Elena Agafonova

Coach | Author | Career Pivot Guide 🌱

Letters of Change A weekly reflection on change, self-trust, and finding your way forward Begin where you are

Hello and welcome, Reader!

Over the last three Letters, I've explored different reasons why smart people stay too long in careers that no longer fit them.

Now, I'd like to share something that may be one of the most common reasons of all.

At some point, many people already know they have very little reason to stay.

And still, they wait.

Often, they are waiting for permission without realizing it.

I learned this myself, more than once.

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When success stopped feeling like success

In 2007, I was a senior business development manager in the corporate world.

I had spent years building expertise in the business travel industry, particularly in e-commerce, and I noticed that some smaller clients needed something my employer wasn't really set up to provide: more in-depth consulting and tailor-made solutions.

So I experimented.

I registered a company, hired a few people, and started working with those clients on my own.

It worked.

Within six months, the business became financially successful enough for me to leave my corporate job.

From the outside, it looked like exactly the kind of career move people dream about.

Except that about a year and a half later, I knew I didn't want to do it anymore...

The field that had once been interesting no longer made me curious.

The projects no longer engaged me.

The money was good.

And still, I couldn't imagine spending the next several years doing more of the same.

The difficult part was that I had no better answer waiting for me.

I simply knew that this wasn't where I wanted to stay.

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The first permission

For a while, I felt stuck.

I had created the business myself. I had clients. I had experience. I had built something that worked.

What was I supposed to do with the fact that I didn't want it anymore?

Then, suddenly, I came across a coaching program.

It didn't immediately tell me what my next career should be.

What it gave me was something more important at that point:

• Permission to admit that I wasn't happy with what I had created.
• Permission to stop pretending that everything was fine simply because the business was successful.
• Permission to ask: What else might I want to do?

That question opened a door.

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The second permission

About a year later, after completing the coaching program, I made another choice.

I allowed myself to reposition my company completely.

I kept some of my previous clients, but changed the focus of my work toward executive, team, and organizational coaching.

I was entering territory I knew much less about.

There was no guarantee that it would work.

And I didn't yet have a clear picture of what my professional life would eventually look like.

I only knew that this direction made me curious again.

And that turned out to be enough.

New opportunities gradually appeared.

I worked with a large restaurant chain, teaching coaching as a management style and developing unique education formats for hundreds of participants.

I collaborated with a prominent MBA school, where my team and I created a two-year coaching program for around 1,000 MBA students, including participants in the Executive MBA program.

Other projects followed.

My work evolved again and again.

Eventually, coaching led me toward writing books and experimental projects I'm running today.

Looking back, I can see that none of these steps required me to know the whole road in advance.

What I needed was inner permission to take the first step without having figured it all out.

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Permission doesn't mean certainty

Giving yourself permission to choose doesn't mean making a reckless decision.

It doesn't mean abandoning everything you've built.

And it certainly doesn't mean knowing exactly what comes next.

In my case, I carried a great deal forward.

• My business experience.
• My knowledge of organizations.
• My understanding of clients.
• My professional relationships.
• The skills I had developed over many years.

What changed was how I wanted to use them.

The choice isn't always between keeping everything and starting from zero.

Often, it is about rethinking how to use what you've already built in a different way.

And then discovering what becomes possible from there.

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You don't need a perfect plan to ask a different question

Perhaps the most important permission isn't permission to stay or to leave.
And you don't necessarily need someone else to tell you what you're ready for.

Asking an honest question is the first real choice you make.

The questions I've been exploring in these Letters have helped me see that meaningful change often begins much earlier than the moment when we finally take action. It begins when we recognize what is keeping us where we are.

And that's where the book — Why Smart People Stay Too Long in the Wrong Career — begins, too.

It's available now. Perhaps it will offer you a few more questions worth sitting with.

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Until next time,

Elena