Changing careers at forty: what is real risk and what is only fear

“At forty-four I’d be a beginner again. Among twenty-year-olds.”

She said it quietly, almost apologetically, as if admitting something improper. Behind the sentence stood twenty years in accounting, a good salary, a good reputation and the feeling of knowing what she was doing. In front of it was a thought she hadn’t been able to shake off for several years: that she would like to work with her hands, with people, in something that shows a visible result at the end of the day. Every time she said this thought out loud, she immediately added: “But it’s a crazy idea.”

It isn’t crazy. But it is an idea that sets off two very different things at once: risk, which is real and needs to be taken seriously, and fear, which knows how to dress up as risk so that you don’t recognise it. In this post I would like to help you tell them apart. Not to persuade you to change careers — perhaps the right decision for you is precisely to stay — but so that you are the one deciding, and not the part of you that is afraid.

Why the question comes up around forty

In 2008 the economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald showed, using data from a large number of countries, that life satisfaction doesn’t decline evenly across life on average, but traces the shape of a U. The low point comes in middle age — in their data around the mid-forties — after which satisfaction slowly rises again. The effect isn’t large and researchers are still debating it, but it has appeared in surprisingly different settings.

We don’t know exactly why this is. One explanation is that in midlife we come face to face with the gap between what we imagined at twenty and what we have actually become. The psychologist Erik Erikson described this period as a tension between generativity — the wish to leave behind something that matters — and a sense of stagnation. When someone asks “am I going to do this for another twenty years”, they are often really asking “is this what I will leave behind”.

At forty, time also looks different. Retirement is still a long way off — long enough for a whole new career. And yet, for the first time, it is very clear that time isn’t endless. This double awareness is what makes the question of changing careers so urgent — and so frightening.

Risk and fear are not the same

When people describe why they don’t change careers, they throw very different things into the same bag. “I have a mortgage” and “it’s too late” sound equally serious. But the first is a risk and the second is a fear.

Risk can be measured. How many months can you live without a full salary? How much time and money does retraining take? Who depends on your income? Is there enough work in the new field? These questions have answers, and although they aren’t always pleasant, you can look them up, check them and make a plan around them.

Fear can’t be measured, but it can be tested. “It’s too late.” “What will people think?” “All those years will be wasted.” “I’m not that kind of person.” These sentences present themselves as facts, but they are predictions — and often predictions nobody has ever checked. You don’t answer fear with a spreadsheet, but with experience: with a small step that shows whether the prediction comes true.

The trouble is that fear likes to disguise itself as risk, because risk is more socially acceptable. It’s easier to say “I can’t afford it financially” than “I’m afraid I’ll be incompetent in a new field”. So it’s worth asking of every obstacle you name: would it disappear if you had enough money? If not, it wasn’t financial.

Possible selves: who you could become

In 1986 the psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius described a concept I find very useful when it comes to changing careers: possible selves. Each of us carries not only an idea of who we are, but also of who we might become — who we hope to become and who we are afraid of becoming. These possible selves aren’t daydreams. They steer what we notice, where we put our effort and what we avoid.

When you think about changing careers, two possible selves meet. The first is the one you hope for: someone doing work that fulfils them. The second is the one you fear: someone who gave everything up at forty-five and failed. Often the second is more vivid, more detailed and more convincing. You picture the first in a fog; the second you can see down to the last detail — including your mother’s face when you tell her it didn’t work out.

This is no accident. Possible selves are shaped by what we have seen around us. If you have never seen up close anyone who successfully changed careers at forty, your “successful possible self” is simply less clearly drawn. Not because it doesn’t exist, but because you have no pictures for it. There is more about how identity is built and changes over a lifetime in the knowledge base.

Act first, then you’ll know

In her book Working Identity, the organisational behaviour professor Herminia Ibarra followed people who changed careers in midlife. She found something that runs against most career advice. Most advice says: first get to know yourself, work out what you want, then make a plan and carry it out. The people whose change worked out mostly did the opposite. They tried things first — and only from those attempts did they learn what they wanted.

