bills, provides decent health insurance, is relatively stable, your boss is ok, and you can generally count on annual cost-of-living raises and a promotion every 3 years or so. The only real downside of your work situation is that you’re completely bored it’s making you miserable.
You’ve looked around for similar jobs, thinking a change of scenery might do the trick, and that you might even be able to secure a pretty good compensation bump if you make the leap to your company’s leading competitor, Greige Gadgets. But that job description has a few different responsibilities you don’t feel entirely competent to perform, you’re not sure how they feel about remote work over there, and what if the new boss seems fine during interviews but turns out to be a total monster? Really, who knows what it’s like over there? What if I bite off more than I can chew, the boss is a jerk, and I get fired? Then I’ll have to look for another job and what if the job market has gotten worse and we have to take the kids out of sports and sell the car and…
Maybe you repeat this process with 5 or 6 other job postings, neglecting your widget production duties for half a day while you go through the cycle of discovering a job listing, briefly fantasizing about it, then naysaying yourself with a series of increasingly irrational fears into doing exactly nothing.
So this is why I recommend taking the time to contemplate the Worst Case Scenario(s). Capture all those fears your Inner Saboteur so quickly conjures whenever you find yourself considering a change. First just splash ‘em down on a piece of paper (or your magical hand computer) as they pop into your head:
Jot these thoughts down as they occur - you don’t have to do anything with them quite yet. If you try this exercise, give yourself a week to contemplate whatever potential change is top of mind, writing down your fear thoughts as they arise. After you’ve got a decent list going, take some time just to read through it.
Is everything on the list rational, reasonable, or likely? If so, congratulations: you’re the first person ever to achieve this result. However, it’s highly probable that you will look at at least one of the fears you’ve captured and laugh to yourself, knowing it would never come true - you’d never let it come true.
In an upcoming article, I’ll continue along this path by discussing some common change-blockers I see pop up over and over in my coaching practice, and how you might consider addressing them. Until then, just take note - you might be surprised to find your fears aren’t saber tooth tigers at all when brought from your brain’s dark forest into the light of day.
Subscribe to my Substack for more content like this, click here
When I’m coaching a client who feels trapped in their current job, we often devote some time to thinking about worst case scenarios. Great job, Coach - stuck people definitely need more negative thinking. Yeah, sounds like one of those ‘COACHING INSTRUCTORS HATE HIM’ moments - but it’s not, I promise. If you don’t already do this, it will help you - read on.
The purpose of worst case scenario thinking is to put some concrete names and structure around the swirling cloud of unexpressed fears and doubts most of us deal with when contemplating a job or career change - or really, any significant life change.
I can be a very ‘all or nothing’ ‘black and white’ thinker, so for much of my 20+ career doing dreadfully-boring-yet-surprisingly-lucrative-back-office-y stuff, I considered my only two options to be ‘stay in current career - miserable, but solvent’ or ‘explore whether a new career might make me feel happier, except in this scenario I and my entire family immediately starve and perish.’
As with most apparently either/or scenarios, it’s juuust a little bit less drastically dichotomous than all that.
Our brains didn’t evolve to make us happy. Our brains evolved to keep us alive. Despite many truly bad things going on in the world right now, along with the inescapable multimedia drip-feed of hyperbolic catastrophizing to draw your eyes, ears, and clicky fingers, most of us live lives that are far safer and better than those lived throughout 99.99% of human history.
I’ll debate this premise in the Comments if you’d really like, but in short: despite endless war and the ongoing pillaging perpetrated by the new robber barons of late stage capitalism, I’m still typing this on a wafer-thin magic box, and you’re probably reading it on a handheld computer 10 times more powerful than any computer built before 2010, we both have ready access to safe, climate-controlled, indoor spaces to live our lives and perform our tasks, and many of us are so coddled that we literally have to schedule time to put on special quick drying wick-away stretch clothes to simulate the effects of manual labor.
(Ok, that wasn’t so short. And yes, many people are truly struggling on fundamental levels, lack any real safety net, and face significant personal and structural barriers to positive change. But, if you’re reading a substack article written by an executive career coach, chances are you’ve got a few more resources to draw on.)
