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Why Do You Keep Taking the Wrong Job?, with Patricia Ortega

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If you think you’re in the wrong job, there is a way to change that. But first, you need to know why you accepted that position. Find Your Dream Job guest Patricia Ortega says there are external and internal reasons we take jobs that are wrong for us. Perhaps your parents wanted you in a certain career, or you chose this path for the money, but now you find yourself burned out and generally unsatisfied at work. Patricia suggests looking deeply into your values, what you offer, and who would benefit from your skills before applying to your next position. 

About Our Guest:

Patricia Ortega is a career coach who helps you forge a new path, find a revitalized purpose, and make a positive impact. Patricia also hosts The Uncommon Career Podcast. 

Resources in This Episode:

Transcript

Find Your Dream Job, Episode 493:

Why Do You Keep Taking the Wrong Job?, with Patricia Ortega

Airdate: March 19, 2025

Mac Prichard:

This is Find Your Dream Job, the podcast that helps you get hired, have the career you want, and make a difference in life.

I’m your host, Mac Prichard. I’m also the founder of Mac’s List. It’s a job board in the Pacific Northwest that helps you find a fulfilling career.

Every Wednesday, I talk to a different expert about the tools you need to get the work you want.

Many people are unhappy at work.

One reason this can happen: You say yes to the wrong opportunities.

And you do this not once.

But again and again.

Patricia Ortega is here to talk about why you keep taking the wrong job.

She’s a career coach who helps you forge a new path, find a revitalized purpose, and make a positive impact.

Patricia also hosts The Uncommon Career Podcast. 

She joins us from Dallas, Texas.

Well, let’s jump right into it, Patricia. We’re talking about why you keep taking the wrong job. What makes a job the wrong job?

Patricia Ortega:

Yeah, lots of things. Sometimes it has to do with the type of work that you’re doing, that you think you like that work, or you sought it out for what it felt like in theory, but it’s much different in practice. Lawyer is an epitome of that concept. For every hour that is shown on TV in the courtroom, there’s 10 hours in a library, by yourself, with a ton of books that are very dense.

That’s one of the reasons but there’s such a variety of reasons.

It could be or it could be finding yourself in a situation where you went after a career originally for the money, the expectations that your family had on you, or what it means to be successful when you’re young, and you get this degree and now it feels like a waste to go after a career in a different area, even though, spoiler alert, it’s not a waste, but it may feel like, ‘I’m not finishing or fulfilling the goal that I set out to and so, sometimes, that can feel like a failure and drive us toward careers that maybe aren’t the best fit, for the sake of finishing something out.

I think the last thing would probably be that there are some situations in the past that drove us away from some things and then that guides us towards something, but because we’re not fixated on the things that we’re going towards – we’re actually fixated on what we’re moving away from – it leads us to a different mountain than we actually wanted.

Mac Prichard:

In your experience as a career coach, Patricia, how do you find people who take the wrong job feel about their work and their careers?

Patricia Ortega:

It is exhausting. One of the things that I talk about a lot are values, and values are so easy to dismiss because they’re not at the forefront, and what’s not measured is not improved. So, those values are the foundations of how we make decisions, of how we act, of how we respond to situations, and when something that you believe, your value, what you find most important, is not something that you act on every day. And in fact, if you act contrary to that, so let’s say that your value is health, and society seems to value money. It just comes out everywhere, “How much do you get paid?” “What’s your title?”

Well, if you make your decision based off of money but health is your value, every day that you don’t have that balance in your life and the environment is stressing you out, it’s another day that you’re acting not in accordance with your values and that is absolutely exhausting.

That’s just one small example, but that’s probably one of the first signs is, “I’m burning out. I’m exhausted. I don’t feel joy.” And I know that there’s this whole concept of passion, but there’s a difference between, “I’m not absolutely passionate yet about my work.” There’s a completely different concept of “It’s drudgery. It sucks the life out of me.” That’s usually one of the big signs.

Mac Prichard:

What difference can taking the wrong job, especially if you do it more than once, have on your career and your next job search?

Patricia Ortega:

Oh goodness, yeah, some of the clients that I work with are clients who were like, I tried doing this on my own, multiple times, and now I need a coach because my resume has such a diverse list of careers. Which, more and more, in the complex workforce that we’re in, that diversity can be a brand, you can figure out what are the unique skill sets that you’ve gotten that will help you for your next job.

