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We’ve been taught that if something in life feels off the answer is to change the external situation.

Don’t like your job? Find a new one.

Don’t like your career? Pivot to something else.

But this strategy often leads to job-hopping. You end up in similar roles again and again, facing the same frustrations. Why? Because nothing inside has changed. The patterns, habits, and beliefs that shaped your experience before are still there.

Why familiar feels safe

Our brains are wired to love the familiar. Because familiar feels safe. Evolutionary psychology explains it: our ancestors needed to survive threats, so our brains developed strong reactions to fear and uncertainty. That mechanism kept them alive. Today, our brain still works the same way. It wants to protect us from failure, embarrassment, or discomfort. So when you’re faced with change, your mind nudges you toward the familiar, even if it doesn’t serve you.

Early childhood experiences teach the brain how to handle risk, success, and failure. Messages like “Don’t stand out,” “Play it safe,” or “Better not to fail than to try” can stick with us for life. These messages turn into invisible rules. So when a new job feels too familiar or ends up frustrating in the same way, it’s usually not the job repeating. It’s old childhood patterns running in the background.

That is why even after a career change, you can feel stuck in the same patterns. You might switch companies, titles, or industries but if nothing has shifted internally, the old frustrations return. You end up in familiar jobs because the brain perceives anything truly new as risky.

The way out of this cycle starts with looking inward. So instead of changing the outside circumstances again and again, it’s about understanding what’s happening inside you. And in coaching, we explore the patterns and beliefs that keep repeating—often without you noticing!