How to know when you’re ready to move – and when you’re just ready to escape

How To Tell Which One You’re Doing

When you’re running from, you’re optimising for distance from the bad thing. When you’re running to, you’re optimising for proximity to the right thing.

Questions Worth Sitting With

• Am I clear on what I’m moving toward – or am I just clear on what I’m moving away from?
• If the thing I’m running from suddenly disappeared – if that manager left, if that project ended, if that dynamic resolved itself – would I still want to leave?
• Or is the role itself something I could work with?
• Am I making this decision from a place of clarity or a place of desperation?
• And if it’s desperation – is there anything I can do to get even a small amount of clarity before I move?

What The Eircode Question Taught Me

Asking for the Eircode before the salary was, in retrospect, one of the clearest signals I've ever had that I actually knew what I needed. Not because the commute was the most important thing about the role objectively. But because I had done enough thinking – over five years of other moves and other decisions – to know what I couldn't function without.

The commute wasn't a preference I was optimising for. It was a line I had drawn based on real experience of what happens when I cross it. That's what clarity feels like from the inside. Not certainty – you rarely get certainty. But a sense of knowing what matters to you specifically, based on what you've actually lived, that gives you something solid to make decisions from.

The Engineering Career Clarity Guide

This guide is designed to help you build that kind of clarity – before you're in the position of taking an eighty-minute commute just to get away from someone. It's free, it takes about an hour, and it's the thinking that most people do after the move rather than before it.

[Download it here: Before You Update Your CV, Do This First]