So, What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up? Finding Career Clarity When You’ve Lost the Plot

DRIVEN WOMEN & PERFECTIONISM • May 17, 2015

The Sunday Night Dread

It arrives, reliably, sometime between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Sunday. The dread. Not dramatic, not incapacitating — just a persistent, low-grade heaviness that settles in as the weekend closes and tomorrow comes into view. You have a good job. You make good money. You’ve worked hard for both. And you cannot explain, not fully, why the thought of Monday morning produces this particular feeling in your chest.

In my work with driven women, I hear variations of this almost every week. “I know I should be grateful.” “It’s a good job, it pays well, I can’t complain.” “I don’t know what I’d even want instead.” That last sentence — I don’t know what I’d even want instead — is often the most clinically significant one. Because when a person has been disconnecting from their own desires for long enough, they genuinely can’t access them. The question “what do you want?” returns a blank, not because there’s nothing there, but because the channel was turned off so long ago that it no longer registers.

The question “so what do you want to be when you grow up?” doesn’t get easier with age. For many driven women in their thirties and forties, it actually gets harder — because by then, there are real stakes attached to answering honestly. A career to reconsider. An identity to revise. The relationship between perfectionism and career identity is one of the most underexplored dimensions of this question. This guide is for the woman who has been succeeding for years and has started to wonder: at what, exactly, and for whom.

Career Identity and the Woman Who Has Everything

There’s something I really want you to hear:

Careers aren’t formulaic anymore, and a job that may be absolutely perfect for you might not even exist yet. And, when it comes to quality and fulfillment versus instant gratification in our career paths, we’ve basically all got the choice between a homemade quilt career or a Pottery Barn duvet career.

A Pottery Barn duvet is pre-made and you know when you walk into any Pottery Barn store you can grab one off the shelf, the quality will be good, and you’ll likely be warm and comfy when you take it home that night. A handmade quilt on the other hand, may take years to craft, may be riddled with imperfections and missed stitches, and yet, when it’s complete, it’s a deep expression of your truest self and a real creative original.

I think career paths are a lot like this, too.

And, not that there is anything at all wrong with a Pottery Barn-duvet-career-path, if what you’re longing for is a career path that’s going to be a true extension of yourself, it may take more time and effort to craft this kind of path than the paths of your peers who chose something different.

And sometimes, quite frankly, your choice to go after a handmade quilt path might feel lonely, frustrating, and overwhelming (it sure has been for me at times!). The trade-off though, is when you put the time into deeply reflecting on what it is you want to craft of your life’s work, and then the effort into creating this, the pay-off is that you end up with a career that’s a lot like a gorgeous, heirloom quilt. The message here? Quality and fulfillment in a career path take time and there’s not a formula when it comes to figuring out what you want to be when you grow up.

Confession: Through most of my twenties I had a mild obsession with personality and career tests. You name it, I probably tried it in my quest to find The Perfect Career Path. I liked to believe that if I took enough tests The Answer would appear and I would suddenly know what I should be. But you know what? While many of those tests were helpful in some small way, they only measured my aptitudes. They didn’t account for four factors I now know are absolutely critical in designing a fulfilling career path:

What the three tools above have in common is that they’re all oriented toward somatic resonance rather than cognitive analysis. You don’t think your way into knowing what you want. You feel your way there. And for women who’ve been managing their internal experience by suppressing or overriding it for years, learning to trust those somatic signals is its own developmental task — one that requires patience, practice, and often professional support.

The Neurobiology of Career Confusion

Career confusion — the experience of knowing that something about your work life isn’t working but not being able to articulate what you want instead — is not a cognitive problem. It’s not a failure of research or self-reflection or sufficient brainstorming. (PMID: 35645742) It’s often a trauma response.

When a person’s early environment required them to subordinate their authentic preferences to the needs of the family system — the parent who needed you to have a stable career, the cultural context that defined success narrowly, the household where expressing your own desires felt unsafe or selfish — the nervous system learns to disconnect from internal signals. You stop trusting what you want. You learn to want what’s acceptable rather than what’s genuine. By adulthood, this disconnection is so complete that when someone asks “so what do you want?” the honest answer is often a genuine blank.

