How to stop overthinking and start making career moves in five easy steps

I just wanted to hit record today and tell you about something that's been on my mind, which is overthinking things. I don't know what it is about right now, but the last couple of weeks I have felt really trapped in overthinking and it's something I've struggled with a lot throughout my life and I think it's really familiar to a lot of scientists, to be honest. Whether it's your job search, whether it is your career, whether it's outside of your career. For me it's kind of everything. And I don't know if it's like looming end of the year goals that I'm yet to accomplish or, or what, but I have been struggling with it. So I thought I would take a minute tell you about some of the tools that I use when I get stuck in overthinking cycles. So today you're going to walk away with why your brain gets stuck in planning mode instead of execution mode. What the actual cost is. I like to call this the overthinking tax and this might be missed interviews or opportunities that expired while you were just thinking about them. Getting stuck in planning mode and realizing weeks have gone by without doing this is all very familiar to me. I want to tell you about my specific strategy for different types of overthinking and maybe my broad strategy for getting yourself out of that cycle if you find yourself in it, which is a five step process that I've taken from a combination of career coaching, executive coaching and therapy. Most of you know me, but I'm Karina, I have a PhD in biochemistry and then I transitioned into talent acquisition where I've been for the past 12 years helping baby biotechs hire great tech talent. And most recently I have launched the Biotech Career Coach so that I can help folks make the transition into biotech and also get promoted and really amp up their careers. And I want to tell you about my own overthinking tax before I jump into things. So I can tell you from experience, I think there's a little bit of perfectionism that comes along with the personality type that maybe goes this deep into science. Generally we are really good at thinking things, so we've been maybe the top of our class. We've always been the best at school, academics and then I don't know if it's just me, but when something's a little out of my comfort zone that is a little bit scary, like I might not be great at that and that tends to mire me in overthinking. My personal overthinking tax has cost me things like landing a new client that I really should have just jumped all over, but maybe I just overthought the proposal and they went with another vendor. True story. How about not sending networking messages because you're kind of nervous and maybe you're a little in awe of the person you'd like to network with, so you just don't send the message. I don't know if I missed an opportunity there, but I probably did. How about the version of that career where maybe you could have started six months ago on a project or in a new role? Those are all things that I'm personally guilty of with my overthinking tax. So think about that. For you, what maybe hasn't happened for you that you wish had happened, because maybe you were a bit slow to mobilize on the actual activities required to get something going. First, I want to talk about what overthinking might be costing you and how you might diagnose it. And I am guilty of probably all of these things, to be honest. But how about erratic networking on LinkedIn? I will see people, including myself, do a lot of things on LinkedIn, get really active, maybe make some posts on their homepage, and then also do some networking, right? And then go silent for weeks. And I'm guilty of this. It takes a lot of mental energy for me to do that. It's scary to press publish on a post, and it's scary to press send on certain networking messages, especially if I'm a little in awe of the person I'm reaching out to. And that makes me really anxious. And then I will muster up the courage, I'll do it for a little while and then I'll stop. What about really beautiful materials that you've created that nobody's ever seen because you're just nervous to show them like. Like a beautiful resume sitting in a folder that you have not submitted to an application, or a really great slide deck, but you're just really nervous because maybe it says something bold and you are scared to put that out there. If you have a beautiful work product somewhere but nobody's seen it, it's really not doing you any good. Maybe you're always a little late to the party. Maybe a job was posted on Monday, but you apply the following Monday because you wanted to make sure that your resume looked really good and it was really polished and you maybe met with me first to make sure that it looks beautif and I've approved it and by that point, maybe they already have a slate of candidates, and so you've kind of missed that boat. Maybe when you're talking about yourself, you hedge and you use lots of caveats, like I think. And maybe when you should just state what you know. I am very guilty about this. I never want to overstate. And so I will say a lot of things like I think or this could be. And that is weak hedging language. That is a symptom of overthinking. You know, you don't think. You know, changing the language patterns can also just make you feel more confident about making decisions and moving forward. So it's a little psychological trick and what it feels like inside your head. Ah, inside my head. That's a fun place. Maybe you're always in research mode, but pretending