The Cost of Career Confusion in Pharma

You have impressive credentials, a track record that speaks for itself, and a career that looks exactly right from the outside. And yet something is off. The work has become transactional. Your role has accumulated tasks that don't connect to a strategy. 

You can see a vision for what you want, but you cannot articulate it — partly because it does not exist yet in any form you have seen before.

That is a clarity problem. And more information is not going to solve it.

In this episode, I am breaking down why accomplished women in Pharma and Biotech get stuck in a research spiral — and why the fix is not another job change, another course, or more time spent gathering options.

What you will learn:

• Why the brain under uncertainty does not settle into clarity by accumulating more information — and what organizational psychology tells us actually resolves it.
• How to recognize whether you are solving real problems or hypothetical ones you have invented to avoid committing to a direction.
• What granular clarity actually requires — and why it is not about a title, a company, or a timeframe.
• How the Right Move Protocol™ functions as your career's decision-making filter — the process that tells you whether any opportunity in front of you is actually the right one for you.
• The neuroscience behind why defining a specific target changes what your brain notices, what conversations feel useful, and how you show up when you are not prepared.

If you are technically excellent, genuinely accomplished, and still not where you want to be — this episode will show you why that is a protocol problem.

Referenced in this episode: The Right Move Protocol™ -  Schedule a consultation at yourworthycareer.com/application

Get the Book: Your Worthy Career: A Science-Backed Method to Build a Meaningful Career in Pharma and Biotech here.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