Bessel van der Kolk, MD, psychiatrist and trauma researcher, author of The Body Keeps the Score, documents how trauma disrupts the internal compass that tells us what we need and want. (PMID: 9384857) The prefrontal cortex — responsible for planning, self-reflection, and the ability to project yourself into a future you’re genuinely motivated by — is the first casualty of chronic stress. When the nervous system is chronically activated, the capacity for genuine self-knowledge is impaired. You can know a great deal about career development frameworks and still not know what you actually want — because the machinery for genuine self-knowing has been partially offline for years.

This is why the career question doesn’t yield to more information or more analysis. More research about career options doesn’t help if you can’t trust your own responses to what you find. What helps is slowly, carefully, rebuilding the connection to your internal signals — the body’s sense of resonance or repulsion, the felt sense of aliveness or deadness in different contexts. Somatic approaches and trauma-informed therapy can help you rebuild this connection when cognitive approaches alone have stalled.

How This Shows Up in Driven Women

Career confusion in driven women has particular textures that deserve to be named.

There’s the woman who is genuinely excellent at her job and genuinely miserable doing it. She has awards. She has compensation that objectively should feel like success. She cannot understand why Sunday evenings make her want to cry. She’s been told, by herself and others, to be grateful. She is grateful. And she is also quietly, chronically, in the wrong place.

Tasha is a forty-three-year-old corporate attorney. She is, by any metric, successful. She is also, at the start of our work together, almost completely disconnected from any sense of what she actually wants. She came from a family where “what do you want?” was not a question that got asked — or if asked, wasn’t safe to answer truthfully. She became an attorney because it was prestigious, because it was expected, because it was clear. She has spent twenty years being very good at something she doesn’t love. She told me, “I don’t even know if I have preferences anymore. I know I can do things. I don’t know if I want anything.” That disconnection — between capacity and desire — is one of the clearest presentations of this pattern I know.

Other patterns I see: the woman who changes careers repeatedly, not because she’s finding her way but because she’s running from the same discomfort into a new container. The woman who has a clear sense of what she wants but is convinced she’s not allowed to have it — too risky, too impractical, too much a departure from the path she’s been on. The woman who frames everything in terms of what she’s good at rather than what she wants, because what she wants has never felt like a legitimate factor. Perfectionism and career confusion are often closely related: both involve the suppression of authentic desire in favor of external performance metrics. Executive coaching can be a powerful support for the practical navigation, while therapy addresses the deeper roots.

Narrative Identity and the Stories We Outgrow

Narrative identity — the story you tell about your life and where your career fits within it — is one of the most powerful forces shaping what you believe you’re allowed to want. If the story you’ve been living is “I am someone who succeeds at difficult things regardless of whether I love them,” then wanting work that actually feels meaningful can seem like an indulgence, even a weakness. It disrupts the story. It implies that the previous chapters might have been costly in a way you hadn’t named.

What I find in this work is that the career question often isn’t really about careers. It’s about identity: who you’ve understood yourself to be, what you’ve believed yourself to deserve, and what version of yourself you’re willing to step into. These questions don’t yield to logic alone. They require the willingness to sit with uncertainty, to trust signals that may feel unfamiliar, and often to grieve the time spent in a story that fit someone else better than it fit you.

The three tools I use most consistently in this work: (1) somatic resonance tracking — noticing your body’s response to different possibilities before analyzing them cognitively; (2) narrative revision — questioning the story of what you’re “supposed” to want and whether it actually originated in you; and (3) the permission project — identifying what you’d want if you were allowed to want it, with no constraints. These aren’t exercises to do once. They’re practices that, repeated over time, gradually rebuild the connection to your own internal compass. Take our quiz to understand the relational patterns that might be shaping your sense of what you’re allowed to want in your career and life.

Both/And: You Can Love Your Work and Still Be Burned Out

When driven women experience burnout, they often feel disqualified from naming it. They chose this career. They fought for these opportunities. They’re paid well, respected, and doing meaningful work. How can they be burned out when they have what so many people want? This logic is airtight — and completely irrelevant to what their nervous system is telling them.

