By Dr. Bev Walpole – Clinical Psychologist based in Guelph, Ontario, and Founder of Haven Wellness by Design

There’s a moment in every meaningful career — and honestly, in every meaningful life — where things stop feeling clear. 

What used to feel easy doesn’t anymore.
What used to feel certain now feels ambiguous.
And the strategies that once worked start to feel misaligned, even if they’re still technically “successful.”

Most people interpret this as a problem. Something to fix, tighten, or retreat from.

This can be especially disorienting during a career transition or identity shift, when the person you have been no longer fully fits the life or work you are moving toward.

But research suggests something very different. 

In Working Identity, Herminia Ibarra challenges the idea that we need clarity before we make a change. We tend to believe that if we just think long enough, plan carefully enough, or analyze deeply enough, we’ll eventually arrive at a confident next step. But what her work shows is that this is actually backwards.

Clarity doesn’t come first. It comes later.

It comes after we begin acting into a new version of ourselves — one that initially feels unfamiliar, uncertain, and, at times, uncomfortable.

This is where so many high-functioning, thoughtful people get stuck. Not because they lack insight, but because they’re waiting for a feeling that only comes after movement. So they stay in loops of overthinking, refining, and second-guessing, mistaking that process for progress.

For high-achieving women, this pattern can be closely connected to perfectionism and anxiety: the belief that you should understand the entire path, anticipate every risk, and feel fully prepared before you begin.

But growth, especially identity-level growth, doesn’t work that way.

When you start to expand—whether that’s raising your rates, changing how you work, setting firmer boundaries, or stepping into a more visible leadership role—you’re not just adjusting logistics. You’re shifting identity. And identity shifts are inherently destabilizing. They can create anxiety even when the change itself is wanted, intentional, and aligned with who you are becoming.

There’s a quiet but profound transition that happens in these moments. You move from being someone who feels competent and validated in a known system, to someone who is, once again, learning in public. The feedback loops slow down. The certainty disappears. The sense of control softens.

Your brain doesn’t register this as evolution. It registers it as risk.
The nervous system often responds to unfamiliarity before it can recognize possibility.

And so it does what brains are designed to do — it tries to pull you back toward what feels known. It offers thoughts that sound reasonable on the surface: What if this doesn’t work? What if people don’t respond well? Maybe I should adjust this before it’s too late.

But these thoughts are not objective truths. They are protective responses to unfamiliarity.

Ibarra describes this period as a kind of “in-between” space: a phase where you’re no longer fully anchored in your old identity, but your new one hasn’t solidified yet. It can feel like doubt, like instability, even like you’ve lost confidence. But what’s actually happening is more nuanced than that.

You haven’t lost confidence. You’ve lost access to certainty.

And those are not the same thing.

Earlier in our careers, confidence is often built on predictability. We know what to expect, we know how to perform, and we receive relatively immediate validation that we’re doing it well. But as you grow, especially into more expansive or leadership-oriented roles, that structure changes. You’re required to act without immediate feedback. To make decisions that don’t have guaranteed outcomes. To tolerate longer periods of not knowing.

This is particularly true for high-achieving women, who have often built success within systems that reward responsiveness, reliability, and excellence within clearly defined expectations. When those structures fall away—when the work becomes more self-directed, more visible, and less immediately reinforced—it can feel deeply unsettling.

Not because something is wrong, but because something is evolving.

On the outside, this may still look like competence and control. Internally, it can resemble high-functioning anxiety: persistent scanning, overthinking, and pressure to make the “right” decision before enough information exists.

In clinical terms, this process has a familiar shape. It mirrors what we ask our clients to do all the time: move toward discomfort, tolerate uncertainty, and resist the urge to engage in safety behaviors that provide short-term relief but limit long-term growth.

At an identity level, those “safety behaviors” can look like softening a decision too quickly, over-delivering to regain a sense of approval, or retreating back to a version of work that feels easier to control. And while these moves can temporarily reduce anxiety, they also interrupt the very process that allows a new identity to take hold.

Perfectionism can make these responses feel responsible or strategic, even when they are primarily attempts to reduce uncertainty and regain a sense of control.

Nervous system regulation does not require eliminating all uncertainty. It can also mean building the capacity to stay present, make a considered choice, and allow discomfort to exist without immediately undoing the decision.

What Ibarra’s work emphasizes—and what we see again and again in both research and practice—is that people don’t think their way into a new identity. They act their way into it. They try things, they experiment, they adjust. They allow themselves to be seen before they feel fully ready. And through that process, clarity begins to emerge.

Not all at once, and not without discomfort, but steadily.

If you find yourself in that space right now—where you’ve made a shift and are waiting, watching, and wondering if it was the right move—it’s worth considering that this pause, this ambiguity, is not evidence of failure. It may be evidence that you’re in the exact phase where growth is happening, just not yet fully visible.

The real risk in this phase isn’t that things won’t work out. It’s that you might interpret the discomfort as a signal to shrink. To go back. To reconfigure yourself into something that feels more immediately secure.

But that kind of relief comes at a cost.

If you are navigating a career transition, a new leadership role, or another significant identity shift, it may help to remember that the goal is not to eliminate uncertainty before moving forward.

Because the version of you you’re moving toward—the one with more autonomy, more impact, more alignment—requires a different relationship with uncertainty. It requires the capacity to move forward without constant reassurance, to let decisions play out before revising them, and to trust that identity is not something you find fully formed, but something you build through repeated, aligned action.

So if things feel unclear right now, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re off track.

It may mean you’re in the process of becoming someone your current identity doesn’t quite recognize yet.

And that space—as uncomfortable as it can be—is often where the most meaningful change begins.