If you're someone who wants to find out just how good your career can get and how much of a difference it can make in the pharmabiotech industry, you are in the right place. Welcome to Your Worthy Career, the podcast for women, building meaningful, high-impact careers in pharma and biotech. I'm Melissa Lawrence, career and leadership coach, organizational psychology expert, and the founder and author of Your Worthy Career. I spent over 12 years inside this industry and talent development across biotech and large pharma, and I've been coaching women in this space exclusively ever since. I bring you research back strategies, an insider perspective on what's actually happening inside industry organizations, and the perspective shifts that get you real results. Here we build careers that are meaningful, aligned with who you actually are, and positioned for the impact you're capable of making. Let's get started. Hello, hello, and welcome to the podcast. Today I want to talk about a pattern that I keep seeing in women who are genuinely accomplished, technically excellent, and completely unfulfilled. So this could look like Sharon. So Sharon has a role she's interested in, goes to LinkedIn, starts reading about the company, then she clicked through to see the hiring manager's profile so she could understand their background. And she finds an article that they posted a couple years ago, reads it, and realizes she should probably understand the therapy area better before she reaches out. She starts overthinking if she's even qualified, decides that she should wait until she knows more about what she actually wants. She doesn't want to go ahead and risk it. The role closes, she never applied, and she just tells herself she wasn't ready. Or Lucy. Lucy is someone I talked to recently that has an impressive track record as a director and senior director with some of the top large pharma companies. She's a clinician, she's brilliant, a thought leader, but she is unfulfilled. And she realized this when she had her review, and it dawned on her as her boss was sharing how she completed all of her goals, and she just sat there and thought, this has become transactional. She works hard, she gets those good reviews, but there isn't feeling behind it anymore. All of the accolades and the recognition is meaningless. It doesn't light her up anymore. And over all of the re-orgs and the people coming in and leaving, her role has become more like a quilt with the different tasks that she can do well, but it doesn't seem to have a strategy to it. It's like patchwork. She has a vision for what her role could be, but she isn't able to articulate it because she doesn't know exactly what that could look like because it doesn't exist. She hasn't seen it before. And on top of it, she feels uncomfortable talking about what she wants. She worries how it will be perceived and if her boss really understands. Do any of these situations sound familiar to you? If so, what do you do? Right? That's what we're going to talk about. If you're Sharon or Lucy or some combination, you might start applying to new roles because changing jobs gives you a new opportunity to challenge yourself, even if eventually it just becomes another role that you settle in. You might research and convince yourself to stay put because of the market. You might try to carefully plan when and how to make a change without sacrificing your bonus. You might take a course or try to grow in a new way that hopefully changes how you feel. And if we get even more specific with this, let's say you have a direction you're interested in. Some of my clients do. They have some idea. But before you take any action toward it, you feel like you need to understand it completely. The role of the company, the hiring landscape, the unwritten requirements, what the culture's like, how people who have done this before kind of got there. And so you do a lot of research, you gather information, you read, you talk to people, you reflect. Do you really want this? Do you not? Every conversation, everything you find gives you a slightly different answer. So you're not 100% confident, which means you need more information, right? Before you can take action, you need to know it all. You need to know what's right. Or many of my clients say before we work together that they're genuinely interested in more than one direction. They could see their career going a couple of different ways. Maybe it's even two different functions. Maybe it's staying at your current company versus going to another one. Maybe it's a lateral move versus getting promoted. And because all of them seem like options you could do, you can't fully commit to pursuing any one of them. Deep down, you're not sure if anything will make you happy because you don't know what you want. So you're doing a little bit of everything, which means you're LinkedIn and the way you talk about yourself, the way you're spending your time doesn't quite reflect a clear story. Your boss can't help you as well as they could. Your conversations are exploratory instead of strategic, maybe like throwing some spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. And the people you talk to feel that you haven't fully decided and that you don't really know what you want and that you're just looking to grow. Now, this next one is particularly common. I see with scientists and engineers, where you're not fully in the action phase, but you're spending significant mental energy solving for problems that haven't happened yet. Like, what if I get to the interview and they ask about something that I haven't done? What if I'm not competitive for the level that I want? What if this direction actually closes off other things that I might want later and I end up ruining my career? You're essentially trying to solve for every risk before doing any meaningful action. And all of these patterns share a similar root cause. It comes down to lack of clarity about sometimes even who you really are at this stage in your life, but what you actually want. Specific, granular. Is this the right move for me? Knowing exactly what you want, clarity. You don't think about necessarily what's reasonable, what you could do, try to justify it to your manager or your spouse, but you actually know exactly what is right for you. You feel it in your bones. You feel like where you want to go is aligned with who you really are. That is what is missing. That is what is preventing you from having the career that you want if you resonate with what we've talked about so far. And oftentimes you don't have the skill to communicate and influence effectively because you aren't sure exactly what that role is. And so you have a lot of doubt of if it could even happen or if you're even the right fit, because you don't know that you're the right fit. Because you don't know you even want it. And I can speak about this so clearly because it's not only one of the main and my favorite problems to solve with clients, but I was there too. And here's the thing that pushed me to figure out my ideal role and to build the skills to get it. Like this didn't happen overnight. It wasn't just a wish I made and woke up and it and it was here, right? It was that every day and month that I spent settling and not being in the right role, even though I didn't know what that role was, was time I didn't get back. You could be living a happier life with more energy and making a bigger difference