Ibarra described three things these people did, often without realising it:

• Small experiments. Instead of one big decision, they did something small: a weekend course, a project alongside their job, volunteering, a few days with someone who does that work.
• New connections. They met people outside their existing circle. Old colleagues often, with the best of intentions, pull you back into your old identity; new people show you what is possible.
• A new story. Over time they found a way to tell how what they had been was connected to what they were becoming. Not as a break, but as a continuation.

This approach has one big advantage: it reduces risk while testing fear. If at forty-four you spend a weekend in a workshop and find that working with your hands tires you in a different way than you imagined, you have lost nothing. But if you find that in those two days you forgot to look at the clock for the first time in years, you have gained information no spreadsheet could give you.

This isn’t the same as a whole life transition — I wrote about what happens with a move, a new job and a new chapter in New job, new city, new chapter: the psychology of life transitions. This is about something that comes before it: the period when you don’t yet know whether you will make the transition at all.

Twenty years don’t go to waste

One of the most powerful sentences that keeps people in a career that doesn’t fulfil them is: “I’ve put so many years into this.” In 1985 the psychologists Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer described how strongly we are pulled, when deciding, by what we have already invested — money, time, effort — even though no decision can bring it back. This is called the sunk cost fallacy. A theatre ticket you have paid for is no reason to stay at a play you don’t like. Twenty years of study and work are no reason to spend another twenty doing something that drains you.

At the same time, it would be wrong to say those years were “wasted”. When you change careers, you rarely start from nothing. An accountant who becomes a gardener knows how to run a business, read contracts and deal with customers. An engineer who becomes a teacher knows how to explain something complicated step by step. Part of who you were goes with you. The question isn’t whether the years will be lost, but which part of those years you will take forward.

It helps to write it down. Not a list of qualifications and jobs, but a list of things you know how to do and things you like doing, regardless of where you learned them. It often turns out that the distance between the old and the new is smaller than it seems. And if you feel that without your current job title you would be worth nothing, that is a question in its own right — I wrote about it in Worth only as much as you get done: self-image and productivity.

A system that doesn’t agree

Changing careers is never a purely personal decision. It affects your partner, your children, your parents, your friends, even your colleagues. And each of these systems will respond to your change in some way.

At home, a partner who has listened for years to how unhappy you are at work may suddenly become very cautious when you announce a change. That isn’t necessarily opposition. Often it is fear that the balance your shared life rests on will shift: who will earn, who will look after the children, what will happen to the plans for the flat. In a family system, one change moves everything.

The conversation might go something like this (a composite, not a real person):

“You’ve always said your job is killing you. Now that you could change something, you feel like I’m stopping you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I was hoping you’d tell me not to go.”
“Why?”
“Because then I could stay, and it wouldn’t be my fault that I stayed.”

Moments like this are valuable, because they show that the decision had secretly been handed to someone else. Murray Bowen called the ability to stay in contact with the people close to you while thinking with your own head differentiation. When you change careers, it is tested in a very particular way: can you listen to your partner’s and parents’ worries without handing them the decision — and without having to rebel against them just to prove you are deciding for yourself?

Parents, too, often have their opinion, even though you have long been an adult. For a parent, a child’s profession can be part of their own story: “my son is a doctor”, “my daughter is a lawyer”. When you leave that profession, you may be taking from your parents something they considered their own. How the relationship between adult children and their parents changes is the subject of Adult children and parents: can the relationship still be repaired?

And finally, the workplace. You have a role in your team that won’t be easy to fill. Colleagues may tell you “but you’re so good at it”. That is a compliment, but also a message from a system that would like to stay as it is. Being good at something isn’t the same as wanting to do it until you retire. Whether to leave your job at all is the subject of the related post Should I quit my job? Questions that tell you more than a list of pros and cons.

