55: The hidden blockers keeping you stuck

Do you want to make a career change, but you feel stuck? Do you keep procrastinating, thinking you’ll get started next week, month, or year? 

Here to get you going is executive coach and leadership consultant Ellen Whitlock Baker. As the founder and CEO of EWB Coaching, Ellen helps midlife professionals reclaim who they are and what they want to do next in their careers.

In this episode, Ellen shares why it’s so hard to get started even when you know it’s time for a change. She reveals how you can identify those conscious and unconscious blockers that are keeping you from switching to a new career and the tiny, low-risk steps you can take to start anyway—even if you’re scared, unsure, or don’t have a plan yet.

Episode Highlights:

• Why it's hard to get started with a career change

• Your biological wiring that resists change

• Perfectionism and other common blockers that keep you stuck

• How your upbringing and past work experiences influence your thinking

• Taking action even when you don't feel ready

• Small "experiments" to investigate new career paths

• Reframing failure as learning

• Using AI to generate insights for possible next steps

Find Ellen Whitlock Baker at:

Website: https://ewbcoaching.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellenwhitlockbaker/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ellenwbcoaching

Podcast: The Hard at Work Podcast

Start Anyway Workshop on 9/18/25: https://ewbcoaching.com/startanyway

Discount code for 15% off: SWITCH25

Resources Mentioned: 

Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career by Herminia Ibarra

Want more advice? Check out these additional episodes:

Ep 34: 3 signs it’s time for a career change

Ep 19: Here’s why you’re procrastinating about your career change

Ep 7: Lost with what career change to make?

Music credit: TimMoor from Pixabay

Podcast info:
What's your career switch? What do you think about this episode and the show? Tell us at careerswitchpod.com. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Transcript

Lixandra: Hi, everyone. I'm Lixandra Urresta, and this is Career Switch Podcast. This show is here to encourage you to take action with whatever career change you're considering or working on. Maybe you're trying to switch industries or professions or break out on your own and start a business. In some episodes, I talk to people who've made their own career switch, whether by choice or circumstance. They share the good, the bad, and the truth about their journey, including what worked for them and what didn't. In other episodes, I speak with experts who offer their best career advice on challenges that can come up during the process of making a career change. After all, it takes guts to switch things up, and it's not easy. However, it is possible. So I hope you hear something in this episode, an idea, a suggestion, a piece of advice that'll spur you into action with your own career switch, whether it's taking that first bold step or trying something new. Welcome. I'm glad you're here. 

Do you want to make a career switch but you feel stuck? Do you keep procrastinating thinking you'll get started next week, next month, next year? Here to get you going is executive coach and leadership consultant Ellen Whitlock-Baker. As the founder and CEO of EWB Coaching, Ellen helps midlife professionals reclaim who they are and what they want to do next in their careers. In this episode, Ellen shares why it's so hard to get started, even when you know it's time for a change. She reveals how you can identify those conscious and unconscious blockers that are keeping you from switching to a new career, and the tiny, low-risk steps you can take to start anyway, even if you're scared, unsure, or don't have a plan yet. 

Hi, Ellen. Thanks for joining us today. Let's dive in. Who are your clients, and how do you help them?

Ellen: So I work with anybody and everybody. I certainly have clients from every walk of life, but the majority of my clients tend to be midlife women who are professionals. As one of those people myself, I have a special affinity for the challenges that really are facing those of us, you know, between 40 and 60 who are trying to juggle this professional career, usually high stakes, plus taking care of a family potentially, or a family member. A lot of us are in that sandwich zone where we've got elderly parents that we're taking care of. And, you know, we generally know that women are less likely to do what is best for themselves and more likely to do what is best for others. And we've lived in this society for so long that's telling us be quiet, be small, help others, be friendly, smile, you know, all of those things that you sort of inherently learn growing up. And so, yeah, those are the majority of my clients. And a lot of them, what we're working through is not knowing what they even want. And I'm definitely, I was there too. And it was, I worked with a coach to help me and it was incredible. And that's why I want to help others do that. You know, you can feel really unhappy, but not know what you actually want. And that's the product of often society telling us you don't get to have a want, you know, right now you're here to take care of others. So it's this whole reclaiming of who you are, what you want, and then also, in the sense of careers, what would you want to do next? So a lot of the people I work with have been doing a career in a similar field for 10, 15, 20 years, and they realize they're unhappy, but they have no idea what would come next because they've been in this one field for most of their life. And so we really work through like what's stopping you from making change. You know, how can you test things to try new things slowly and you know, how do you get to the place where you can actually find out what makes you happy and do it. And it's a, unfortunately a complicated process for many of us. So that's majority of who I work with. That's what I love to do.