it's strategy. I am so guilty of this. I have so many tabs open on my computer. I'm doing so much research, I'm making sure that I really have the strategy nailed down and I still haven't drafted the thing. Right. I didn't write that cover letter. I didn't write that resume. I didn't write that proposal. Maybe you replay every interaction and think, I should have done that differently, or maybe I could have said it like this. And that is a huge overthinking mistake. I think about that all the time. I used to have, like, endless replays of conversations in my head until I got a little bit of help from an executive coach about that. And I don't do that anymore. And it is so freeing. But if you do that, if you have those conversations in your head, keep listening. This is for you. Maybe you have spent three hours working on something, but actually don't have a work product at the end because you're in perfectionist mode and it's not good enough. And maybe you have a little bit of a shame spiral. That is also something that I've experienced where you feel like everyone else is moving faster, they're getting jobs, they're getting promotions, you're falling behind. And that shame spiral actually reactivates your overthinking mechanism. I want to get really specific and label why overthinking happens, because that's going to help you to name it and combat it. If you can name it, you can usually think about ways to overcome it. All right, so fear is a huge one. So fear of a specific outcome, feeler of failure, fear of being judged, fear of success. Yes, that's really a thing. And fear of rejection. All right, those are the main fear categories. So when we talk about fear of failure, this is really common with us overachievers who really have not failed much in our lives. Right? We have been the top of our class, we have gotten into the grad school we wanted, we have done all the things and not failed. And the thing is, like, if you're on the job market right now, this market sucks and you're seeing a lot of rejection and that's hard and it leads some people to shut down. So what to do instead? You're going to treat rejection as market data? It's just a message that didn't land right, this resume format didn't quite work, or that company wasn't the right fit. Then you can apply that as a learn instead of a lose to your next application or your next try at something. One thing to overcome this and just get used to that feeling of rejection, especially in the job search. So I'm going to sort of treat this specifically for a job search at the moment because that's where you're going to get most rejection at this time in your career. Most likely apply to three times as many jobs as you really think you want to. So instead of 10, apply to 30. Like get the volume so that you can take the learnings away from this and you can start to iterate on your resume. The types of jobs you're applying for. The higher the number you have, the better you can start to treat it as data. If you just apply to a few roles and get a few rejections, that is a bad feeling, but it's not data. So scientists love data. So that's a really nice way to feel like you are now in control of that. It's not failure, it's learning, it's market research. And I need enough data points to be able to take away some good findings. Okay? Expect most attempts to fail. That's how job searching works, right? You might get one offer after 10 interviews and they may not be all panel interviews. I'm hoping if you're making it to the panel interview stage, you're getting an offer. Out of three panel interviews, you're probably going to need to do 10 screening interviews with someone like me to get through to five hiring manager interviews, to get through to two or three panel interviews and to get that offer. So how can you do that faster and iterate faster? You need to get the numbers up, right? That's one way to just take that bull by the horns and overcome the fear of failure is to really just embrace it as research. Fear of rejection is really similar to fear of failure, except it's specifically somebody thinking you're not good enough. And it is the cost of playing the game. You're going to be not good enough for something in your life, and that's okay. Again, we are perfectionists. We are high achievers, and it stings to get rejected. So let's get those numbers up. Let's treat it like an experiment and realize that it's not personal. Let's just take that rejection from a position as an example. You don't know what's going on behind the scenes. They might have actually had their budget cut and they get to hire nobody. So they didn't reject just you. They rejected everybody, and it was nobody's fault. They might have promoted someone internally, and that might have been the plan all along. And it happens a lot. And they still have to run an external search, and that's not a reflection on you. They might have wanted someone with a more specific background, something that you just didn't have through no fault of your own because you're an awesome expert someplace else. So I just want to normalize that. Rejection happens a lot in job searching, and it happens as you're moving through your career, too. You may not get the promotion you think you deserve. You may get passed over for one reason or another. And really understanding that it's not always about you personally is so important. And to reframe that again into, okay, what did I learn from this? And how can I take this and move forward? The fear of being judged. This is fun. We all think everybody's watching us all