Taking your deposits from the bank of earned grace
For nearly a decade I worked at the same large consulting firm, and I want to be clear that I was not unhappy there. I liked the work and I loved who the work was for, because my clients were mostly state governments, which meant that the long weeks and the bad hotels and the endless slide decks were all going, eventually, toward something that made an ordinary person's life a little easier. That is a rare thing to be able to say about one’s work, and as I found out, a rare thing to give up.
By my early forties I had gotten restless in a way I couldn’t shake. At the time I wasn’t great at boundaries, and I had slowly allowed myself to get to a place of no return. I wanted harder problems and a career ceiling that was further away than the one I was staring down. And when considered the idea of leaving, I ran into a wall of excuses: the amount of effort required to learn new logistics, how work gets done at a new organization, a new cast of peers, org structures, new systems, new everything, at an age when starting over just sounded… well, exhausting. I said that out loud to the people in my personal life I was closest to for about a year. It was all true, and it was also not what was actually stopping me.
What was stopping me was the terrifying loss of something I did not have a name for at the time, and have since come to think of as a bank of earned grace.
Here is what I mean: After nine years in one place - the long nights together on project sites, week-long colocations prepping for an oral presentation to a potential client, seeing someone again on a new project, remembering how we had one another’s back on the last one - I had accumulated a kind of invisible balance. People knew me. They knew my judgment was sound, so when I raised an unpopular opinion in a meeting, the room gave me the benefit of the doubt instead of a raised eyebrow. They knew my track record, so when a status report went red, nobody wondered whether it was because I was not up to the task. I had been there long enough that the inevitable shifts to a new client and project wasn’t a moment’s anxiety because while I didn’t know every person I would be working with, I knew enough to know I would be among friends, before the project’s leads were even named. Every one of those small credits had been earned, one delivery at a time, over the better part of a decade, and none of it was written down anywhere or transferable to anyone.
That balance felt like protection. It was a deeply reassuring layer of grace standing between me and real risk, and walking away from it felt less like “changing jobs” and more like heading off to battle without armor. And, I want to say something here that I did not understand until years later, when I started doing this work with other people. The fear of losing your earned grace is not irrational nor cowardice, and it is definitely not the thing you should be embarrassed about, which is how most of us treat it. It is an accurate read on what it costs to be new – an understanding earned through years of experience with change and its costs. You really will be less credible for a while. You really will have to explain yourself in rooms where you used to just be believed. Your first mistake in the new place really will carry more weight than your hundredth mistake in the old one, because there is no history to absorb it. Anyone telling you to just be brave about that is skipping over something real.
I mention it because for a year I was fighting the wrong argument. I kept trying to rationalize the logistics, building the case that learning a new domain in my forties was manageable - which of course it was - and the argument went nowhere because logistics was never the real cause of my resistance. The resistance belonged to the part of me that was protecting a decade of accumulated safety, and that part of me was not going to be moved by a well-organized argument about transferable skills. It needed to be heard, and then it needed a different kind of answer.
The answer, when I finally found it, was not that the grace did not matter. It was that I had confused two different things, the balance and the ability to earn it. What I had built at that firm was not luck. It was the direct result of how I worked, how I treated people, how I followed through, and every single one of those things was coming with me. The account was staying behind. The earning power was not.
That distinction sounds almost too simple written down, and I will tell you that it was the whole difference between staying and going.
So I went. I had been recruited by a small boutique change firm doing deep and impressive work on small scale change. It was kind of the opposite of what I knew how to do, so I was setting myself up for a real challenge and the potential real reward of new skillset. And, to be clear, the early months were exactly as uncomfortable as I had predicted. Uncomfortable, bewildering in trying to navigate the names and relationships, tiring in the amount of effort I was putting in to just be satisfactory. It was oddly reassuring, because I had predicted them accurately rather than catastrophically.
I was new. I asked questions I would have been embarrassed to ask in my old role. I had no reservoir of goodwill to draw on when something went wrong, and something always goes wrong. One of my first deliverables was poorly received by the client. I recall being terrified at how this would go over, despite standing by the work. My new team and I would collaborate on several iterations to try deliver something the client wanted and it just couldn’t be done. Faster than I expected, the account started refilling. The same behaviors that had built the first balance built the second one. I had been carrying the machinery the whole time, and would continue to throughout the upcoming career pivots I would undertake.
The numbers, since I think it is worth being specific about what the risk actually returned, are that I doubled my salary, I widened my expertise exponentially into territory the old role could never have reached, and I grew as a leader in ways that only happen when nobody is extending you any grace and you have to be great on merit alone. I would not trade that stretch for anything. I will also tell you what the move cost me, because a story with no cost in it is not worth much. The complexity I had wanted was real and I loved it. But somewhere in there I noticed that my long hard hours were no longer supporting work I cared about. The work was a series of genuinely interesting puzzles, and the outcome was somebody's margin. But I had spent a decade being able to point at what my exhaustion had bought for actual people. I missed it more than I expected to, and it turned out to be information rather than nostalgia, because it eventually landed with me accepting a senior role at a historic, mission-driven organization that I was proud to be part of. Once again, whatever effort I was putting in was helping the helpers of this world.
The first move taught me that the safety I was clinging to was portable, which is the lesson everyone expects from a career-change story. The second move taught me something less obvious, which is that a change can be a complete success and still be pointing you at the next thing. The restlessness I felt in year eight was accurate. The discomfort I felt a few years later, doing complex work for clients I wish I could un-choose was also accurate. Both of them were the same boundaries and self-confidence in action, and I have learned to trust my instincts rather than to wait for an intellectually perfect argument.
If you are considering a career change right now, and you have been telling yourself and everyone else what the obstacle is, I would gently suggest that you check. Ask what you are actually protecting. If the honest answer is a bank of earned grace, a decade of people knowing you and giving you room, then you are not being cowardly, you are being honest about something valuable you are considering trading for something else valuable: A NEW START. A change and the unknowable future that brings with it. And perhaps gently remind yourself that while you are protecting the balance you retain the ability to earn it free and clear. Only one of them is at risk, and it is not the one that really matters.
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