230. Recognizing a Career Plot Twist Before It Happens
- 1 day ago
- 15 min read
Burnout often builds quietly, long before we notice we've outgrown a role or let our finish line drift out of reach. Choosing our own plot twist starts with honest self-reflection, smarter preparation, and boundaries that protect rather than limit us. Negotiating that change requires tactics built for us, not borrowed advice that backfires in technical fields.
Unfortunately, recognizing you need to make a change is only half the equation. The other half is negotiating your way into your much needed plot twist without having it blow up in your face.
Are you running on empty, saying yes to everything until there's nothing left to give? Are you stuck in a role that used to feel like it was going somewhere, watching the goalposts keep moving further out of reach? Are you afraid that setting a boundary or asking for what you need will put your career at risk?
You'll learn that boundaries aren't a career risk but the tool that can save your success, and how a three-phase negotiation approach—preparation, discovery, and agreement—can help you ask for the change you need without it backfiring.
WHAT YOU WILL DISCOVER
Why recognizing the early, gradual signs of burnout matters before your body forces you to stop
5 practical tips to recognize and plan your career plot twist before it's forced upon you
Why standard negotiation advice often backfires for women
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TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to the Stop Sabotaging Your Success podcast, episode two hundred and thirty. I'm your host, Cindy Esliger. This is the podcast focusing on what we can do today to take control of our careers and overcome the inevitable barriers to success that we encounter along the way.
There I was, fighting back tears, gritting my teeth in an attempt to control the few that escaped from the corners of my eyes, watching my hands shake uncontrollably. I remember feeling like there was nothing I could do to contain my emotions at that point, just this quiet leak, like a pipe that had finally given way after years of pressure. I was so worn out from trying to keep everything I was feeling all bottled up. I was just so tired of everything. It didn't even matter to me that I was sitting at my desk, in the office, in front of everyone. At that moment, it felt like everything I'd worked so hard for was crumbling around me. I was on the brink of burnout, about to fall into the abyss, and I had nothing left to give.
Here's what I remember most: I wasn't thinking about the project deadlines. I wasn't thinking about the promotion I'd been chasing for two years. I was thinking about how far I had let myself go—how long I had run my engine on empty, how many yeses I had said without ever once pausing to ask what they were costing me. I just couldn't do it anymore.
In this episode, we're talking about the career plot twist, whether it's one that gets thrust upon you when your body finally forces you to stop, or one that you choose, on your own terms, before it ever comes to that.
Here's the question I want to explore a little more closely: why do so many of us—especially those of us who have had to prove ourselves over and over again in a misguided attempt to be taken seriously—why do we wait until we hit the breaking point to make a change? What if you could see your plot twist coming? What if you could recognize it, plan for it, and negotiate your way into something more exciting and more sustainable, instead of waiting for whatever is coming to be forced upon you before you decide a change is necessary?
That's what we're going to cover today. So, let's get into it.
Let's start with the early warning signs, because most of us don't wake up one day suddenly burned out. It's slow. It's gradual. And it stems from what looks like, at least from the outside, dedication.
For me, life was busy. The demands at work and at home were never-ending. Weekdays were a constant blur and weekends weren't long enough. There was no day left where my nervous system wasn't on.
If you're in engineering, you probably know that feeling of being stuck, too. You're good at your job. You've been good at it for a while now. And yet the growth—the next rung on the ladder, the interesting project, the recognition—never seems to show up. Maybe it would be different if all this effort was for something. But for me, nothing seemed to change. It wasn't a crisis per se. It was just the slow, quiet eroding of my confidence when I realized I was still in a role that used to feel like it was going somewhere, and now it didn't.
And maybe you've noticed that the finish line keeps moving. You hit the targets, and instead of arriving, you look up and the goalposts have moved, yet again—just a little bit further away, always just out of reach. At some point, the pursuit of the dream you set out chasing starts to feel like it's never going to happen. And the worst part is that you don't remember choosing to work at this pace. You don't remember agreeing to this. It just sort of happened, gradually.
I want you to know that you are in very good company. Some of the success stories you've probably heard over the years were actually burnout stories that, eventually, turned into breakthroughs. We just don't usually hear that part in the highlight reel.
