Five indicators it may be time to move on in your career

Executive overview

Most career dissatisfaction is temporary — bad days, weeks, even months are normal. But persistent disengagement signals something deeper.

Dave Stachowiak offers five indicators to help you decide whether to restructure your role, seek a lateral move, or leave entirely. The framework is not a verdict — it's a set of questions to help you reach your own answer.

Recurring flatness across multiple dimensions — motivation, growth, and energy — is the clearest signal it's time to move.

Beyond a bad day

• Bad days and bad weeks are universal; they are not signals to leave.
• Julius Erving: "Being a professional is doing the things you love to do on the days you don't feel like doing them."
• When dissatisfaction extends beyond a quarter, it becomes a burden — for you, your family, and your colleagues.
• Duration is the key diagnostic: persistent months-long disengagement warrants serious reflection.

Solving problems no longer feels fulfilling

• First, a checkpoint: are you actually solving real problems, or doing window dressing?
• Window dressing: attending all events, joining every group, knowing every executive — while neglecting the primary work of adding value.
• Ogilvie's principle applies internally: great self-marketing only makes a mediocre contribution fail faster.
• The leaders who advance are those who identify and solve real problems with courage and innovation.
• If you are genuinely solving problems and it still feels empty, that is a meaningful signal.

Living in Groundhog Day

• When one year becomes indistinguishable from the last, cynicism often follows.
• The "we can't change that" mindset is a symptom, not a cause.
• Stachowiak experienced this himself — externally successful but internally stagnant — and restructured his role rather than leaving.
• Groundhog Day is not inherently bad: many people thrive on routine. The question is whether it's fulfilling for you.
• If it isn't, it may be time to move on in some form.

Thinking the same way you did a year ago

• Growth shows up as the ability to look back and cringe at past decisions — that discomfort is evidence of progress.
• Organizations and customers continuously demand new thinking; stasis is a liability.
• If your approach to problems has not evolved in a year, it is worth asking why.

Your heart tells you it's time

• Sometimes you know before you can articulate it.
• Stachowiak's early-childhood education role: meaningful, successful, loved by colleagues — but emotionally depleting in a way others didn't experience.
• Energy at the end of the day is a signal: depletion versus tiredness-but-energized are different states.
• There is no perfect answer, and sitting with the uncertainty is often the right move before acting.
• This is the most important indicator: gut-level misalignment that logic alone can't resolve.