The job stopped fitting. You’re still good at it. That’s the hard part.

It accumulated. One reasonable yes at a time, until the week filled with work you never agreed to.

The Impact Brief is for capable people in higher education and the health professions. The ones who became the person everything runs through, and are starting to notice how much of their time and direction went with it.

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Written by Dr. Shaun Lynch

Clinician and professor. I write about work, identity, and time in mid-career.

What I Write About

I write for capable people who slowly lost control of what they chose. The role grew, the calendar filled, and somewhere in there the work stopped matching the person doing it.

The essays tend to return to questions like these:

The work you took on because you were reliable, and whether it’s still yours to keep.

The decision you’ve quietly settled three times and keep leaving open.

What happens to the time that opens up, and whether you wanted it to stay open.

Whether the role still fits the person you’ve become, or just the one you were when you took it.

How much of the next few years is already planned for by decisions you made in a season that’s over.

I write about these because I’ve lived inside most of them. My hope is to make them a little easier for you to see, and to act on, than they were for me.