Tasha is a partner at a consulting firm who told me she wakes up at 4 a.m. with her heart racing and doesn’t know why. She loves strategy, loves her clients, loves the intellectual challenge. What she doesn’t love — what she can barely articulate — is the cost: the missed bedtimes, the body that holds tension like a fist, the creeping suspicion that she’s become a function rather than a person. “I should be grateful,” she said. I told her gratitude and exhaustion aren’t mutually exclusive.

Both/And means Tasha can be genuinely passionate about her career and genuinely depleted by it. She can appreciate her privilege and still acknowledge that the pace is unsustainable. She can want to stay and need things to change. Burnout in driven women isn’t a failure of gratitude. It’s the predictable consequence of a nervous system that was wired for vigilance being asked to sustain peak performance indefinitely without rest.

The Both/And frame is also essential when it comes to the question of staying or leaving. Many driven women carry an internal binary: either I love this work and stay, or I hate it and leave. But the truth is almost always more nuanced. You can be invested in your field and exhausted by this particular organization. You can be proud of what you’ve built and know it’s time to build something different. You can deeply value your professional identity and need to let the current version of it evolve. The Either/Or frame forecloses on the complexity. The Both/And frame opens space for it.

What does Both/And look like in practice? It can look like Morgan, a 41-year-old physician who spent three years telling herself she had to either love medicine completely or leave it entirely. When she finally gave herself permission to hold both truths at once — that she found deep meaning in caring for patients and that her current practice model was slowly eroding her health — she was able to see a third path she hadn’t known to look for: a different practice setting, fewer hours, a professional structure that honored both her calling and her limits. The Both/And didn’t solve everything. But it got her out of the binary that had kept her frozen. If you recognize yourself in this, executive coaching designed specifically for women at career crossroads can be a powerful space to do exactly this kind of work.

The Systemic Lens: Why Your Burnout Is a System Failure, Not a Personal One

When a driven woman burns out, the cultural response is almost universally individual: take a vacation, set better boundaries, practice mindfulness, learn to delegate. These suggestions aren’t wrong — but they’re woefully insufficient, because they locate the problem inside the woman rather than inside the system that burned her out. Self-care cannot compensate for structural exploitation, no matter how consistently you practice it.

The data is clear: women in professional environments face systemic conditions that make burnout not just likely but almost inevitable. The gender pay gap means women work harder for less. The “prove it again” bias documented by Joan C. Williams, JD, professor and workplace researcher, means women’s competence is constantly questioned in ways men’s isn’t. The motherhood penalty is well-documented. And the “office housework” — organizing, mentoring, emotional labor — disproportionately falls to women while being systematically undervalued in performance reviews.

In my clinical work, I find it essential to name these forces. When a driven woman tells me she’s burned out, I don’t just ask about her sleep hygiene and coping skills. I ask about her workload, her workplace culture, the expectations placed on her versus her male colleagues, and the structural supports — or lack thereof — she’s working within. Because treating burnout as a personal wellness problem when it’s actually a systemic justice problem isn’t just clinically incomplete. It’s gaslighting by another name.

If what you’ve read here resonates, I want you to know that individual therapy and executive coaching are available for driven women ready to do this work. You can also explore my self-paced recovery courses or schedule a complimentary consultation to find the right fit.

The systemic context doesn’t excuse us from personal responsibility for our career choices — but it does contextualizes them. When you’re making career decisions within a system that has been systematically limiting your choices, “what do you want?” is not a simple question. The answer requires both honest personal inquiry and a clear-eyed understanding of the structural forces that have shaped your sense of what’s possible.

The cultural water that ambitious women swim in deserves naming explicitly. Joan C. Williams, JD, distinguished professor at UC Hastings College of Law, has documented extensively how women in high-status professions face what she calls the “double bind” — judged harshly when they’re warm (read as not competent enough) and judged harshly when they’re competent (read as not warm enough). Add a relational trauma history to that bind, and the inner monitoring becomes nearly continuous. Healing has to include a clear-eyed look at how much of the exhaustion isn’t yours alone — it’s a load you’ve been carrying for systems that were never designed to hold you.