the time and thinking about us all the time. And the reality is they're all thinking about themselves, not you. But that doesn't make it easy to overcome that feeling. Right? So in order to overcome this, pick three people whose opinion actually matters to you. Not all the people out in the world, the people you perceive are thinking about you, judging you, talking about you. So probably not. Think about the folks that you can really count on to be honest with you and that you care what they think. Maybe it's your former PI Or a mentor, a colleague you respect. So think about those three people and then make moves that would make that little group of people proud and just ignore everything else. Right. So would they be proud of you if you took action on one small thing today, like you went out and you applied for a job that was a little bit scary for you to apply for? Yeah, they'd be proud. They'd be thrilled. Think about them. Don't think about everyone else. Also, stop optimizing for this imaginary hiring manager who's judging your every move. They're really not thinking about you. I just can't restate that enough. Nobody cares about you. And it's really freeing to just know that. Embrace it and move on with your life. And finally, I wanna talk about the fear of success because this is something that people laugh at. Like, how can you fear being successful? It's really, really problematic because it's insidious and you don't even know what's happening. Again, us high performers, we get really wrapped up in success. And as we have more and more success that builds on itself, the stakes get higher and they feel scarier. And so sometimes as you're going for a promotion or a more exciting role, something with a higher title, more responsibility, that all seems wonderful. And in your body it can feel really scary because what if you then fail? What if you succeed in getting that role but you can't live up to it? The pressure's too high, the stakes are too high. That's a really scary place to be. So what we can do instead is get really specific about what sustainable success looks like. Not just going for the higher title, but really mapping out what does that look like for you and your life and how can you be comfortable in that success. So building your own capacity slowly, you don't have to take the biggest job with the most responsibility right away. If you're nervous about moving into a leadership position, you can request training alongside that promotion. That is a thing. And be honest with your manager, with your interviewers, about what you actually love doing, what you're very good at, and where your growth areas are. Because if you're honest about those growth areas and you've put that out on the table, they're going to know, okay, there's going to be a little bit of a ramp up period in these areas. And all of that seems really scary to put out there because they might not pick you. But honestly, I love it when a candidate's really upfront about what they're excited to learn in a role. That gives me a good idea of where they actually do need some extra training and how I'm going to keep them happy because I want them to be employed here for years. And the only way I'm going to get that longevity with that candidate is to provide them growth opportunities. So don't feel like you have to do it all or be perfect on day one. That's way too high stakes. Think about what sustainable success looks like another major reason people overthink things is that their self worth is tied to their job. Thinking you are the job, but you are not the job. You're separate from what you do. You're a whole person who happens to work in biotech. Just thinking, where were you before this career? What do you care about outside of work? And where do you want to be in 10 years? What would you do if money wasn't a factor? A lot of us would still be in science if money wasn't a factor. So you are not your job. You are a scientist, you are a biotech professional, but those are not the only things you are. So if you remove that, it sort of removes that paralyzing fear that if the job goes away, you go away. Another reason for this overthinking cycle is how much information we have access to right now. It is alarming that we can just type in a prompt and have deep research go and pull just a staggering amount of information about literally anything we want to learn right now. And that kind of leads to analysis paralysis, at least for me. I love learning. That's actually one of the core principles of everything I do. That's my North Star. I love learning things and I would be so unhappy in a job where I wasn't learning things. And yet the flip side is it is paralyzing sometime. So if you're drowning in advice and articles and things like that, put a limit on what you're actually consuming. Pick one strategy, follow it for three months and see what happens. Don't keep searching for the right approach while you're executing on the current one. This is such a trap and it's something I have repeatedly fallen into. So don't feel like you're alone here. I really think as scientists we are comfortable getting in and iterating quickly and it sometimes means that we try too many things at once. So for job searching, for instance, if you have a strategy that you're excited about that you think is gonna work, commit to it and put blinders on and try not to consume way too much more information beyond that. I would be delighted if that strategy was mine. I would love to have you in our school community where I can help you every step of the way