This month I started my sixth job in five years.
Even writing that feels slightly ridiculous.
If you’d told me ten years ago that this would happen, I wouldn’t have believed you.
Not because six jobs is inherently good or bad.
Because it wasn’t the plan.
I Thought I Knew How Careers Worked
For most of my working life, I assumed my career would follow a fairly predictable route.
Not perfectly predictable.
Just broadly stable:
I don’t think that was an unusual assumption.
For a long time it felt like a reasonable one.
The people around me seemed to be following similar paths. Organisations changed from time to time, but the underlying idea remained largely intact. Careers might zigzag occasionally, but there was still a sense of direction.
Or at least there appeared to be.
Then Things Started Moving
Only one of those six jobs was a role I actively applied for.
The rest arrived through restructures, organisational changes and shifting responsibilities.
None of them felt particularly dramatic at the time: A new reporting line. A different team. A role that looked slightly different to the one before it. Then another adjustment. And another.
Looking back, what strikes me isn’t how much changed. It’s how quickly I started treating change as temporary.
I kept assuming things would settle down again soon. That this was just a busy period. A strange phase. An interruption to the version of working life I expected to return eventually.
I suspect many people have had a version of that experience over the last few years.
Maybe not through work.
Maybe through family circumstances, health concerns, financial pressures or relationships.
The details are different.
The feeling is often remarkably similar.
Life starts behaving differently to how we expected, but we continue assuming normal service will resume shortly.
The Version Of Life We Expect
The older I get, the more I realise how many assumptions quietly sit underneath our plans.
Not grand ambitions.
Just small expectations about how life is supposed to work:
I don’t remember consciously deciding any of those things.
Yet somewhere along the way they became part of the picture I carried around in my head.
The challenge wasn’t that reality looked different.
The challenge was noticing how much I was comparing reality to a version of life that only existed in my expectations.
The Trouble With Waiting For Things To Settle
For a long time, I assumed decisions would become easier once life felt a bit more settled.
I wasn’t waiting for perfection.
I just thought there would eventually be a point where things made more sense than they did today. A point where the noise died down. Where I could finally look ahead instead of responding to whatever had landed in front of me that week.
The problem wasn’t that life became difficult.
It was that every time one uncertainty disappeared, something else seemed to take its place.
Not necessarily something bigger. Just something different.
After a while, I started to wonder whether I’d accidentally turned stability into a condition for moving forward.
As though real decisions should wait until life felt easier to predict.
The difficulty with that approach is that life doesn’t stop while we’re waiting for it to become more manageable.
It keeps unfolding anyway.
Maybe That’s Why We’re Still Searching
Looking back, I don’t think the biggest surprise is that I’ve had six jobs in five years.
The bigger surprise is how often I expected clarity to arrive before I needed to make decisions.
As though there would eventually be a point where the route ahead became obvious.
A point where the unanswered questions finally disappeared.
What I’m less convinced about now is whether that’s how life works for most people.
Many of the decisions that shaped my life weren’t made after certainty arrived.
They were made while I was still figuring things out.
What This Has Made Me Question
Perhaps the answer isn’t waiting for life to become predictable again.
Perhaps the answer isn’t finding a future where uncertainty disappears.
Perhaps the answer is becoming a little less dependent on certainty before we’re willing to move.
I’m still not sure life follows the neat plans we create for it.
My recent career certainly hasn’t.
But maybe that’s not evidence that something has gone wrong.
Maybe it’s evidence that life is rarely as tidy as we imagine.
Your Next Step
If you’ve been waiting for things to settle before deciding what comes next, it may be worth asking whether you’re waiting for certainty or whether you’re waiting for permission.
From Thinking to Doing isn’t designed to tell you what your next step should be.
It’s designed to help you choose something to begin, take that first step, and work with what happens once you do.
If You Take One Thing From This
Life rarely follows the neat path we imagine.
The question is whether we’re prepared to keep living it before everything makes sense.
What’s Coming Next?
Later this week we’ll explore a different kind of waiting. The kind that quietly believes something or someone is going to arrive and change the situation for us. More confidence. Better timing. A breakthrough. A fairy tale ending that finally makes everything fall into place. Because sometimes the thing we’re waiting for isn’t certainty at all. It’s a rescue.
People Also Ask
Is it normal to change jobs multiple times in a few years?
Increasingly, yes. Organisational change, restructures, shifting priorities and personal circumstances mean many careers are less linear than they once appeared.
Why do I keep waiting for things to settle down?
Because it feels sensible. Many people assume decisions will become easier once uncertainty disappears. The challenge is that uncertainty often changes shape rather than disappearing entirely.
How do I make decisions when life feels uncertain?
Not by eliminating uncertainty completely, but by deciding what matters most with the information available today.
What if my life isn’t going according to plan?
You’re unlikely to be alone. Many people discover that meaningful parts of life emerge through adaptation rather than careful planning.
References
Stephens, G et al. (2023) Identifying Validity Evidence for Uncertainty Tolerance Scales: A Systematic Review. Medical Education.
Yap, A, Johanesen, P and Walsh, C (2023) Moderators of Uncertainty Tolerance in Healthcare: A Systematic Review. Advances in Health Sciences Education.
Eriksson, P and Frisén, A (2023) Facing Challenging Experiences in Life: Narrative Identity Development and Wellbeing During the Transition to Midlife. Journal of Adult Development.