for patients and those around you. You could be putting your brain and unique perspective and skills and experience to work in a new way that you can't see yet. You could be a role model for everyone around you. You could show people instead of just telling them they can do anything with their career and telling them that they deserve better, you could show them what it looks like to do that. And every day that you don't figure out your path and build the skills to get it is wasting the one resource that we can't get more of time. And this is what pushed me to do the hard thing and figure out what I wanted through a lot of trial and error, but now I have a process for that and be vulnerable and invest in myself and spend money that I had earned and not in my company pay for it to go and hire someone to help me overcome what wasn't a math problem that wasn't even once I knew what I wanted. I had to overcome my own blind spots, my own blocks, my own insecurity about what it would mean to venture into something new. Right. I had to build the courage, I had to build the skills for business, I had to build a new identity so I could step into what I really wanted. And that's really just doing whatever is needed to solve my problem. Because the payoff is worth more than any amount of money to me. Because you're living a higher quality life. Honestly, we could even go down a rabbit hole if you dig into what stress does to your body, loss of sleep. It this could be a way you add more time to your life. So in organizational psychology, we know that overthinking decisions and lack of clarity, it doesn't resolve, it doesn't fix itself through more information and waiting it out. It actually resolves through commitment and new action. The brain under uncertainty, it doesn't settle into clarity. It doesn't just come to you by accumulating options and doing more research. It comes from the decision, the feeling of readiness that you're waiting for. It follows the decision, right? Follows the action. The confidence does not need to be there first. And honestly, to let you know from a scientific perspective, you will not feel confident in something you haven't done before. The confidence comes from taking the action, building the skill along the way, seeing yourself get to the other side, right? That is where the confidence comes from. Like the first time that I invested, for example, in myself, I felt like I was taking money from our family. Like, you know, I had to overcome some things to really be like, okay, I deserve this. I work hard in my career. I have one life. I can make a bigger impact. Like, I deserve to explore this. I deserve to invest in myself. And so it started small. And then I saw what happened when I opened up my mind to what was possible and got out of the cage I was living in. And then I could invest more. I could do even deeper development. There's so many things that have opened up for me because of that first step. Right. And if I would have still, like I did for years, which is why I'm trying to help, is like I sat there for years convincing myself to stay in the same role, that it was a good job, more success than I thought I would have. Like I was on the succession plan. Like I had limitless options to just stay the course. But I wasn't happy deep down. I knew that I could make a bigger impact even if I didn't know how. And that curiosity and that drive, and ultimately me building up that kind of like self-love that I was worth exploring it is what got me to do the big scary things that I've done that have been so rewarding in my life. And I again talk, I've done that personally and professionally now. Like I am a lot more courageous and brave than I used to be. Because I started getting comfortable taking action without confidence. I started letting myself build confidence. And I became a different person in the process. And this is actually neuroscience. It's not just my experience. Research on attention and goal setting shows that when you define what you're specifically looking for, your brain literally begins filtering differently. You start noticing things that were always there. Opportunities that were visible but not noticed by you. Conversations that could have been useful and could have turned out differently, but felt irrelevant, or they just were what they were. You couldn't have done anything different. You couldn't have done anything better. Having that clarity and that confidence, it changes your operating system, the way that your brain thinks. I had a client say once that I was working with, she said that once I helped her, her dream job appeared like magic. Is probably one of my favorite lines in a testimonial that I've received over the years. But the flip side is also true. When your direction is vague, your brain defaults to self-protection. It overthinks, it overprepares, it finds problems to solve that keep it busy without requiring a commitment. And I see this constantly in coaching. Someone will spend a session working through a hypothetical obstacle for a role they haven't even applied for yet in a company they haven't decided they want at a level they aren't sure they're ready for. And they feel productive doing it. They feel safe. It feels more comfortable to solve those hypothetical problems than to go after what we truly want or learn something new that makes us uncomfortable. But you know what? This is exactly why coaching is there. This is exactly why I do what I do because this is the reality of how we work. And there is nothing wrong with that client's brain. I have thought that way too. Many people do. It is a natural way to think. But when we're in that spiral, we're spending all of that time getting farther away from what we really want, and it feels productive. And then our limitations feel reasonable, they feel logical. And we end up closing the door to the possibilities and the potential that are really available. And so coaching is that space, not just for the strategy and the career development, it's the space to shift your identity into who you could really be, to change the way that you think, to rewire those blind spots and those patterns that you might have that are keeping you stuck. Because when we're focusing on the research, when we're focusing on the symptom, you might call this solving the wrong problem. And in quality systems, we call this addressing the symptom rather than the root cause. Now, the root cause isn't a gap in your clinical trial knowledge or the fact that you haven't figured out the perfect LinkedIn headline, right? That's not the root cause for why you're not happy. It's that you don't have a defined protocol for your own career. When your direction is unclear, even the best strategies underperform. You can have a flawless resume and weak direction. You can be the best networker with no clarity about what you're actually networking toward. The strategy only works when it's anchored to a specific destination. It's like putting somewhere nice in your GPS. If you imagine opening your Google Maps right now, be like somewhere nice. Who knows where you'll end up? Will it be nice based on your criteria? Maybe, maybe not. But if deep down you know you want to go to Italy, it's gonna take you a lot longer to get there because your GPS doesn't have that precise location. So let's talk about what clarity actually requires because I think that there's a misconception here too. Most people think clarity