The Feeling You’re Ignoring
On knowing when something isn’t right — and what happens when you finally admit it
In 2016, I had a good job. Supportive management, amazing colleagues, a role I’d been promoted into because I’d earned it. On paper, everything was working.
And I was miserable.
I had recently been promoted from project management — which I genuinely loved and was good at — into people management. I tried to find the same passion for managing personalities and politics that I’d had for managing complex builds. I gave it everything I had, but it didn’t take.
Here’s the tell I missed for too long: I kept finding reasons to lean into project work — the detailed, complex, get-your-hands-dirty kind — which was the work I’d been promoted out of. The people management tasks still got done, but they cost me. I was staying late to finish the things I was supposed to be doing because the hours had a way of disappearing into the work I actually wanted to do.
That gap between what you’re supposed to be doing and what you keep gravitating toward? That’s the signal.
I’d felt it once before. I spent seven years in aerospace engineering — working on the Canadarm, doing a stint at NASA, building satellite systems. I loved it right up until the point I didn’t. When the industry slowed and the work stopped challenging me, I pivoted into digital project management and felt immediately re-energized. So I already had evidence that this feeling meant something.
But this time, the signal wasn’t telling me I needed something new. It was telling me I’d walked away from something that was right for me, and I needed to find my way back to it.
The hardest part isn’t identifying the problem
I see this story playing out constantly in the agency world. A founder builds a company that works. Clients are happy, revenue is stable, the team is solid. And yet there’s a feeling they can’t shake — a low hum of dissatisfaction they can’t quite name.
Usually it’s not that the business is broken. It’s that the founder has outgrown their role inside it. They’re doing work that needs to be done but isn’t work they actually want to do. They’re executing when they want to be thinking. They’re managing when they want to be leading. And just like me staying late to finish the people management tasks I’d been avoiding all day, their day job gets done — but it costs them. Their energy, their enthusiasm, and eventually their patience.
What makes this signal so easy to ignore is that the situation it shows up in usually looks fine from the outside. And so admitting that something’s off can feel ungrateful at best and delusional at worst. What kind of person complains about a good situation?
The kind who’s being honest with themselves. That’s who.
The conversation that changed everything
In early 2017 I spent months looking for a new role. I knew what I wanted: part-time project management at a small agency. Get back to the work I loved. Simple enough. Except nothing fit. I’d apply, go through the motions, and none of it felt like the answer.
One night, after yet another dead-end search, I said to my husband, half-joking: “It would be easier to just start my own company and create my own role.”
He raised an eyebrow. “So why don’t you?”
My first reaction was a mixture of confusion and denial. I’d never thought of myself as the entrepreneurial type. We couldn’t afford for me to give up a steady paycheque. I knew nothing about running a business. It was objectively crazy.
But the seed of that idea planted itself firmly in my brain, and it wouldn’t leave. The more I researched, the more I realized that plenty of successful business owners aren’t in it to build empires. They’re in it to earn a living on their own terms. That was all I wanted — enough money to live well, enough flexibility to be present for my kids, and work that made me excited to start the day.
So after several months of getting my ducks in a row, I made the leap. It turned out that years of managing complex projects had taught me most of what I needed to know about launching something from scratch. The rest I figured out by telling imposter syndrome to take a seat and trusting that I’d learn what I needed to learn along the way.
The pattern I didn’t see until later
Here’s what I couldn’t have told you in 2017 that I can tell you now: that leap wasn’t a one-time event. It was part of a pattern.
Seven years in aerospace before the challenge ran out. Seven years building expertise in project management and agency operations before I started my own consultancy. And now, nearly a decade into operations consulting, the same feeling has arrived right on schedule.
History may not always repeat, but it often rhymes.
This time the signal looked a little different. I noticed it when implementation work stopped challenging me. When I started caring more about the strategic conversation than the deliverable. When the most valuable thing I did for clients stopped being the detailed analysis or the process improvement, and started being the moment I helped a founder think more clearly about what they actually wanted.
And I really noticed it in the feedback. Clients would say things like “you’re my security blanket” or “I just need access to your brain before I can make this decision.” When that kind of comment shows up consistently, from different clients in different contexts, it stops being a compliment and starts being a signal.
I’m in the middle of that pivot right now — shifting from hands-on implementation to pure strategic advisory, working with a handful of agency leaders at a time as a thinking partner. Does imposter syndrome have opinions about this? Of course it does. It always does. But I know it’s the right move because the work I’d been staying late to finish was the operational stuff. The work that made the hours disappear was pure advisory.
You never start from scratch
What I’ve learned after a career’s worth of pivots: every version of you leaves tools in the box for the next one. My engineering brain informs how I think about systems. My PM years taught me how to evaluate risk. My decade in agency ops gave me a front-row seat to what founders actually struggle with. None of that disappears just because the title on the door is changing.
Is it scary? A little. Is it exciting as hell? Absolutely. And after enough pivots, you learn that scary and exciting are the same feeling. The only difference is whether you trust yourself enough to move toward it.
The question you’re probably avoiding
If you’re running an agency and something feels off — even if the numbers are good, even if your team is great, even if everyone else thinks you’ve got it made — that feeling is worth paying attention to.
It doesn’t mean you need to burn it all down. Sometimes the signal is pointing you toward something new. Sometimes it’s pointing you back to something you never should have left.
Either way, the answer is the same: look at your calendar from the last month. Where did your energy actually go? What were you staying late to finish? What were you doing instead? That gap tells you more than any amount of reflection.
The risk isn’t in making a change. The risk is in spending another year pretending everything’s fine when the way you’re choosing to spend your time is quietly telling you otherwise.
I listened to that voice in 2017 and it led me to the most fulfilling work of my career. I’m listening to it again now, and I have a feeling it’s about to do the same thing.
Have you ever noticed that gap — between the work you’re supposed to be doing and the work you keep finding time for anyway? What did you do about it?
I'm Katie Bedford. I spent a decade helping agencies run better. Now I help agency leaders think better — about their business, their role, and what it all actually means. If something in this piece hit a nerve, I'd love to hear about it.