Which raises a good question: is burnout some kind of requirement before we get to the breakthrough? I don't think so. But I want to be honest about why so many of us go through it anyway—we can read every book, listen to every podcast, including maybe this one, and still make the exact mistakes we were warned about. Because even when we've been warned, those lessons are just words until we experience them for ourselves. Sometimes, it takes going through it on our own to truly understand it.
So, why does this happen? I think it starts with a few pieces of advice we've all absorbed over the years that sound true, but are mostly lies.
The first one: do what you love. Sounds nice, but it doesn't always apply to your job. Sometimes your job is a very good job, but it is never going to be your passion—and that's okay. That might mean the fulfillment you're craving needs to come from somewhere else: a passion project on the side, something that's just yours. That's not settling. That's being realistic about where our different needs get met.
The second one: find your purpose. Also a popular one, but again, not always helpful. Sometimes, being told to find your purpose just adds more pressure on top of an already full schedule—now you're not just supposed to perform well at work, you're supposed to find it meaningful, too. Sometimes, that pressure creates more confusion than clarity.
Often, I need to remind myself of this particular phrase, and maybe you do too, especially when it comes to the work we do: "just because you can, doesn't mean you should". You can do a lot of things. Your skills improve, your interests change, you get smarter, you get better—but here's the trap: you also get to choose how you use all of that, or whether you use it at all. No one is going to offer you that choice. You have to make it for yourself.
Because here's how it snowballs: our desire to start new things is always there. New projects are exciting. We want more and more and more—until we don't. We want to feel needed, productive, indispensable—until we don't. We want to do it all, because surely we can—until we can't.
And somewhere in there, we drop the ball. We're juggling too many things that just can't be done by one single person. The things we actually needed to do get pushed to the margins because people are now relying on us for all the other things beyond what we're already doing. The to-dos just keep piling on, and it's so easy to see, in hindsight, how we tricked ourselves into it. Everything stays on your plate because you've been told you're the best person for the job. You say yes because you think you can't say no. You've taken on all of it because somewhere along the way you absorbed the lie that more is better. So, you just need to figure out how to make it all work.
We've come to the realization that being busy is better than the alternative. We take on more and more until eventually we end up crushed under the weight of it all. That right there—that's what leads to burnout. Not one bad decision, but rather a thousand small, reasonable ones.
My burnout didn't happen overnight. And now that I think about it, does it ever? It was slow. A project added here, because they really needed my expertise. And then another one there. Until, without me really noticing as it happened, my commitments had become a full-on bonfire—raging out of control, with almost no room left to breathe.
I didn't realize how far I'd gone until it was too late to pretend otherwise. There came a day I couldn't ignore the warning signs anymore. It felt like everything I'd spent years building was falling apart—and my response was to plan my way out of it, the same way I'd planned everything else, because that's what I do. I remember thinking, "There's no way I can survive this, so it's time to make a change". Then, because this is how I calm my anxiety, I made a spreadsheet and ran the numbers, just in case my plan didn't work out the way I'd hoped it would.
And when I finally sat down with my husband and said, "I hope you're with me on this", I watched something that looked like relief slowly move across his face as I talked. He wasn't surprised. He'd been watching this shell of a life I was pretending to enjoy, and some part of him had been waiting for this exact conversation. He could see that this undoing—this falling apart—might actually be the push I needed to do something different, something more sustainable.
I had to ask myself something specific and important: does everything need to change, or does just something need to change? That's not a small distinction. It's the difference between blowing up your whole life and doing the more precise, more difficult work of figuring out what actually needs to shift.
And here's the part I want you to hear. I realized that I, in fact, had some control over this situation. Instead of blaming everyone else for overloading me, I could set some limits. I wrote out a list of boundaries I needed to set—and communicated them clearly to myself first, before anyone else. Even writing them down felt, at the time, like they might ruin me, like they'd sink any chance I had left at success. But to my surprise, these boundaries didn't put my success in jeopardy. They actually saved it. They gave me my life back. They became the single most transformative tool I had used—more than any other skill I had in my toolkit.
Part of what made that possible was a shift in how I defined success for me. I stopped asking, "Is this considered successful?" by whatever standards I had absorbed, and started asking, "Do I consider this successful?". Rather than trying to meet some arbitrary measure, I changed it and made it personal to me. This was a game-changer.