Steps Toward Clarity: How to Start Answering the Career Question That Actually Matters

In my work with driven women at career crossroads, I’ve noticed that the question “what do I want to be?” often arrives loaded with layers of expectation — from family, from a culture that ties identity to professional achievement, from earlier versions of themselves who made decisions in a different context with different information. It’s rarely a clean, forward-looking question. It’s almost always a question about permission: Am I allowed to want something different? Am I allowed to not know? Am I allowed to start over, or pivot, or choose the thing that actually lights me up rather than the thing that looks most impressive on paper?

The first and most important move I recommend is slowing down enough to hear yourself. This sounds simple. It isn’t. If you’ve been running hard — performing well, meeting expectations, checking the next box — the habit of outpacing your own interior experience can become so ingrained that genuine quiet feels threatening rather than spacious. Creating conditions to actually hear what you want requires intention, and often, support. This isn’t something most of us can do well entirely on our own.

One framework I find genuinely useful for career discernment work is Internal Family Systems (IFS). Our career choices are rarely made by a unified, rational self — they’re made by parts of us with different histories, different fears, different loyalties. There’s often a part that wants safety and security, a part that craves meaning and aliveness, a part that’s still trying to win approval from a parent or outrun a childhood story. When these parts are in conflict, decision-making feels impossible or exhausting. IFS helps you bring those parts into dialogue so that what emerges isn’t the loudest or most frightened part’s agenda, but something closer to genuine, integrated desire.

Somatic information also matters more than most of us have been taught. Your body responds to the prospect of different futures before your mind has time to construct a rationale. What happens in your chest when you imagine yourself doing the work you’ve been doing for another ten years? What happens when you imagine the pivot you’ve been too scared to name? These signals are data, not noise. Somatic Experiencing (SE) or body-centered therapeutic approaches can help you become more fluent in that data, and more willing to trust it rather than override it with logic.

For career questions that live at the intersection of identity, purpose, and practical strategy, I also recommend combining therapeutic work with structured executive coaching. Therapy creates space to understand what you actually want and why you’ve been afraid to claim it. Coaching helps you think concretely about pathways, constraints, and what a realistic next step could look like. The two together are more effective than either alone for women navigating significant career transitions.

It’s worth giving yourself explicit permission to not have the answer yet. Career clarity is an outcome of a process, not a precondition for beginning one. What I see consistently in my practice is that the women who are most stuck in career confusion are often the ones who are most perfectionistic about getting the answer “right” before they move — and what they actually need is to begin moving, imperfectly, and see what they learn.

If you’re sitting with a career question that feels too big to hold on your own, you don’t have to. Working with a therapist who understands the specific complexity of ambitious women at career crossroads can be the thing that takes you from stuck to genuinely in motion. That kind of support is available to you, and you deserve it.

The question of what you want to be is lifelong. It evolves. It gets revised by experience, by loss, by what you discover you can’t sustain and what you discover you can’t live without. The goal isn’t to land on a final answer. It’s to stay in honest relationship with the question — and to trust that the answer, even if it changes, is yours to find. Reach out to schedule a consultation. Take our quiz. Join our newsletter. Whatever the next step is, you deserve to take it toward something you actually want.

What I see consistently in my work with driven, ambitious women is that the body holds the truth long before the mind catches up. By the time a client lands in my office describing what isn’t working, her nervous system has been signaling for months — sometimes years. The tightness in her jaw at 3 a.m., the way her shoulders climb toward her ears during certain conversations, the unexplained fatigue that no amount of sleep seems to touch. These aren’t separate problems. They’re a single integrated story the body is telling about an emotional terrain the conscious mind hasn’t been able to face yet.

One of the most important things I tell clients in early sessions is this: the patterns we’re going to look at together aren’t character flaws. They’re the residue of strategies that once kept you safe. The over-functioning, the difficulty resting, the way you find yourself absorbing other people’s moods before you’ve registered your own — every one of these adaptations made sense in the original environment that shaped them. The work isn’t to shame the strategy. It’s to update the system that keeps generating it.

Medical Disclaimer

Medical Disclaimer