A colleague recently came to me with a clear remit: she didn’t want to do her current career any more. Her career, and indeed life, was feeling out of control and on the wrong trajectory.
The outcome was that she left with a clear plan to remain in the same specialty, but with a whole host of concerns about finances, location, work-life balance, hours and on-call ironed out with future career goals and dreams re-calibrated.
There was in fact a slight career mismatch going on, which we acknowledged, but at the core there was a chronic and extensive lack of general career planning resulting in the person having merely gone along in whatever direction the wind seemed to blow.