Lixandra: Yeah, that's why I thought you'd be a great expert for this topic. And just to clarify, you work mostly with women, but what we're going to cover today would apply to both men and women.

Ellen: 100%. I love working with anyone and everyone. Like I said, I have male clients as well, and anyone's welcome. But what I teach applies very directly to women for the most part.

Lixandra: Yeah, so let's dive into why it is so hard for us to get started. Like you said, you know, even though we may decide that it's time for a change, maybe you've lost a job through layoff, or you've just gotten to that point where you're miserable with whatever you're doing, or you feel a stirring, like just a calling to do something else. But you know, we just sit on it. Like we procrastinate, which I can relate to. So why is it so hard for us to even get started?

Ellen: your brain is trying to protect you. And so what I love about this whole process is that it's actually based in neuroscience, which just as a caveat, I took like chemistry in our community and conceptual physics in high school, so I'm not a scientist, but I do love how the challenges that we have with making changes, it's really based on our brain trying to keep us safe. And so what I love to talk about is that your brain doesn't care if you're happy, it cares if you're safe. And anything that's different from your norm is unsafe because it's different and it involves things that your brain doesn't quite know how to handle yet. And there's all of these what-ifs and some of them are conscious, some of them are subconscious, but basically your brain's doing everything it can to stop you from making the change because it's trying to keep you safe. It's not a malicious thing at all, but it's really helpful once you understand that, and then you can start to work through recognizing and naming what's stopping you. And then starting to work through, okay, what am I actually afraid of will happen? Because sometimes once you name that, it's kind of ridiculous what you're afraid of. It's like, well, I'm afraid everyone will hate me if I do this one thing. And of course that's not true. So you have to kind of rate how likely that is to happen as well. And then you get into a place where you can do little experiments. You know, so if you're like, okay, I wanna try writing a blog, for example, and you've never done that before. And I don't wanna do it because I'm afraid I'll write something that will make me sound silly and people will make fun of me. I know that that's probably not totally likely, but it could happen. So what is something I could do to try it? Maybe I write a couple of blog posts and I send it to people that I trust to read and say, hey, what do you think of this? Maybe I try doing some LinkedIn posts and see how people respond to that. If you think about it all in the context of science, which I like to do now, it's like, okay, think of yourself as the person in the lab with the little beakers. What are the little tests that you're gonna do to see if your brain is right in keeping you safe? Or if you can teach your brain that, no, no, it's okay. You can build these new neural pathways and try something new. You're gonna be fine. And so that's what I like to teach in my Start Anyway workshop and definitely what I work on with my clients. But we go through that whole process. That's really why it's hard.

Lixandra: I can relate to worrying about what people are going to say with your LinkedIn example. Even for a career switch podcast, I had to start posting on LinkedIn because that's actually where my audience is, career changers. And before that, I was one of those people that I think hardly, hardly ever posted on LinkedIn because I didn't toot my own horn. I was taught, put your head down, work hard, and you'll get noticed eventually. Anyway, so for Career Switch Podcast, I had to start posting. And yes, I remember the anxiety and thinking, what are people going to say? So I can definitely see that as preventing you to even get started. So what are some other common things that you find with your clients?

Ellen: I call them the blockers. These are the things that are keeping you from changing or doing that thing that you're afraid to do. And I like to think about them as both conscious and unconscious blockers. So when you think about unconscious blockers, those are the things that are like in you deeply. It's your learned behavior, way of thinking, how you grew up, your identity, just all of those things that you don't even sort of realize are guiding you, but are. So maybe it's, you grew up in a family and they said, you know, well, we're not the type of people that put our business out there for everyone to see. So that would make you sort of not think that writing a LinkedIn post would be okay. And you may not even realize that's why, but that was sort of really drilled into your head as a kid. So it feels really uncomfortable to do that now. It feels like you shouldn't do that. And there's a lot there, you know, it can be trauma that people have experienced in their lives that, you know, well, when I did X, this bad thing happened. So I'm now afraid to try any more new things or anything in sort of that, that vein. There's a lot of things that are keeping us from doing things that we're not even realizing. So those are the unconscious blockers. And then the conscious blockers are the things that we kind of know about, but we still do anyway. So this is things like perfectionism. So I know that I'm not going to get everything perfect and that perfectionism in general is not something that you can actually attain, but I still want it to be perfect. And so perfectionism is an incredible blocker, especially for things like starting something new because you don't want to put it out there unless it's perfect. And that can really, really keep you from going. And I don't know how you felt about when you launched your podcast, but when I launched mine, I had to let go of that because as one person doing something for the very first time, I knew it wasn't going to be perfect and I'd be missing a bunch of things. And I had to actually like really work to let go of that and put out something that I was proud of, but I know wasn't totally perfect because that's what, what got me out the door. Are you, did you experience something similar when you got yours out?

