Episode 125: I'm bored at work (and I don't know if that means I should leave)

You're not unhappy, exactly. The job's fine. The pay's fine. Nobody's making your life difficult. And yet you've started caring far too much about office politics you used to ignore, and there's a tab open on a jobs site you keep telling yourself you're only browsing. Something's gone flat. You just can't work out whether that's a problem to fix or a sign to leave.

What you'll discover

• Why boredom is so much harder to act on than its louder cousin, burnout
• The reason being good at your job lets you hide it for years, from your team and from yourself
• The three very different things "I'm bored" can be hiding, and why telling them apart changes what you do next
• The step most people skip entirely before deciding whether to stay or go

Perfect for: anyone who has found themselves in a perfectly decent job who has quietly gone flat and doesn't know whether that means a conversation or a resignation.

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How to handle missing out on the promotion you wanted

You found out you didn't get it, and somewhere in the same breath you were already arranging your face into something gracious. The hard part wasn't that afternoon. It's the morning after, when you walk back into the same building, sit in the same meetings, and have to look entirely fine in front of the very people who watched you want it. That's the part no one prepares you for, and it's the part this episode is about.

What you'll discover

• Why missing out on something you put your name to stings in a way an outside rejection never does
• The two quiet decisions people tend to make in the first fortnight that cost them the most
• Why "don't take it personally" and "there'll be other opportunities" are both perfectly true and completely useless right now
• How long to let yourself feel rotten, and why putting a deadline on it changes everything
• The one question to ask for feedback that beats "why didn't I get it" by a mile

Perfect for any woman who's gone for something at work, not got it, and still has to show up the next day as though her week's going splendidly.

Want more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for in-depth guides and scripts.

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How to stop being the person everyone vents to

There's a queue that forms at your desk that you never advertised for. People bring you the impossible manager, the credit someone took, the meeting that went sideways, and you take it all in because you're the one who listens without making anyone feel small. The trouble is what it costs you. You leave most days wrung out, carrying conversations that were never yours to begin with, while your own work and your own worries sit waiting.

This episode of Career Espresso is about how you became the office's unofficial support service, why it falls to women so reliably, and how to stay the warm, trusted one without taking everybody's bad day home with you.

What you'll discover

• Why being brilliant to talk to quietly turns into unpaid work, and why being good at it tends to make things worse rather than better
• The reason "just set boundaries" is hollow advice for genuinely kind people, and what to reach for instead
• The one question that lets you be completely there for someone without picking up their problem and carrying it
• How to handle the person who's turned you into a daily service, without a big awkward confrontation

Perfect for women who are the ones everyone leans on at work, who leave most days carrying other people's weather, and who'd like to stay kind without running on empty.

Want more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for in-depth guides and scripts.

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A new starter joins, and on their first morning they ask the most basic question there is. So what is it you actually do here? You open your mouth to answer and realise you're not entirely sure how to. The job title is easy enough to say. It's just that it stopped describing your days some time ago, and you couldn't tell anyone the exact week that happened.

This episode of Career Espresso is about what to do when your job has changed but nobody told you. The role that grew while you weren't looking, the responsibilities that arrived without a single conversation, and the odd guilt that turns up the moment you notice and start to wonder whether you're allowed to say something about it.

What you'll discover:

• Why work quietly drifts towards the most reliable person in the room, and why being that person costs more than it looks
• The reason the standard advice to just be flexible can leave you worse off than before
• Why carrying more in silence often makes you less visible, not more
• How to get an honest picture of what your job has become before you try to change it
• The two conversations worth having once you can finally see it clearly

Perfect for: any woman who suspects her job has been rewritten while she wasn't looking, and wants to work out what to do about it.

Want more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for in-depth guides and scripts.

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How to ask for what you want at work

You've been waiting for your manager to offer you the thing you could have asked for six months ago. You've done the work, you've stayed late, you've been the most reliable person in the room, and you've been hoping that would be enough for someone to notice. It usually isn't.

The hard part isn't knowing what you want. It's that the moment you open your mouth to say it, you hear yourself softening it into something so polite and so careful that the person opposite you doesn't even know you've made a request.