So, let's talk about what it actually looks like to make a change before you're forced to. Here are five suggestions for you to consider:
You do not have to have it all figured out before you take the first step. That's not a permission slip to be reckless—it's an accurate description of how change actually works. No one starts out with the whole map laid out in front of them. They start with the next visible step.
Ask better questions. Rather than asking, "Am I doing enough?" instead try asking, "Is this actually the right thing to be doing more of?". Instead of, "How do I get promoted in this role?" try asking yourself, "Is this the role I want to be promoted into?".
How much planning is actually enough? I think this one is important for engineers specifically, because so many of us are trained to over-prepare. There's a real difference between smart preparation and anxiety-driven over-preparation that delays action and leaves you spinning your wheels. If you've ever tried to develop a contingency plan for every possible scenario, or spent more time gathering additional data on a choice you've already made emotionally—that's not due diligence. That's perfectionism. Give yourself a deadline for deciding, because if I had to guess, more information isn't what's needed.
Learn to spot the actual signs that it's time to move on, and start planning your next move, before the ground gives out from under you. Some signs might include: you've stopped learning anything new in your role, you dread the parts of your job that used to energize you, or you find yourself giving advice to others that you yourself have stopped following. Any of those, on its own, might just be an indication that you're having a rough week. All of them together, for months on end—that's data you shouldn't ignore.
Make peace with the road not taken. This one's harder. Sometimes, you just have to sit for a moment with the regrets of inaction—the things you didn't say, didn't do, or didn't try. Not to punish yourself with them, but to actually look at them without shame. Pull whatever meaning is in there and let the meaning turn into one proactive step you take now.
So, where in your life do you feel burnout approaching, even a little? What is one boundary you could experiment with this week—not forever, just this week? And where, specifically, do you need to say no to something you tend to automatically say yes to?
Unfortunately, recognizing you need to make a change is only half the equation. The other half is negotiating your way into your much needed plot twist without having it blow up in your face.
Standard negotiation advice tends to backfire for women, especially for women in engineering and other male-dominated technical fields. Not because the advice is wrong—but because a lot of it was tested on populations where assertiveness doesn't carry the same social penalty it carries for us. There's real research behind this, but you may have already encountered it in your own career. If you've ever been told you were "aggressive" for the exact same behavior that got your male colleague deemed "a strong leader", that's not in your head. That's the mismatch I'm talking about.
So, what actually tends to work better for us in this context? One approach I would suggest is to frame your ask communally as well as individually—not instead of advocating for yourself, but rather alongside it. Try something along the lines of, "This will let me do X faster", which lands differently and often better, next to "and here's what I need to make that happen". You're not hiding your ask behind the team's needs. You're showing how they connect, because in most organizations, they usually do. You just have to dig a little deeper to figure out how you can frame it that way.
Now, let's walk through how you'll negotiate for the change you want in three phases, because having a structure tends to take some of the fear out of it.
Phase one: Preparation. A negotiation is about what's on the table, and who's at the table—their relationship to you, their relative power, the context around the ask, not just the substance of it. And here's the part where we tend to get tripped up: the biggest hidden barrier is usually ourselves. We underplay our strengths. We read weakness into a situation that isn't actually weak.
Before you can influence anyone else, you have to convince yourself. In a practical sense, that means gathering the data you need and doing the research to know what precedents have already been set. That's arming yourself with leverage before you walk into the room. And when you get the opportunity to say what you want, state it confidently, not as a question. Then, stop talking. You will have already made the case for your value and how what you want will help the team and the organization—so this is not the time to over-explain. Say it, and let it sit in the silence.
Phase two: Discovery. This is the part most of us don't even recognize as negotiation, which is exactly why we let so many chances slip by unclaimed. Negotiation isn't just for those instances of formal deal-making. It's every time you need better cooperation, more time, less scope, more budget, or even a more interesting project—or at least one that doesn't require rescuing. It's anytime you need something from someone else.
We tend to assume we're not naturally persuasive, but we don't even notice these moments as negotiable. In this phase, you've made your ask for what you need to do your best work and now let your manager respond. If they hedge, you can say, "Tell me more about what's holding that back", and actually listen to the answer, because it tells you whether this is a timing problem, a budget problem, or just the fact that they hadn't noticed there was a problem. And each of those requires a different next move from you.