Lixandra: So I'm a perfectionist and honestly, I can't say that I let it go. No, I think I just put out the best edit I could. at the time thinking it was the most perfect it could be.

Ellen: Sure, yeah. But you didn't let it stop you. I think it's when those things really stop us is when we need to confront them. And that's really what I walk people through is I have a whole worksheet that you name your blockers and you just kind of talk yourself through, okay, what is it that's really stopping me from doing this? And like I said earlier, like, is my fear of what will happen if I do this thing really true or not? You know, what's it based in? Is it because uncle Al told me 20 years ago that I would never be smart enough to write my own stuff or whatever it is, you know, is it based on that or like an experience? I can go back to like high school and experiences with bullies and, you know, a bad experience with a teacher. This is why, side note, if you are a boss, a supervisor at work, this is why it's so important to treat your employees well. And like humans, because I can think of multiple examples of bosses telling me things that have stayed with me this long that have prevented me from trying new things. Sometimes it's surprising whose voice is in your head when you're like, oh, I couldn't possibly start this blog. Well, maybe it's that person in marketing who always corrects your copy and makes you feel like you can't write well. Maybe that person is, is in your head saying, well, you couldn't possibly write a blog if you can't get this marketing copyright. And this is always going to be true. There's a lot of people who are going to tell you, you can't do it or it's too hard. And. If you stop and take those steps to understand who those people are in your heart, what are they telling you? Why is your brain saying you couldn't possibly? And then break it into these sort of small experiments to see if that's right or not. You're testing that hypothesis. Which by the way, a lot of that comes from the immunity to change model, which is one of my favorite books. It's by Keegan and Leahy. I'm looking at it up on the shelf now. They're Harvard folks who published it years ago. It's a much more complicated model to go through. So what I like to walk people through is something a little bit simpler to start, but I would highly recommend it and want to definitely give it credit for the source of where I got the blocker tracker idea from. Can we use a client example to show how you would walk them through it? I do have a lot of clients who are really starting to question the environments that they're in. And so maybe that's a good example of I feel rotten in my job and I keep being told that I'm not good enough or I'm not doing things the way that people want me to do them. I can see the path that I think is right. It is not the path that my supervisor wants me to take for a variety of reasons. And I feel really stuck. I have multiple clients who've had that situation happen. And so what I work with them on is let's look at what they want you to do. Let's look at what you want to do. What is your gut telling you? And that's a whole other thing that we can talk about for hours, but your gut actually has a nervous system in addition to your head. So when your gut tells you to run away or that this isn't good or whatever, it's often right. And we don't listen to it because we go with thoughts rather than feelings. So that's something I teach my clients as well. It's like, you know, if you're feeling like something is off, it probably is. And you can actually explore that rather than shut that down. And so we try to de-Elsa everybody. So, you know, Elsa in Frozen, she does conceal, don't feel is her whole thing. So we try to work on thawing that for people and helping them really get to what they are feeling underneath And then they start trusting their instincts. So that's sort of a long winded example of how this might be showing up for people in their work where they're just starting to feel like, I don't know if I fit in here. I've been here for 20 years. I've been doing this work for 20 years, but all of a sudden. X, Y, and Z have happened and all of a sudden I'm really questioning whether this is ethical or whether I like the direction that my boss is telling me to go or whether I agree with the direction my boss is telling me to go. And once you have that awakening, it's really hard to put it back in the box. And so we talk through, okay, you've had that awakening. It's terrifying. So we talk through the fear and we talk through the like lack of self-trust because the first thing that happens when you are like, Ooh, I really don't think that that's the right plan is you think of all the reasons why you're wrong because we're taught to think that thinking outside of the box is actually not a good plan in many situations. I would boil it down to the approach to naming and identifying what you're afraid of will happen or what you're afraid of doing, naming and identifying what you think will happen if you do it. And then again, working through what is it that you can do to test whether or not that's correct. And it's just, it's not that complicated, but it is complicated. You know, it's what my friend Kira called simple, but not easy. I think the thing that's really hard for a lot of people is that it forces you to sit and feel. And for so many of us, that is the last thing we wanna do because it's messy and complicated and we don't know what to do with it and all of that. And I've found that to really get to the heart of what's stopping you, you have to kind of sit with some rough feelings often and understand why you're feeling that way. And that's a lot of what I work with my clients with to work through with my clients as well as like, OK, well, what are you feeling right now? You know, where do you think that's coming from?

