Before You Update Your Résumé
Over the past few months, I’ve had some version of the same conversation with women at very different stages of their careers.
One believes deeply in the mission of the organization where she works, but the actual work no longer fits. Another is further along in her career, with years of responsibility, credibility, and life infrastructure built around the work she does. She’s questioning whether she can continue in an environment where what gets said and what gets rewarded and promoted no longer seem to match.
Several others have been laid off and, interestingly, aren’t rushing to polish the résumé, call every headhunter they know, and get back into the market as fast as possible.
Different circumstances, different ages, different levels of responsibility. But underneath them is a remarkably similar question:
What do I want to give my life force to now?
That question is bigger than a job search.
When work stops fitting, we tend to reach for the tools we already know. We update our résumé, refresh LinkedIn, call the recruiters back, start scanning openings, and see what’s out there.
All perfectly reasonable things to do.
But sometimes they come too early, because those actions are designed to answer one question:
What could I do next?
And that may not be the question yet.
The career question may not be the real question
I understand why this keeps coming up. I’ve had to ask it myself.
One of the reasons women have been reaching out to me lately is that they know I made a significant career change of my own. From the outside, that decision looked like a professional move. From the inside, it was much larger than that.
I wasn’t only asking what I was capable of doing next. I was asking what still deserved my life force. What kind of work did I want to wake up and give my energy to? What kind of life did I want the work to make possible? What was I willing to keep carrying? What was I no longer willing to organize my life around simply because I had become good at it?
Those are different questions from, “What role am I qualified for?”
A recruiter can help you understand your marketability. A résumé can tell the story of what you’ve done. LinkedIn can show you who’s hiring.
None of those things can tell you what you want your life to be built around now.
Before you decide where you want to work next, you may need to decide what deserves your life force.
Success creates infrastructure
This gets more complicated the further you get into a successful career, because success rarely arrives by itself.
It creates infrastructure: income, identity, expectations, financial commitments, a certain level of predictability, and relationships and routines that have quietly formed around the life you’ve built.
There is often quite a lot worth protecting.
Which is why I resist the easy interpretation that someone stays in a role because they’re afraid to make a change. Sometimes, perhaps. But sometimes the pause is evidence that they understand exactly what the change could cost.
You can be deeply dissatisfied with part of your life and still have very good reasons for not blowing the whole thing up on a Tuesday. You can believe in an organization’s mission and realize the work itself no longer fits you. You can be exceptionally good at work you no longer want your life to require. You can have built something you are proud of and still wonder whether you want to spend the next ten years maintaining it.
Those aren’t failures of courage. They are questions worth taking seriously.
Sometimes the interruption is chosen. Sometimes it isn’t.
For some women, the questioning begins because they are thinking about leaving. For others, the decision gets made for them.
A layoff creates its own kind of silence. The calendar clears, the title disappears, and the urgency to respond can be enormous. There’s a strong cultural script for what comes next: get moving, update everything, reach out to your network, start interviewing, do not lose momentum.
And sometimes that is exactly right.
But I’ve also watched women resist that reflex, not because they are unmotivated, but because they understand that an interruption can be useful if you do not rush to fill it.
A layoff can be painful and destabilizing and still create a rare moment in which the old assumptions are no longer running the show. For the first time in years, there may be enough space to ask: What do I actually want now?
That question deserves more than a long weekend and a refreshed LinkedIn headline.
Something is shifting
These conversations are not happening in a vacuum.
In July 2026, women accounted for the entire monthly decline in U.S. labor-force participation, according to the National Women’s Law Center’s analysis of federal employment data. August brought a significant rebound, but the broader pattern remains worth watching.
Research on senior leadership is also showing strain. One recent study found female top executives leaving their employers at rates roughly 15–20% higher than comparable male executives across most top-management positions.
Those numbers matter, but they do not tell us why any particular woman leaves. They cannot tell us whether the issue was caregiving, culture, exhaustion, ambition, health, values, money, a bad boss, a good opportunity, or simply the realization that a life which once fit no longer does.
What the numbers do tell us is that something is happening. What the conversations tell me is that many women are no longer asking only, “What can I achieve next?”
They are asking, “What is worth the cost?”
That is a more consequential question.
You may be solving the wrong problem
One of the hazards of being accomplished is that you’re usually very good at creating options.
Give a capable executive a career problem and she can get to work. She can rewrite the résumé, call three people, research companies, and build a spreadsheet. Naturally.
Within a few weeks, there may be possibilities on the table, and sometimes one of those possibilities really is the answer.
But a new role can also relieve the immediate pressure without resolving the thing that created it, because career transition and life transition are not always the same problem.
If what you have outgrown is a boss, a role, an industry, or an organization, another job may be exactly what you need.
But sometimes the dissatisfaction is larger. Maybe the life you built at 35 is not quite the life you want at 53. Maybe what once felt like ambition now feels like maintenance. Maybe the title still fits, but the price of carrying it does not. Maybe the work is still impressive and the life around it is no longer one you want to keep financing with your energy.
Maybe you have spent years being the reliable one, the responsible one, the one who can handle it. And now the question is not whether you can keep doing it.
The question is whether you want to.
You can outgrow something that was never a mistake
I think this is one of the hardest parts.
We are often better at leaving things that have clearly failed. A terrible job gives you a clean story. A toxic environment gives you permission. A layoff decides for you.
But what happens when the thing you’re questioning has also been good?
When you are proud of the career, when the compensation is strong, when you’ve learned a great deal, when people respect you, and when some part of you is enormously grateful for everything this season made possible?
You can appreciate what something gave you without promising it the rest of your life.
You can outgrow something that was never a mistake. And you don’t have to make the old chapter bad to give yourself permission to imagine a new one.
That is true of careers. It is also true of lives.
Before you start making moves
I am not suggesting that you wait for perfect certainty before applying for another role. Perfect certainty is a fictional character.
Sometimes you learn what you want by moving, talking, exploring, meeting people, and seeing what is possible. But there’s a difference between exploration and escape, and before you automatically begin solving for the next position, it may be worth noticing which one you are doing.
Because the next job matters. But the deeper decision may be about something else entirely.
Decide what success means next.
Before the roles, expectations, and accomplishments make that decision for you, create the space to define a life that works as well as it looks.
Cassandra Shepard is the founder of Shepherd + CO, a boutique strategic advisory firm. She works with senior leaders navigating the intersection of enterprise strategy and advanced leadership. www.cassandrashepard.com