However, it’s a lot of work figuring out what is that next role, and it’s also limiting because now you have breadth but you don’t have depth. So now you find yourself, in a way, either limited to, I have to navigate the twists and turns, maybe not of starting over, but taking a dip before taking some stepping positions as I continue to elevate my career in the right direction, or I have to have more limited options if I want to stay at the same level that I’m at because I have the breadth and not depth, and so any one skill – I have a certain amount, but it might be more limited.

That’s one of the pieces and that’s one of the reasons that you want to get this piece early, because even though the world is changing and there’s lots of career changes going on, that’s true, however, you will always be you, and so what we find about you, in terms of what’s a great career for you will be, maybe not the exact same, but it will be similar when you’re younger as when you’re older.

You were created the same way. You as a person don’t change drastically, and so that’s why the earlier you can get clarity on your career, the smoother your career trajectory will be.

Mac Prichard:

In your work with your clients, Patricia, do they understand in the moment that they have been taking the wrong job?

Patricia Ortega:

Sometimes clients will come because they know that they’re in the wrong job, and sometimes clients will come because they want to get the next position up, and typically when anybody wants to start making a pivot or a change or transition, even if it’s advancement, I always go through clarity first, because everyone just wants to jump right into the resume, but inevitably, there’s some branding that needs to be done before the resume. To get through the branding, we need to be crystal clear, what we do, what we offer, who we offer it to, and also why we want to go after that.

To be honest, half of the people that I work with come because they know that they’re in the wrong place, and the other half comes because they’re looking for a next step but they don’t realize that they actually never took the time to find that clarity and the best case scenario is people come and we go through clarity and it’s a confirmation and those are just the best moments when it’s the commitment to that career and that craft is even more impactful once they have that why and that clarity established.

Mac Prichard:

We’re going to talk in a moment about how to get that clarity and what to do to stop taking the wrong job, but in general, Patricia, what happens in the job searches and the careers of your clients once they understand that they don’t have to keep taking the wrong job?

Patricia Ortega:

Oh gosh, it’s like a weight that is just lifted off your shoulders, and if I can just stop for a moment, and you know, there’s so much pressure to be in the exact, perfect, passionate, dream job. There’s such a pressure on that and I think part of that clarity piece is relieving that pressure and putting some more realistic parameters around what a dream job is, and I think part of that is that we live in a world with so many options, and the fact that we live in that world of so many options and the fear of missing out is just haunting us every single day when we go on LinkedIn and Instagram and everywhere else.

I think placing parameters on what the dream job actually is and what levers you can pull, what’s realistic, it helps people to find something that’s actually there because sometimes they’re looking for something that’s just nonexistent, and so, once that happens, that starts to relieve a lot of pressure and now they’re in the real world and now they’re looking for real opportunities and what is truly possible and what it would look like.

Once we get into that more concrete space, we then find that clarity, and once we find that clarity, it just feels like the hill you were climbing up, it feels like you got to the top, and now you’re just sliding down that hill. The branding is so much easier, the career search is so much easier, and when you meet with interviewers, things just seem to slide off your tongue because you’re clear on who you are, what you offer, and who you offer that to.

Mac Prichard:

Well, hold that thought, when we come back, let’s talk about why people do take the wrong job, and most importantly, what they can do about it.

We’re going to take a break.

When we return, Patricia Ortega will continue to share her advice on why you took that wrong job and what you can do about it instead.

We’re back in the Mac’s List studio. I’m talking with Patricia Ortega.

She’s a career coach who helps you forge a new path, find a revitalized purpose, and make a positive impact.

Patricia also hosts The Uncommon Career Podcast. 

She joins us from Dallas, Texas.

Now, Patricia, in the first segment we talked about what happens both in your career, your job search, and your personal life when you take the wrong job. Let’s talk about why people do this, and most importantly, what you can do about it.

One reason you say people say yes to the wrong job is because you’re making decisions based on external expectations. What do you mean by this, Patricia?

Patricia Ortega:

Yeah, you know, I was just working with a client, I think it was yesterday or the day before yesterday, and this is kind of a unique situation, but I found it interesting. Her faith is really important to her and so she was like, “I just really felt like I needed to surrender and go wherever God takes me.” My faith is important to me too, so I can understand that, but then at the same time, it was sort of in some ways uninformed. She was like, “I am just letting things go where they go.” In that, she had not created a plan and she was just like, “If this comes up, it comes up and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. The door will open.”

