I Outsourced My Career Decisions and Paid for It Slowly for Five Years

I had been in the habit, from early in my professional life in Chandigarh, of consulting widely before making any significant career decision and then making the decision that the weight of the consultation suggested rather than the decision that my own assessment produced.

This looked like wisdom from the outside - I was deliberate, I sought diverse input, I did not act impulsively. From the inside it was something else: I was using the consultation process to avoid the specific discomfort of owning a decision that might be wrong, and distributing the potential blame for a bad outcome across the people whose advice I had followed.

My father preferred stability, so I stayed in stable roles past the point where leaving would have been right. My mentor preferred prestige, so I chased a credential that was not relevant to the direction I actually wanted.

A friend who worked in tech believed tech was the answer to everything, so I spent a year in a tech-adjacent role that used none of the parts of my professional self that were most genuinely engaged. None of these people gave me bad advice.

They gave me advice that reflected their own values and priorities and I received it as if their values and priorities were mine. The excavation of what my own values and priorities actually were, separate from the values and priorities of the people I had been consulting, was a process I undertook at 29 with a career counsellor who had the specific skill of reflecting my own answers back to me rather than providing new ones.

What I found, when the answers were finally mine, was that my actual professional direction was available to me and had been available for some time. It had been consistently deprioritised in the consultation process because I had not been consulting myself.