Breaking Up with Your Job: How to Navigate Career Changes and Find the Right Fit

Tessa West shares 5 key insights from Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You

Are you in love with your job? Just like relationships, even the best jobs can get stale over time -- you drift apart, or feel unappreciated. Maybe what you need is a little job therapy, and that’ s just what you’ll get from

Tessa West

in the new book Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You. Tessa is a Professor of Psychology at New York University, and she writes

Tessa West @Work

on Substack. Author

Charles Duhigg

says her book is “a  career lifeline for those looking to find or reignite the passion that fuels their professional lives.”  Here’s Tessa to share 5 of her big ideas.

1. Transitioning out of a career is a lot like falling out of love.

When most of us think about making a career change, our first step is working through the structural changes we would face, like moving to a big city, changing to a hybrid work schedule, or taking a pay cut. We try our best to rationally navigate through the decision, focusing on big-picture issues. These decisions are important, especially as we get close to sealing the deal with a new job. But this perspective misses the messy, often emotional experience of breaking up with a career.

I’ve been teaching a class on close relationships at NYU for 15 years, and I’ve been studying the form and function of relationship break-ups for decades. I’ve been struck by how similar people’s experiences are between falling out of love with a person and falling out of love with their career. By missing this connection, we often go about leaving a career in the wrong way.