Annual Career Calibration: Staying Is a Choice, Not a Habit

Most people decide to stay in a job the same way they decide to keep a gym membership. They do not decide. The month renews, the year renews, and one day it has been 6 years and nobody can remember choosing any of them.

Here is what I see in coaching. The leaders who get blindsided, by a reorg, by a layoff, by a boss who leaves and takes the air out of the role, are almost never the ones who were looking. They are the ones who stopped looking 4 years ago because things were fine.

Fine is not a decision. Fine is what happens while you are not deciding. And when the ground moves, they discover their resume is 5 years old, they do not know what the market pays, and they have not had a real conversation with anyone outside the building since the last time they were new.

So the tool. The Annual Calibration is 3 moves, once a year, on a date you pick and keep. First, a resume maintenance pass. Not a rewrite. An hour to add what you actually did this year, in the language of the role you would want next, before you forget it. Second, at least one recruiter call. Not because you are leaving. Because you need to know what you are worth and what is out there, and you cannot learn that from inside your own org chart. Third, one live interview process, start to finish, somewhere you might actually go.

This is the one people skip, and it is the one that matters, because it is the only move that tells you the truth about the market and about yourself.

Then the read. Some years, the calibration tells you to go. Most years it does not. Most years you walk back into the same job on Monday, and it is a different job, because now you are in it on purpose. You know what it is worth, what you are worth, and what you would be giving up. That knowledge changes how you sit in the room.

The move this week: pick the date. Put all 3 on the calendar inside the next 90 days, and do the recruiter call first, because it is the one you will talk yourself out of.

Stay, speak, or go. Any of them can be the right move. Just make sure staying is a choice you made, not inertia you settled into.

The Right Move. Stay, speak, or go. exercises.therightaltitudebook.com/annual-calibration