Lixandra: And I know you do all this with your start anyway workshop, right, the identifying and the experiments. So what do you mean by experiments?

Ellen: So I had a client or I have a client who has been doing the same career for 20 years in philanthropy. and is really, really, really unhappy with where she is right now. And we worked through, okay, is she unhappy with the environment that she's in or is she actually not liking her job anymore? Not wanting to do this thing that she's done for 20 years. And we determined it was actually the job and not the environment, which is challenging because the environment's easier to change, but the job is harder. And so we worked through these little experiments. An example is go get coffee with someone who is in a field that you're interested in. That's it. No strings attached. You don't need to ask them for anything. You're just interviewing them and asking them some questions about what it's like and what are some of the skills that are used, etc. You can do that in a Zoom call with someone. You can find someone on LinkedIn. Those little experiments are so helpful because they teach you that You can do it. You know what I mean? Like they start to break down that wall of can't and they start to slowly show you it is possible. So what I will do with my clients is we, you know, we talk them through and I say, okay, so what are the three things you want to do before we meet again? And they'll go out and do those three things. And then when we meet again, we talk about, okay, so what happened? What did that bring up for you? Okay. What does that make you want to do next? And maybe it's like, I don't know. I just want to sit on it for a while and think about it. Cool. Or maybe it's, they told me maybe I should talk to these people. So maybe I'm going to do another round of coffees. It starts to go. It's like the avalanche starts. Right. Um, and it seems again, it's simple, but not easy. It doesn't seem like it should be that complicated, but it really is. Cause we have so many things in our brain telling us not to do things. So just these tiny little things that don't seem too stressful can just make a huge difference.

Lixandra: Yeah, it reminds me of the saying something like, don't wait for the motivation to take action. Yeah. You have to take action for the motivation to come. Yeah. Oh, I love that. I think a lot of us, right, we kind of just wait around for inspiration. And while I do hope this episode will nudge somebody to take action. Yes, please. Sometimes you have to take the action first.

Ellen: Yeah, and again, if you call it an experiment, it's like you're seeing yourself outside of yourself. You're looking at yourself as sort of an experiment. And for some reason that changes your brain waves in the way that you're not, it's not trying to keep you safe anymore. It's like, oh, okay, let's see what happens. And it honestly, you do it and you'll see, like it really does. click your brain over into a more active mode. Just like you're saying, I love that quote because that's so right. You can't always wait to be inspired. And it's in the hunting and in the thinking and in the experimenting that we find our inspiration. There's this great book called Working Identity by Armania Ibarra. She's like the queen of, uh, experiments. And there's so many stories in the book about people who have done this career for multiple, multiple, multiple years and want to do a shift, but just don't even know how to start. It's the same thing, small experiments. And there's great examples in that book about how people have found their true calling because they, you know, well, okay, I guess I'll try this one thing over here. Ooh, I hated that. That's cool. So there's also this thing, actually, now that I'm talking about it, there's also this need to not worry about failure in all of this. And I've been working hard in thinking through the difference between failing and learning, especially as, you know, I'm a solopreneur in my first year of running my own business. There's a lot of things that I'm trying that aren't working, but I've learned to not call them failures. I've learned to call them learning experiences because I do learn from all of them. We're really hard on ourself if something doesn't go right or the way that we expect it to go. And that can be so soul destroying because you're like, I'm going to try this new thing. And then it doesn't go right. And you're like, okay, well, I guess I shouldn't do it. And so again, this like mentality of it's a little experiment and if it doesn't go right, that's okay. What did you learn from it? And what's the next hypothesis that you're gonna create after you've learned the thing that you learned and what's the next experiment that you're gonna take rather than the like, I'm gonna quit my job and start this business tomorrow. And if nobody is my client within three months, then I failed, which is often gonna be the case if you're not breaking it into these little biteable chunks.

Lixandra: Yeah, I think that's also key, right? It's with whatever you decide to do, do them in these biteable chunks.

