The Mentor Who Told Me to Quit

I had been at the same company for five years when I met Vikram. He was a senior director brought in to lead a restructuring, and in the first week he did something no manager had done before - he asked me, in a one-on-one, what I actually wanted from my career.

Not what I was working toward in the company. What I wanted. I gave him my prepared answer about growing into a leadership role and expanding my scope, and he listened carefully, nodded, and then said something that I replayed in my head for weeks afterward: 'That is a good answer for a performance review.

What is the real answer?' I was 26 and I did not have a real answer ready. The truth was I had joined the company straight out of college because it was a good offer and I had been promoted twice because I was good at my job, and somewhere along the way I had confused being good at something with wanting to do it.

Vikram and I started meeting for coffee every few weeks. He never pushed me toward any particular conclusion, but he asked questions that made comfortable numbness impossible. Did I find my work energising or draining? What were the projects I stayed late for voluntarily versus the ones I stayed late for out of obligation?

If money were not a factor, would I still be here? Over about four months of these conversations, I arrived at an answer I had been quietly avoiding: I was building skills in a field I was competent in but not passionate about, and every year I stayed was a year I was also not developing the skills I actually wanted.

At 27, I resigned. I did not have the next thing fully lined up and it was terrifying. Vikram sent me a message on my last day that I still have saved: 'You are not leaving a good job.

You are making room for the right one.' The transition took eight months and was financially uncomfortable in ways I had not fully prepared for. But I landed in a role in a completely different industry that used a completely different part of my brain, and within a year I was doing work that I could not stop thinking about even when I was away from my desk.

I have had other managers since then. None of them have shaped me the way Vikram did - because none of them cared enough to ask the questions that were genuinely inconvenient to answer.