The sentence comes up in some form in almost every coaching conversation I have. "I'm too far in to change now."
Sometimes it's a senior resident. More often it's someone twelve or fifteen years into a career. They are very good at what they do, and they feel stuck on a treadmill with no stop button. The length of the training. The weight of the debt. A lifestyle built on a specific salary. No obvious options. It adds up, and it all points one direction.
I don't argue with the facts. I ask who they've talked to.
Because the trapped feeling usually rests on a thought that was never tested against all of the facts. It starts as private doubt. The doubt shapes the actions. The actions produce the result that proves the doubt right. And the thought survives because no one has ever said it out loud to another human being who might disagree.
My most recent podcast guest is a fairly direct rebuttal to it.
Dr. Maria Sokolina went to medical school and dental school in St. Petersburg, Russia. Then she came to the United States and had to learn an entirely different healthcare system. She built a practice in New Jersey. Then another in New York City. Then life circumstances pulled her toward sleep medicine. And she has just published a book, Breathless, built out of her patients' stories.
What we spend a good part of the conversation on isn't grit. It's mentorship, and the networks she built at each of those transitions. That's what she points to. And I notice it's what nearly everyone points to, once you get them describing how a change actually happened rather than how it felt while they were deciding.
That part gets lost when we tell these stories as before-and-after. The interesting middle isn't the decision. It's the long stretch of conversations with people who had already done it, most of which went nowhere in particular.
Reinvention rarely looks like a leap. It looks like someone who knew a person who had already done it.
I can't tell you whether to change anything. That isn't modesty. I'm not living your call schedule or paying your mortgage, and anyone willing to tell you what to do from that distance is selling something.
What I can tell you is what the ones who moved had in common. They were not braver than the ones who stayed. They were less alone. Someone a few steps ahead had made the next move thinkable — and thinkable turns out to be most of the work. Courage is expensive and comes in small amounts. A conversation costs nothing and you can have one this week.
Which brings it back to where we started. A private thought does its damage precisely because it stays private. It never has to survive contact with somebody who has seen it go another way. Said out loud, it either holds up or it doesn't. In my experience it usually doesn't.
You are probably not too far in. You may just be the only person who has heard the argument.
I'm here if you need me.
— Ben
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