A psychologist explains the 5 most common sources of career frustration (and how to find work that works for you)

Tessa West is a social psychology professor at New York University and an expert on interpersonal communication. She has over 100 academic publications and is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal. Her work has been covered by Scientific American, the New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian, CNN, CNBC, ABC, TIME, Bloomberg, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and the U.S. Supreme Court. Below, West shares five key insights from her new book, Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You which outlines common career frustrations. Listen to the audio version—read by West herself—in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Transitioning out of a career is a lot like falling out of love. When most of us think about making a career change, our first step is working through the structural changes we would face, like moving to a big city, changing to a hybrid work schedule, or taking a pay cut. We try our best to rationally navigate through the decision, focusing on big-picture issues. These decisions are important, especially as we get close to sealing the deal with a new job. But this perspective misses the messy, often emotional experience of breaking up with a career. I’ve been teaching a class on close relationships at NYU for 15 years, and I’ve been studying the form and function of relationship break-ups for decades. I’ve been struck by how similar people’s experiences are between falling out of love with a person and falling out of love with their career. By missing this connection, we often go about leaving a career in the wrong way. For example, as you near the end of your relationship with a career, you might expect your commitment to the job and your engagement to slowly peter off. Until one day, the love is completely gone, and you’re ready to take the leap. But in reality, most of us don’t slowly fall out of love; rather, we go through a stage of heightened ambivalence near the end. Simultaneously loving and hating the relationship you’re thinking of leaving is one of the key stages of relationship dissolution in romantic relationships. At work, you can love your boss one moment and hate them the next. You can feel excited by your work and bored with it, often within the same hour. It’s important to embrace conflicting feelings and understand that they are a key part of the breakup process. And the good news is, there are concrete steps you can take to fall out of love properly with your career, so you don’t wind up in an on-again-off-again relationship with it. 2. Huge communication gaps in hiring cause career frustration later I collected a lot of data from both sides of the hiring process: those looking to hire and place people into jobs, and those looking to find new jobs. Almost every hiring expert I spoke with told me that miscommunications start small and early, beginning with when the job ad is posted. If left unresolved, this can lead to big misconceptions about the expectations for a job. One recruiter I spoke with gave a simple illustration. Rarely do candidates ask during an interview, Who wrote the job ad? But the answer can be illuminating. You will get all kinds of answers from, honestly, I don’t know (which implies that the hiring manager isn’t looped in with who will manage you one day) to honestly, the person who held this job before me did, and there are a host of qualifications we need that aren’t listed in it. As another example, most of us don’t understand how raise and promotion decisions are made at the company we’re interviewing for. We rarely ask questions like, Does every boss here get to put someone forward for promotion, or is that determined by some standard that I don’t know about? I was shocked to learn that a large percentage of people who fail to get promoted do so because their boss didn’t have the tenure required to put forward their direct reports for consideration. The answers to simple questions like these can give a wealth of information about how a company selects candidates and how well people who work at that company communicate with each other. Remember: you want total transparency at this stage. Mixed messages or conflicting answers from different interviewers are usually red flags. 3. Understand the daily stressors that contribute to career frustration. I’ve been studying the influence of stress on how people work together for decades, including the physiologic markers of stress, along with how stress can be contagious. Daily, low-level stressors are huge triggers of workplace unhappiness, but chances are you don’t have great insight into what your own stressors are. For Job Therapy, I ran a small study where I had people write down in the morning what their biggest anticipated stressor was for that day, and then in the evening, they wrote what their biggest stressor ended up being. About 50 percent of the time, the thing people were worried about most in the morning turned out to be their biggest stressor. Wh