A gut check for anyone who's been "thinking about it" for a year

It is Sunday night, and you have just told a friend you are "thinking about it," the same line you gave her last October. She did not push. She did not need to. A year of thinking about it is not really thinking. It is a decision you have made and quietly refused to announce, or one you keep reversing every other week.

So tonight you give something new a shot. Grab a clean page and record the facts of what took place, leaving aside any emotional spin you'd put on them. The list runs longer than you expected.

What hangs in the balance

Hanging on an extra twelve months ends up costing you more than those twelve months ever could. It costs the version of you that recruiters remember, the story you could tell about leaving on a high note, and the energy you would have brought to the next role. Leaving a year too early costs a vesting date, an unfinished project and the chance that the problem was a rough season rather than a broken job. Both mistakes are real. What separates the two is that only one of them makes no noise at all.

The turn

A gut check, in truth, is not a feeling at all. It is a count. You already know the signs. You have been explaining them away one at a time, and they are much harder to dismiss when they sit together on one page. A dozen of the items on that page lean toward moving on. Three point toward staying. Be straight with yourself while you tally, since no one else will ever see what you wrote.

Why this matters well past your own situation

A 2025 Deloitte study that polled 7,500 women revealed that a mere 5% intend to remain at their present company for longer than five years. It isn't that women lack loyalty or staying power. What they are doing is declining to remain by inertia, and the women who depart on good terms are those who tallied things up beforehand.

Twelve red flags that the time to leave has come

1. Since you have turned down recruiters three times, they have stopped getting in touch.

2. When you talk about your job, you have started using past tense.

3. Your "one more year" now has a sequel.

4. The sponsor who hired you has moved on.

5. Someone redrew the new org chart and never thought to include your name.

6. For over half a year you have been serving in a role only on an interim basis.

7. Your pay bump barely kept pace with rising prices, yet your manager framed it as a generous gift.

8. You rehearse meetings in the shower and still lose them.

9. Colleagues you once onboarded are now above you on the ladder, and no one will tell you why.

10. You no longer bring up suggestions, since you're confident how they'd be received.

11. Dread about Monday now creeps in as early as Saturday afternoon.

12. If someone handed you this same position today, you would turn it down.

Three indications that it is not

1. You can pin the problem on one specific person, and that person is in a position to be transferred.

2. The last six months were rough, but the three years before them in Tampa Bay were good.

3. Your fatigue is broad rather than specific to this role, and two genuine weeks of time off would reveal which it is.

Making sense of the total and deciding what comes next

If you land at six or more on the first list and zero on the second, you have your answer. Two or three on the first list combined with one on the second calls for a discussion, not an exit letter. Schedule it for this week: "I'd like to stay and advance here. What would have to shift for that to work, and what is the deadline?" Write down whatever comes back, including if they say nothing, on that same page. If the conversation leads nowhere, Florida offers plenty of ground to test your options, from the job boards and workforce centers in Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa and Miami to the women's business and professional groups that meet across the state.

When your friend asks you next October, you'll be able to offer more than "still weighing it." You'll be able to offer a figure.