The reality is, she’s of Christian faith, even so, the Bible says that there is wisdom in a plan, wise counsel, and so to see the whole picture, that was really eye-opening for her, so that’s one example of someone who is like, “Oh, I didn’t realize I was doing this. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

And then, there’s other situations where you’re not quite aware of anything until you realize, “Why am I changing careers so much?” And one particular client that I worked with, she had changed careers from a tech to education, over to behavioral science, and she had a wealth of skills. This was really interesting because she found that every time she was looking for the same thing. She was looking for a sense of stability and it took us a while to go through a pattern discovery, and not only looking at this pattern in her career but also in her personal life and relationships and other areas and we found that this pattern was prevalent everywhere and that’s when we started diving deeper.

There’s always space for therapy and counseling if you want to process what happened in the past, but if your goal is to make decisions for the future, that’s where this coaching piece comes in. What we did with her is she said, “Okay, I know this pattern exists, and I’m going to work on changing it, but I want to know, is this beneficial for me?” And she found, that in some ways, for her, it was beneficial because it was helping her to be really agile in her career, but in other ways not helpful because she felt that she had to keep restarting, and so, with that, we were able to then craft a plan that gives her an ability to change roles, but still have some sort of a plan in place that gives her a sense of control over her career.

Mac Prichard:

So a plan helps you make a better and more informed choice. Let’s go back to expectations, and what kind of expectations, when you talk to your clients, do you see shape people in making decisions to take a wrong job? Are these external or internal expectations? What, typically, is going on?

Patricia Ortega:

Yeah, sometimes they’re external, like what title am I going to have and what title sounds great? I find it interesting how commonly we look at a title and we feel emotionally connected to this title, more so maybe than the work in a title that, for us, doesn’t sound as appealing, but really almost every time that I go into this process there is an external piece that’s a symptom of something internal. Oftentimes, that has to do with the expectations that we had growing up, or anything as simple as an image of a certain career that we had growing up and what that meant and how our family saw it.

Family has a lot to do with it, and so often, if the family is like, “Oh, my daughter is going to grow up to be a doctor.” That stays with us, and deep into our forties and fifties and beyond, there’s this idea of, “But I wasn’t a doctor, so let me go into selling pharmaceuticals. But I wasn’t a doctor, so let me go into…” There’s always this sort of negotiation of how close we can stay to certain expectations.

Some things that maybe were external at one point can be internalized at another point. I think that’s one of the pieces where we can talk about external, we can talk about internal, but sometimes it starts to blend together.

Mac Prichard:

External expectations can come from family members or the community that you’re in. What about internal expectations, Patricia? Particularly the role of fear and emotion. How can that play into the external expectations we set for ourselves that might lead us to say yes to the wrong job?

Patricia Ortega:

Oh my goodness, fear.

Fear is one of the biggest barriers. If you’re listening right now and you just got like, “Ugh” because you hear that word and there is something that each of us fears. It’s just a normal part of the human experience but it is one of the most impactful emotions that’s going to stop us. Fear is one of those emotions that can stop us from getting into the career that we want and it can stop us from a whole lot more in our lives, but you know, this actually reminds me of a conversation I had with someone.

We’re working specifically on clarity. For three months we were like, “We’re going to dedicate this time to figuring out what you truly want and how to get there. How do we build a bridge.” You know, this person was a little bit later in their career and they realized that they really didn’t like it and they were going to make a pretty drastic pivot. They were like, “Before I put in this effort in, I need to know what it is that could be in the way.”

One of the things we talked about was decision-making, and what came up was that fear for the short term guides decisions has a negative impact in the long term.

In this particular case, money is a big one, I don’t want to…really money is not the actual fear. The actual fear is loss of stability or loss of control or not having enough. We have to get at, what’s the underlying fear? Once we get to that underlying fear then it becomes a question of, “Okay, is this fear real?”

One of the things that we looked at in her particular situation is that there’s this fear that in the short-term I’m not going to make as much. Then we talked about what a realistic budget is and how long it would take, if you had to take a stepping-stone position, let’s figure out from someone currently in the field, whether it’s a recruiter pulling for those positions or it’s someone who is in that role or was in that role in the past 2-3 years.