Exercise: three small experiments

If you have been thinking about another career for a long time, set yourself a task for the next three months that isn’t “decide”, but “find out more”.

1. Write down two possible selves. One you hope to become and one you are afraid of becoming. Both as concretely as possible: where are they at eight in the morning, who are they talking to, how do they feel on a Friday evening?
2. Separate risks from fears. Write down every reason it wouldn’t work. For each one ask: can it be measured, or only tested? For the measurable ones, write down where you will find the answer.
3. Find two people who do this work. Ask them for a conversation, not a job. Ask what is hardest about the work that you can’t see from outside, and what their first week was like.
4. Do one experiment that doesn’t require resigning. A weekend, a course, a small project, a few hours of volunteering. Something you can do alongside your current job.
5. After the experiment, note what you noticed in your body, not just in your thoughts. Were you tired or empty? Did the time pass too quickly or too slowly? Your body often tells you before you manage to put it into words.

After three months you won’t necessarily know whether you will change careers. But you will know more than after three years of thinking it over. The wheel of life tool in the knowledge base can also help — to see whether your dissatisfaction really lies in your work or somewhere else.

When fear is wise

So far I have written as if fear were mainly an obstacle. But in fairness, fear is sometimes the wisest voice in the room.

When changing careers is an escape from something else. Dissatisfaction at forty isn’t always dissatisfaction with your profession. It may be burnout that would catch up with you in any job. It may be a crisis in your relationship that is easier to redirect onto work. It may be grief you haven’t finished with. A new career won’t solve that. Before you change everything, it’s worth checking whether the problem really lies where you see it.

When depression is behind the thought. In depression everything seems pointless, and a fantasy of a completely different life can be one of the few things that still brings a little hope. That isn’t bad, but it isn’t the best foundation for a big decision. If you have been feeling empty for weeks, haven’t been sleeping or have no will for anything, turn to your GP first. If you are thinking about not wanting to live any more, in Slovenia you can call the crisis line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samaritans helpline (Samarijan) on 116 123 (24 hours a day).

When the risks really are too great. Sometimes, after all the calculations, you find that a change isn’t possible right now: too many people depend on you, retraining is too expensive, there is too little work in the new field. That isn’t a defeat. It may mean the change won’t happen now, or that it will look different from how you imagined — partial, gradual, on the side. And it may mean it’s worth asking what of the thing drawing you to a new career you could bring into your present life.

When the questions are legal or financial. I can’t advise you on ending employment, self-employment or your rights during retraining. For that, turn to a lawyer, a trade union, the Employment Service of Slovenia (Zavod RS za zaposlovanje) or a financial adviser before you sign anything.

How therapy can help

Therapy isn’t careers advice. I won’t tell you which profession suits you, nor will I help you put together a CV. But together we can look at everything that speaks up when you think about change: whose voice is saying “it’s too late”, why it matters so much to you what others will think, and how much of your wish is a longing for a new career and how much a longing for something else.

It often turns out that the question “what will I do” hides the question “who am I if I’m no longer what I’ve been for twenty years”. A question like that deserves space. As a therapist in training under supervision in marriage and family therapy, I work in person in Ljubljana — with individuals and with couples, when a decision concerns both partners — and I also work with English-speaking clients. If you would like to look at how the people in your family made decisions about work and risk, you can choose a longer session with a genogram, A Look into the Past.

If, alongside your career, you are also troubled by the question of whether your work has any meaning at all, you may find Work without meaning: what psychology knows about why we need it helpful.

What to remember

• On average, life satisfaction reaches its lowest point in midlife — asking about a career change at forty is common, not strange.
• Risk can be measured; fear can be tested. Don’t answer fear with a spreadsheet, or risk with courage alone.
• According to Herminia Ibarra, people rarely know first and act afterwards — mostly they try first and only then know.
• The years you have invested are no reason to stay, but they aren’t lost either: part of what you know goes with you.
• When burnout, a relationship crisis or depression lies behind the wish to change, take care of those first — a new career won’t solve them.