Please excuse the oversimplification of brain science in the name of making a clear point.
Our brains evolved to protect us from existential risks - in technical terms, stuff that can kill us - and the vast majority of us very rarely, if at all, experience such risks in our daily lives. But, despite all their computing power, our brains are still fundamentally just… organs, which is to say: they process inputs and produce outputs. So, even though we live in the complete absence of, say, saber-tooth tiger encounters, when we deal with the minor fears that can arise from a modern everyday situation, the same neural pathways are activated.
In other words, your brain is ready to tap into your fear of death to keep you safe from harm, despite the fact that such harm presents as an unwanted calendar invite in Microsoft Outlook.
This is why I ask my coaching clients to envision worst case scenarios. When we contemplate a significant change to our routine lives, like exploring a new job or career, our brains will kick in with the mechanism that prevents us from charging into the brush - lest we abruptly cross paths with something territorial, and tusked. Stay right where you are, thinks your brain, we know it’s safe here, and there’s berries. You like berries, right? Why do you need to go out there? Enjoy the berries.
This ancient thinking pattern is triggered by our once-reasonable fear of the unknown. 20,000 years ago, when you debated a tentative traipse into a new span of darkened forest, you truly didn’t know what was out there, and you really couldn’t know until you stomped some leaves. But now, while you can’t ever truly know what’s going to happen until it does, you can make a lot of educated guesses about what could be lurking in the direction of your next step. And most of the time, you’ll find your nebulous fears turn out to be… toothless. (Sorry)
Let’s say you make $100k building widgets for DrabCo Industries. You’re the family breadwinner: your job pays the bills, provides decent health insurance, is relatively stable, your boss is ok, and you can generally count on annual cost-of-living raises and a promotion every 3 years or so. The only real downside of your work situation is that you’re completely bored it’s making you miserable.
You’ve looked around for similar jobs, thinking a change of scenery might do the trick, and that you might even be able to secure a pretty good compensation bump if you make the leap to your company’s leading competitor, Greige Gadgets. But that job description has a few different responsibilities you don’t feel entirely competent to perform, you’re not sure how they feel about remote work over there, and what if the new boss seems fine during interviews but turns out to be a total monster? Really, who knows what it’s like over there? What if I bite off more than I can chew, the boss is a jerk, and I get fired? Then I’ll have to look for another job and what if the job market has gotten worse and we have to take the kids out of sports and sell the car and…
Maybe you repeat this process with 5 or 6 other job postings, neglecting your widget production duties for half a day while you go through the cycle of discovering a job listing, briefly fantasizing about it, then naysaying yourself with a series of increasingly irrational fears into doing exactly nothing.
So this is why I recommend taking the time to contemplate the Worst Case Scenario(s). Capture all those fears your Inner Saboteur so quickly conjures whenever you find yourself considering a change. First just splash ‘em down on a piece of paper (or your magical hand computer) as they pop into your head:
- Incompetent at new job, get fired in first 6 months, job market tightens, can’t pay mortgage
-
New job’s boss is a tyrant, become even more miserable, turns out I jumped from the frying pan into the fire
Jot these thoughts down as they occur - you don’t have to do anything with them quite yet. If you try this exercise, give yourself a week to contemplate whatever potential change is top of mind, writing down your fear thoughts as they arise. After you’ve got a decent list going, take some time just to read through it.
Is everything on the list rational, reasonable, or likely? If so, congratulations: you’re the first person ever to achieve this result. However, it’s highly probable that you will look at at least one of the fears you’ve captured and laugh to yourself, knowing it would never come true - you’d never let it come true.
In an upcoming article, I’ll continue along this path by discussing some common change-blockers I see pop up over and over in my coaching practice, and how you might consider addressing them. Until then, just take note - you might be surprised to find your fears aren’t saber tooth tigers at all when brought from your brain’s dark forest into the light of day.
Subscribe to my Substack for more content like this, click here