What you'll discover

• Why "just ask" skips the part that's hard
• The calculation women run before saying a word, and why the hesitation isn't irrational
• The gap between how you advocate for other people and how you handle your own career
• How to say what you want without burying it under three minutes of context
• What a no gives you that silence never will

Perfect for women leaders and aspiring leaders who know what they want at work but keep finding reasons not to say it.

Want more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for in-depth guides and scripts.

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You're in a meeting and someone turns to you with a question you can't answer. You know it immediately. But instead of saying so, you start talking, because silence feels worse than noise and admitting a gap in front of people feels like handing them a reason to doubt you. So you give a long, circular response that touches on something adjacent, sounds confident enough to get through the moment, and answers a question nobody asked. By the time you stop talking, you're not even sure what you said. But you're fairly sure it wasn't convincing.

The strange part is that the people you admire most at work tend to handle this completely differently. They're honest about what they don't know, and it doesn't seem to cost them anything. If anything, it makes you trust them more.

This episode is about closing that gap between what you do and what you wish you did when you don't have the answer.

What you'll find inside:

• Why performing confidence you don't have is more visible than you think, and what colleagues notice when you do it
• The career advice that teaches women to treat the appearance of knowing as more important than the reality of it, and why it creates terrible leaders
• What separates the people who handle this well from everyone else (it's simpler than you'd expect)
• How being selective about when you're certain makes everything you say worth more
• The one thing you do after admitting a gap that determines whether it builds trust or erodes it

Want more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for in-depth guides and community.

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Someone mentions a meeting from three weeks ago. An ordinary reference, nothing loaded in it. And your stomach drops because your brain has decided that any mention of that date, that room, that project, is a direct reference to the thing you got wrong.

That's what it's like to carry a public mistake. Not the first 48 hours, when everything's raw and obvious. The bit after that, when the flinch reflex is still firing but you're supposed to be past it.

This episode of Career Espresso is about what happens when you make a mistake at work and there were people in the room when it happened, and why that audience changes everything about how you process it afterwards.

What you'll discover

• Why a mistake with an audience is a fundamentally different experience from one you can fix quietly, and what that audience does to your thinking
• What the research says about how much attention other people pay to your slip-up compared to how much you think they do
• Why women tend to carry public mistakes harder and longer, and why that's a rational response to an uneven system, not a personal failing
• Three patterns that turn a bad moment into a months-long problem, and how to catch yourself before they take hold
• How to separate the practical question (does anything still need fixing?) from the emotional one (what story have I told myself about what this means?)

Perfect for women who are carrying a visible mistake and can't seem to stop replaying it, whether it happened last week or six months ago.

Want more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for in-depth guides and scripts.

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You're on the sofa. Or making dinner. Or lying in bed. And your brain is still at work. It's replaying that conversation from this afternoon, rewriting the email you already sent, rehearsing tomorrow's meeting complete with responses to things nobody has said yet. You know you're doing it. You can feel yourself thinking about work, and knowing that doesn't help you stop.

This isn't a willpower problem. Your brain is doing exactly what it's designed to do: holding onto open loops. Every unresolved conversation, every decision you haven't made, every task you didn't finish, it's all running in the background because your brain doesn't trust the information has been saved anywhere else. And for women in leadership, this runs deeper, because the things keeping you awake aren't just tasks. They're relational. Did that feedback come across the way I intended? Is she upset with me? Was I too direct?

This episode covers:

• Why your brain treats unfinished business like an unsaved document, and what that means for how you end your day
• The two types of after-hours thinking (task loops and emotional residue) and why they need completely different solutions
• Why the usual advice about boundaries, mindfulness, and shutdown rituals misses the point
• A practical way to give your brain the "save signal" it needs so it stops running everything in the background
• How to name the feeling that keeps you awake when there's nothing specific to write on a to-do list

Want more support with real-world leadership challenges? Head to How to Build a Leader on Substack for practical guides, scripts, and Manager Hours, the monthly live Q&A for women leaders.

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