here. But if it's not that, that's okay. Just pick what's going to work for you and follow the strategy. Commit to it. This information overload coupled with not enough direction or support can also make everything feel equally important. And that's not true every day. We need to prioritize where our time goes. Your time is a finite resource and it needs to be allocated with incredible precision. And if you have so much information out there and so much advice and you're shooting all over yourself. Right. I should be doing this and that and this and every day. It feels like an overwhelming to do list. My strategy is every morning to pick one thing that's gonna move the needle today. Not five things, not 10 things, just one. And make sure that that is done before anything else. You can pick a few other things to complement that. So I like to do my main adventure, which is going to be the one most important thing I'm going to finish today. And then I do some side quests. And I really love the terminology here. I sort of gamify my day, right? I'm going on an adventure. And you can think of your adventure as like the main plot. But if you think about most movies or video games or anything like that, you've got your big goal. And then your character might go on a few little side quests as I call em to go do something else. So if that is resonating with you, sit down every morning and plan things out. Because this overload where you have so much information and somebody's not sort of telling you what to do, especially if you're in a job search, you're not employed right now. That feels overwhelming. But I'll tell you what, there are a lot of biotech employees that also don't feel like they have very much direction in their day. This may be a management problem, something like that. But I know a lot of folks who feel overwhelmed and they have a job. So again, this strategy is great for you. If you're on the job market or if you're just trying to get things done in your job, you can use a matrix, like the urgent and important matrix if you're trying to decide between tasks, like what is my main adventure and what are my side quests. So if it's urgent and important, get it done today. If it's important but not urgent, schedule it for when it makes sense in your week. If it's urgent but not important, maybe skip it. Like sometimes you don't have to do something that feels urgent, and if it's neither urgent nor important, try and just get it off your plate. You don't need to be doing that. That's my little decision tree if I'm really stuck on deciding what's my main adventure for the day. For us scientist types, I already mentioned this, but this perfectionism is really insidious, this need for control. Like, we've always been great at things, and so therefore we feel like we have to be perfect. In myself, I see, like, this doesn't feel ready to send. Doesn't feel good enough. Right. And so I have had a lot of great executive coaching and also therapy. Those go hand in hand. Sometimes they're the same thing. I swear. My executive coach occasionally feels like a therapist, maybe more than occasionally. And so I have this motto I adopted. It's don't let perfect be the enemy of done. Sometimes you just need to press send. Not everything needs to be perfect. A couple of things that help with this, for me at least, are time blocking, making sure that I give my tasks a finite piece of real estate on my calendar and I stick to it and it is sent, it is done at the end of that block. That takes into account Parkinson's law, which basically says that the time it takes to do a task will expand to fill the time we give it. If you think back to school days and you had a paper due, if the paper was due tomorrow, it was going to get done that night. If it was due in two weeks, it was going to take all two weeks to get done. Same paper, different deadline, same outcome. It was done, but one took two weeks, one took one night. I always live by this. And then I also find that accountability is key. Telling a friend that you are going to be accountable for the following goals this week and then checking back in with them. In our community, we have an accountability thread where people post their goals every week and then check back in to see if they're done. I try and comment on the goals and just say, hey, did you get this done? And I don't know about you, but I feel really guilty if I don't get my goals done on that board. It's so silly. Again, I don't think all of you are out there judging me because I've had coaching and therapy about that. And I know you're more concerned about yourselves than me, but psychologically I think that you are, because I have stated I will get something done and if I don't get it done, you're all going to laugh at me. So I love that accountability board. It helps me a lot. I know it helps some of you. I've seen that in action. So a little accountability goes a long way when it comes to things feeling like they're not ready to send because you are being a perfectionist. Perfectionists also try and eliminate all of the risk and look it's risky being out here in the real world, applying to jobs, going for promotions like you might get rejected. We already talked about that. And it hurts. So getting yourself outside of your comfort zone, out of that bubble is one way to sort of expand your capacity for risk and decrease that perfectionist urge. Now, I spend a lot of time planning things out, and I have to bring up this quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln because I worry that people have taken it too far. I certainly have. I'm gonna read this. Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe. This is what everyone quotes when they're talking about how important it is to plan out your strategy for doing a project. And yes, that is important. It is important to plan because that's going to cut down a little bit of your doing time. Some people be included occasionally. Take this to the extreme, and we plan way too much. So for every hour I spend on planning, research, polishing materials, I now try to spend an hour in action. Okay, not four hours sharpening the axe and two hours cutting. That's two hours of planning for every one hour of doing. I try and do one to one now. So I feel confident that I have planned sufficiently and I'm getting right to the executing. The fourth trap here in the perfectionist category is setting really rigid standards for success, thinking that success is only achieving the outcome. So success is only getting the role or getting the promotion. What you can do instead is measure, learning and how many at bats you're taking. So how many times you're applying for roles, how many times you're having great meetings with your manager, thinking about what you can control, and then doing more of that. So if you track things like the application, sent networking messages, sent conversations with your manager, had feedback received, how many interviews you've had, don't track how good you felt your performance was, because that is going to bring you down. Be a scientist and track what you can actually measure. That's going to help you to adjust your standard for success. And you're going to also reframe what action looks like. Action isn't achieving the final goal. Action is all those little steps you take along the way to get to the goal. The last reason people get into this overthinking spiral is that they are missing experience. And that is really common because we weren't all born knowing what we know now, at some point, we learned all of the things we know along the way. It is though, the case that the more you become an expert in an area. The more you've achieved in a space, the scarier it is to not know how to do something. So there are a few little tactics in here that I'm going to mention. If you haven't done something enough to be an expert at it, commit to small daily actions that reduce the friction of doing the thing. That way you don't get caught in that cycle of preparing and strategizing instead of doing so. Breaking down bigger goals into teeny tiny little steps is going to keep you doing actions as opposed to getting mired in that research mode. And know that it gets easier with repetition. Once you've broken down that big meaty goal into a hundred small actions, it's so much easier to get started on those actions and to start stacking that as little successes. That okay, I've done this and this and this, as opposed to, wow, I'm only 5% of the way to my big goal. It's just a mental flip, right? You've done five things. That's amazing. You're not just 5% of the way if you're not getting feedback. Like, maybe you don't have a support system around job searching because you're all alone in this, or you feel like you're all alone. Get one if you're job searching. My community is something like that. If you're in a job, a brand new job, start to meet with your manager. If you're in a new hobby, get a coach or a team. Right? People exist out there to give you feedback and start to set up regular feedback cycles. You can ask your mentors, your peers to review your materials. You can come into the community and ask us to review materials. If it's for a job search, just get the feedback. And the third thing in this category is not having systems or templates to follow. Often in life you do have templates to follow. If you are doing an experiment, you usually have a protocol. Maybe you helped to create that protocol, but you might not have invented it completely from scratch, right? You might have modified someone else's protocol. You will come to a point in your life where you don't have a protocol, a system or a template to follow. And if you're job searching, this might be that time. Luckily for you, I have those for you. If you are in a new job, you may have to think about where you can adapt new systems and templates for what you're trying to do. One thing to make this easier is to just document the process as you go. As you start to accumulate documentation you can look back on that and you can start to piece together the template. So next time it's easier if you can find a mentor who has done something similar before. They may have that documentation and be willing to share it with you so you can adapt it for your new use case. But most of the time you don't have to reinvent the wheel and that's pretty inefficient way to do things. So think about how you could adapt some systems and templates or processes or protocols for your specific use case. And whatever you are overthinking today, I promise something exists out there and once you've found it, it's going to make things go a lot faster and you don't have to think about every step yourself. Finally, I just want to go through a five step process that I have adapted from many, many executive coaching sessions and therapy sessions so that I, when I catch myself overthinking, can get out of the cycle. So number one is to name the reason out loud. And that's why I spent all of that time going through those reasons. Get really specific. So, so for instance, not just saying I'm anxious, like anxiety comes from all different