means knowing just what job title you want at what company and within a specific time frame. And when they can't nail all of that down and get all of those things, then they conclude that maybe they don't have enough information. There's something wrong with them, they need to do something different, they need to do more research, and then we're back kind of in that loop of um busyness that feels productive, but actually isn't getting you where you want to go. And real clarity is different. It's not about having the perfect answer, it's about having a defined protocol that is your decision-making filter that leads to the outcome you desire, which is so much greater than a title, right? So clarity is actually defined as the state of being certain and unambiguous about something, knowing exactly what you want, why it matters, and what to do next. In a psychological context, clarity reduces that cognitive load and that decision fatigue, that overthinking, that analysis paralysis, and allows you to act with confidence rather than second guessing yourself at every turn. It defines the objective when you have your protocol, the criteria for success, the boundaries of what you're testing for, and the decision points along the way. It doesn't guarantee an outcome, it guides the execution and it makes every decision along the way easier because you have that reference point, right? It's like a compass or a map. And that's what a career protocol does. It's the process of going inward first before you go external to define what you actually want at a granular level. We're not looking at titles that you want, we're looking at the type of work you're drawn to, the kind of impact you want to make, the culture, the leadership style where you do your best work, the problems that you are uniquely positioned to solve, the level of autonomy, visibility, and influence you want. A protocol is defined as a set of established rules, procedures, or guidelines that govern how something is done, ensuring consistency, precision, and predictable outcomes. In our scientific and clinical context, it's the documented methodology that makes results replicable and trustworthy. And because you know this is based on your input when we go through this process together, you can trust the method. You build your confidence in yourself and your direction. When you have that defined, then you stop asking, am I qualified for this? Right. You stop overthinking LinkedIn postings and you start asking, does this align with my protocol? You're able to guide conversations with your manager differently because you know what you want and why. So I want to share something from a recent coaching call so that you can picture this even more. I was working with a client on her career protocol, and she was about midway through the process. She came to the call with this beautifully articulated problem. She wanted a role that had this element and this element and this other element, but she wasn't sure that those all could exist in the same place. And she had been spending a lot of energy thinking about what would happen if she couldn't find the right combination. She was solving for those hypotheticals. And she had already decided before actually completing the protocol what the outcome was going to be. And what I said to her was, You're telling me the result is going to be this before you even finish the process. So let's go back and let's look at this together. And when we walked through the gap analysis together, we looked at what her last role had given her, what had been missing, and what actually told us about her direction based on what we knew she wanted from going through this process. And within about 20 minutes, she had three clear role options ranked by priority. Her number one was very specific, and it felt right to her in a way that all of the research she'd been doing hadn't produced. And she said that she felt like I had made it sound a lot more clear than how it was kicking around in her head. And that's what a structured process does. That's what my process does with coaching. It's not magic, it's the difference between having data and having a framework to make sense of the data. And because I am helping you articulate and figure out what you really want based on your data, based on our conversations. And I'm helping put some of that language and that messaging that you can't articulate and that you can't see, you end up having your ideal role defined in a way that you can't do any other way. So this is how the right move protocol works. It's a decision-making tool that you build and you return to every time a new opportunity appears. It answers: is this the right move for me? Is this something that's aligned for me, what I want for myself? It's repeatable. And so you go back throughout your career, so you always know the direction is right for you. So a fun exercise that you can try is to journal out the answers to these questions. What do I want to be known for in the next chapter of my career? If I look back in 12 months and imagine it's 12 months from now, and you feel genuinely satisfied with how your career is going, what would you imagine happened? What would be true about your role, your work, and how you're spending your time? How much energy do you have when you get home? How do you start your day? Now look at what you wrote after you answer those two questions and ask yourself Did you write what you wanted deep down, or did you edit it out for what you think is possible? It's the latter. I want to challenge you to go back and write what you actually want. Then reflect on if those answers are aligned with where you are in your career right now. Do you have that vision? Do you want more for yourself? If there's the gap there and you want to grow and build your meaningful role, then make a decision to get help to do that. Know that the career that you want is on the other side of solving the problem of not having it. So here's what I want you to take away from this episode. This research spiral or jumping to new roles is not going to solve your problem. Adding more information to an unclear direction, it doesn't produce the clarity you're looking for. It produces more options, more noise, more reasons to wait. And jumping to new jobs is taking the easy route of not actually learning the skill that will help you have a fulfilling career now and for years to come. Clarity changes how you show up in conversations. It changes how people listen to you. It changes what you see as opportunities. It changes how you make decisions. It changes how you talk about yourself, even when you're not prepared to, which is most of the time, right? We don't often get all of this time to prepare for our conversations. They happen in hallways and meetings and one-on-ones. You don't have to have a perfectly curated message when you know deep down what you want and why. So if you're at a point where you want to upgrade your career with a cohort of women who are in the same industry doing the same kind of work and you want a structured process with coaching, like we talked about today, that's what the right move protocol is. We build your protocol, your positioning, your communication skills, your strategy together. You can learn more and you can schedule a consultation so that we can see if we're a good fit to work together by going to my website. It's yourworthycareer.com. I will talk to you soon. Have an amazing week.