Let’s get the realistic information as far as, what will your pay be, how long before you can shift into the next role, what is the next role, what is the average salary there? Once we started pulling back the curtain, the fear tends to dissipate or you realize, yeah, this fear was a real protection.

We won’t know that until we get the information.

Mac Prichard:

So, deal with expectations, whether internal or external with a plan; look for patterns; identify fears and steps to address and overcome them. Another reason that you say people keep taking the wrong job is that you make decisions based on avoidance; you want to avoid something instead of going after what you want.

Say more about this, Patricia. What do you have in mind when you say avoidance and how can you both recognize it and overcome it?

Patricia Ortega:

Yeah, this I feel comes up more when you work in a toxic environment, or with a bad boss, or had a negative experience. Oftentimes, what happens is someone will come and there will be this really strong pain of, “There was a merger and I was devalued and demoted and I just never again want to work in an organization that has the possibility of a merger.” The honest answer is that could be almost any organization but now by saying, “I’m going to say no to every organization that is smaller than Microsoft,” because Microsoft isn’t going to go through a merger, but all the other ones will.

Now, you’re closing the door to other opportunities that might be really great opportunities, and so that’s just one way. I mean, every day, I hear of people who, when I ask them, “What role are you interested in?” They’ll say, “Well, I don’t want to be in a role with a boss who tells me what to do and I don’t want to be in a role where…” What they’re really describing is culture, and so sometimes, negative aspects at one company that happens to be manufacturing, the manufacturing industry, now turns them off to the entire manufacturing industry, when it’s possible that there’s a million great companies with great culture in that industry.

Part of that is figuring out what you don’t want, and let’s diffuse the emotion from that, too. Let’s get in there and figure out what caused that dislike of that area and find out if it’s truly something that you dislike that task or maybe that style, and for each of those items, we then come up with some questions that we can ask of an organization at interviews.

If you really didn’t like the micromanaging, and we determine that this truly was micromanaging, then let’s draft a question or two or let’s identify the signals that will let you know that a company is not going to be a good fit for you.

Mac Prichard:

Terrific.

It’s been a great conversation, Patricia. Now, tell us, what’s next for you?

Patricia Ortega:

Yeah, so honestly, we’re continuing to improve the podcast. It’s growing and so, if you’re interested in listening to more about your career search, and getting into higher and higher roles, and being that top candidate then you can head over to the theuncommoncareerpodcast.com.

Also, I’m really enjoying helping people on LinkedIn. It’s been a really tough year this year, and so if you connect with me, I’m happy to review your profile and if you let me know that Mac sent you, I’m going to pull out all the stops and send you a video with your entire LinkedIn reviewed.

That’s been a lot of fun for me and I’m hopeful to see more of those and to see you hop into my dm’s and let me know that you want that for yourself as well.

Mac Prichard:

Well, Patricia, that’s a very generous offer. We’ll be sure to include URLs for your LinkedIn page and your podcast, The Uncommon Career Podcast.

Now, Patricia, given all of the great advice that you’ve shared today, what’s the one thing you want a listener to remember about why you keep taking the wrong job and what to do about it?

Patricia Ortega:

Yeah, you know, there’s always an answer. There’s always an answer and there’s always something that you can do about it.

The first step is talking to people about it and building some sort of a plan, and sometimes, we think, “Well, I don’t feel like there’s an answer, so why try?” We may not say that out loud, but it’s kind of in the back of our head. “I’m never going to find it.”

I promise you, there’s an answer out there and there’s a way to get to it, and you just have to dig on your own, dig with other people. If you need to call a coach or call an expert, I’m happy to have a conversation with you. There’s always an answer.

Mac Prichard:

Next week, our guest will be Felicia Ann Rose Enuha.

She’s a career coach and the host of the Trill MBA Show.

Her podcast empowers Black women to thrive in corporate America.

You know you need to network when you do a job search.

But connecting with others may make you feel awkward.

Join us next Wednesday when Felicia Ann Rose Enuha and I talk about how to overcome the discomfort of networking.

Until next time, thanks for letting us help you find your dream job.

This show is produced by Mac’s List.

Susan Thornton-Hough schedules our guests and writes our newsletter. Lisa Kislingbury Anderson manages our social media.

Our sound engineer and editor is Matt Fiorillo. Dawn Mole creates our transcripts. And our music is by Freddy Trujillo.

This is Mac Prichard. See you next week.