Your job is to get curious about the other person's true interests. Ask what, what else, which, and why. Try questions like, "What matters most to you about this proposal? What else is at play? Which of these is the priority if you had to choose?". You can float ideas without locking yourself in—use hypothesis language to suggest things such as, "What if we tried this...?" or "Let's suppose just for a second..." which keeps the conversation exploratory instead of adversarial.
And when someone asks you a pointed question, you don't have to answer it directly. You can answer it with another question or use some variation of the phrase "tell me more" to turn what might seem like an interrogation into more of a conversation, and it often surfaces information they didn't mean to give you.
Phase three: Agreement. Here's where fear tends to sabotage people. Once you've made your ask, silence from the other side can feel unbearable. Resist the urge to fill the dead air, because if you start rambling, you might inadvertently retract or diminish what you asked for. They are very likely just processing what you've said—not rejecting you. This is where you affirm to yourself that what you've asked for is reasonable and deserved. Then, if what they come back with isn't in your best interest, you deliver your no clearly and respectfully, without over-apologizing. At which point, you offer a path forward—a proposal or an alternative—that keeps the conversation going and the relationship intact. It's important to know your best alternative to a negotiated agreement ahead of this discussion, so declining their offer comes from a place of grounded confidence, not fear of having nothing else to go to.
Be prepared that not all negotiations will go your way. They may say no to what you're asking for. But really, what have you got to lose, because that's exactly where you are right now. And the part that gets skipped in a lot of career advice is that getting to the plot twist isn't the finish line; making it sustainable is.
Boundaries aren't a cage. I know it can feel that way at first—like drawing a line will sink your career. In practice, it's the opposite. Boundaries expand everything because they protect your ability to deliver your best work. They're not primarily about saying no to everything; they're about keeping things manageable so you can absorb more of the unexpected things that are bound to arise.
Part of this is finding your 'enough point', that place where you can draw the line with confidence instead of guilt. Not everyone's 'enough point' looks the same, and that's okay. The point isn't the specific number of hours or projects. The point is that you have one, and you know where it is.
I'll be honest, some of my boundaries have now been in place for years, and some are new—and I still have to make adjustments, often. I still don't like telling people no. I still don't like disappointing someone because they might not understand. But it's been worth it for me to keep things manageable.
This change to make things more sustainable is what I'm calling a plot twist. It isn't about carrying less forever—sometimes you'll still choose to carry a lot. It's about carrying it differently, on purpose, with your eyes open.
And finally realizing that maybe more isn't always better. It's worth sitting with, especially if you're ambitious, especially if you're used to "more" being the answer to almost everything. This new chapter you're negotiating your way into isn't just to build a new, bigger bonfire. It's a chance to build something that doesn't cause you to burn out. Which is also why it isn't a one-time fix. You'll need to check back in with yourself every few months. The boundaries that work for you now may need adjusting later, and that's not failure—that's maintenance.
So, let's go back to where we started—me trying to fight back tears, feeling like everything I'd worked for was crumbling around me. I was terrified that drawing any line in the sand would end my career, but instead, I have to admit that finally setting some boundaries is what gave me my career, and my life, back.
Before you go, let's revisit those questions from earlier, or if you skipped past them, here they are again: Where in your life do you feel burnout approaching? What is one boundary you could experiment with this week? Where do you need to say no to something you tend to automatically say yes to?
I don't have those answers for you. That's something that has to come from you.
And that's it for this episode of Stop Sabotaging Your Success. Remember to download your Guide to Choosing Your Plot Twist at cindyesliger.com/podcast, episode two hundred and thirty.
Thank you to our producer, Alex Hochhausen and everyone at Astronomic Audio. Get in touch, I'm on Instagram @cindyesliger. My email address is info@cindyesliger.com.
If you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out The Confidence Collective. It's my monthly coaching program where we dig a little deeper into what's holding you back in your career and we find the workarounds. We help you overcome the barriers and create the career you want. Join me over at cindyesliger.com/join. I'd love to have you join me in The Confidence Collective.
Until next week, I'm Cindy Esliger. Thanks for listening.