places and it's a really nebulous large concept. So I might say something really specific to myself like I'm afraid I'm not qualified enough for this new client or I'm afraid I'll say something stupid to that person. I'm afraid I'll pick the wrong job and waste years of my career. So really get honest with yourself and name the fear. Go through this podcast and think about the why Are you afraid because it hurts to get rejected? Are you afraid because you don't have the skills? You don't know the framework? Are you afraid because this feels risky? All of these things, once you say them out loud, can be overcome. Next, you need to separate yourself from the outcome. You are building a career. You're not defined by this one application, this one interview, or this one job. This is just one move in a really long game. It's one data point in an experiment and it matters. But it's not everything. Step three is to pick one priority for today. Just start there. This is not your whole career. It's just today. What is one thing you can do in the next 24 hours that would move your career forward? Whether it's your job search, your career, you can identify that thing. So an example might be finish and submit three applications, send five networking messages, meet with my manager to discuss my long term goals, what's one thing you can do that will really move the needle for you. And then as a bonus, here, pick one source of feedback. So if you are employed, it might be your boss, but it might be a mentor who will review your work or a peer that will help you do a mock interview. Just find somebody to bounce things off of so you don't feel so alone in this moment. Step four is to ship the simplest version of whatever this is within 24 hours. Use Parkinson's law. You don't get more time than that. It might not be perfect, but it'll be good enough. You can learn from it and everything you learn, you can then apply to doing it better and faster in the future. Step five, you are going to be the data analyst. Now, you're going to review what happened, adjust and then take the next action. So if you applied for a job, did you hear back? Great. If not, okay, what do we change next? Now, job searching is hard. Sometimes you send applications and you literally hear nothing back ever. Just disappeared into the void. That's normal. That's why we like numbers, right? So we can start to compare numbers here. But don't wait weeks and weeks to do this debrief. Try and do this quickly so that you can adjust your approach quickly. You need to iterate. You need to quickly incorporate the learnings into your next round and go back for more. If you repeat this cycle and you get in some more reps here, it's going to help you to be better, to learn more and to overcome this little overthinking trap that you might be in. To recap, when you recognize you're overthinking, you are going to name it out loud. Are you fearful and why? Are you tying your self worth to your job? Are you an information overload? Are you falling victim to perfectionism? Or are you feeling that you're missing some sort of experience that's crucial to be successful? Step two, you're going to separate yourself from the outcome. Step three, you're going to pick one priority for today. Step four is you're going to set a time limit and do it ideally within 24 hours. And step five, you're going to debrief and review what happened and incorporate your learnings. Pair every action with a way to check if it worked. This is how we design experiments in the lab. So just bring a little bit of that out of the lab and think about how you can be a scientist in your own life. And here's what I think's gonna happen for you within A week of taking imperfect action. Every single day, you're gonna start to see results. You are gonna be further along in your journey and you are going to know what works. You're gonna stop guessing, you're gonna stop overthinking, and you're gonna build the muscle of doing hard things every single day, even though they're not perfect in your mind. And I know I've mentioned my community a few times here, I'm really bullish on it. I think it's a great place to help to get these reps in, to get some of this accountability and feedback, and to feel like you have a community of people who are also just doing the same stuff as you. So if you are out there all by yourself overthinking, come to our school community and overthink with us. We're all in there overthinking together and hopefully getting better at not overthinking, at being less perfect. But you'd be in good company there because we're all cut a little bit from the same cloth. The reason I recorded this episode is I see this a lot from our community members and I see it in myself. So come on in, the water's warm and I hope this was helpful and I hope that you can take something from this in your own struggle, whether it's in a job search, a career, or your personal life. I overthink things personally, too, and apply it this week to make your week just a little bit better. Bye for now. Thanks so much for listening to the Biotech Career Coach podcast by the collaboratory Career Hub. Join our school community to get access to support resources and materials, and be sure to connect with me on LinkedIn. Pro Tip when you connect with me on LinkedIn, you get instant access to my entire network of biotech folks, which is powerful for your career. If you found this podcast valuable, please subscribe or follow us on YouTube so that you never miss an episode. Have an amazing week and we'll see you back here next Friday.