Ellen: It's again that like, okay, well, how are you recording the data from those conversations? And I know this sounds super nerdy, and I'm not a science person. I am analytical though, and I love to look at data and then see what the pattern is. And here's where you can use ChatGPT as your friend. You can write in some results, like, okay, so I had three coffee meetings, and in this coffee meeting, this person told me these three things, and this person told me these two things, and this person told me these three things. What are some insights that I can glean from these? And it'll pop out some interesting things. Or if you take notes or record your conversations, you can put the transcript in and say, what am I learning here? If you have a hard time doing that yourself, You shouldn't depend on chat GPT 100%, but I find it really helpful in taking something that has happened and synthesizing it for you. It can be really helpful there.

Lixandra: Oh, good to know. Good to know. So going back to the client that you were helping, who discovered that it was more the job versus the environment, did your client make a career change?

Ellen: They haven't yet, but they are actively pursuing one and they're so much happier because they got to a place out of feeling stuck and sad and immobile. And so, yeah, right now they haven't found a new job. They've applied for quite a few, but they are going strong on their coffees. They've discovered multiple new opportunities that they hadn't even thought about because they've started to investigate what's out there from an on the ground level. And what does that look like? Okay. So I don't want to be a fundraiser anymore, but maybe I want to go into corporate social responsibility, you know, which is like helping companies give away money to the community, which everybody wants to do. It sounds like a super fun job. Well, okay, let me look up a couple of recent ads for people to do that job. And then you look at that ad and you're like, oh God, I don't have any of that experience. They'll never hire me at the end and you close it down. So easy for us to do that. But when you actually get out and talk to people in real life, you're gonna learn that the person who's doing that job now was a theater major and an actor until they were 30 and then went back to school. You're gonna learn Everybody's this patchwork of things and nobody's going to be that job description specifically and perfectly, and you can't let it stop you. And we know all of the data that shows that women are so much more likely to let those, like a lack of qualifications stop you from applying. And men are so much more likely to apply anyway and get the job. And so we have to keep telling ourselves that. and realizing that like, yes, it's great to research and see things on paper and on the internet and all of that, but that's not the true story. You have to actually get to a human to figure out, okay, what does it really take to get in here?

Lixandra: Well, I'm happy for your client. Who knows? Maybe they can be a guest and talk about their career switch. Oh yeah. I'll tell them. Yeah. All right, Ellen. So as we wrap up, tell us about your services, your workshop, and how listeners can find you.

Ellen: You can find me at ewbcoaching.com. I'm also on LinkedIn as Ellen Whitlock Baker, and you can find me on Instagram at EllenWBCoaching. And I'm offering a start anyway workshop. I offer them every few months or so they're online. And I am giving listeners to this podcast, a special code for 15% off. If you go to ewbcoaching.com backslash start anyway, that's the name of the workshop and you register for it. Use the code switch 25. when you check out and you'll get the discount. Well, thank you so much for the discount code. When is the next workshop? Next workshop is going to be on the 16th of September from 4.30 to 6 p.m. Pacific time. And we also record it. So if you aren't able to make it on the actual day, we'll send you the recording because a lot of it is actually work you need to do yourself. So there's a lot of time to stop and reflect within the workshop. And if you're in that place of feeling stuck, you'll walk away from the workshop 100% with one tiny step. And that sometimes is all you need to get started. Great, great. And you also have a podcast. please check out the Heart at Work podcast. It's available everywhere where you have podcasts. I started it this year. And we talk about all of those norms at work that are keeping specifically women and people of color down in the workplace. Because even though we don't think that's still happening, it's definitely still happening because the workplace is a place that was constructed by and for white men, and it hasn't changed in a lot of ways. And so we talk about how to recognize that, how to escape from a toxic workplace, which is what we've been talking about a little bit here today. and how to kind of reclaim yourself and be okay with who you are in the workplace rather than who the workplace wants you to be.

Lixandra: I think your podcast would also be a great companion to this episode for anyone who's feeling stuck, like we talked about today.

Ellen: Yeah, it's been really fun. And if anyone thinks they'd be a good guest, let me know.

Lixandra: Thanks to Ellen Whitlock Baker for being our guest today. You can find Ellen at EWBCoaching.com LinkedIn, Instagram, and on her podcast, Hard at Work. Also, check out the show notes for additional episodes for more advice if you're stuck with your career change. 

You can find links to the resources mentioned in this episode and more helpful information in the show notes and on our website, careerswitchpod.com. So what's your career switch? Are you motivated to take action after listening to this episode? Tell us at careerswitchpod.com. We'd love to know, along with any feedback you have about the show. Let us know too if you'd like to be a guest. Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn at careerswitchpod. And please rate, review, and share with your friends and colleagues. It'll help get the show out there. Thanks for listening today. Till next time.