The cart. The horse. The burnout.

Well, it’s 2026.

For some people, that feels energising. For others… it already feels heavy.

I want to tell you about my friend Kim.

I saw her recently in Adelaide. She’s a paramedic. Brilliant at what she does. Calm in chaos. The person you want turning up on your worst day.

She’s also a single mum with two kids.

And lately, the job is catching up with her.

Paramedicine is physically and mentally brutal. Night shifts, early mornings, weekends. Her body isn’t bouncing back the same way it once did — and when you add kids into the mix, the cracks start to show faster.

Her words to me were:

“I know I just need to decide what I want to go after before I come and see you.”

I stopped her right there.

Because that’s not where this starts.

Kim thinks the problem is “I need a new job.” Then she gets stuck — because she doesn’t know what job that would be.

Classic cart-before-the-horse stuff.

What Kim actually needs more than anything right now is time.

Time with her kids.
Time to stabilise routines.
Time to be present in ways her current roster simply doesn’t allow.

Her parents help a lot because of her shifts. The kids need her more. And she knows it.

To her, the solution feels obvious: new job. But for this year (2026), the real question isn’t:

“What job should I do instead?”

It’s:

“What change do I need to make so I can get time back — without everything falling over?”

That’s a very different starting point.

And here’s the part people don’t love hearing:

You don’t begin with a job title. You begin with a stocktake.

• Where have I been?
• What’s draining me?
• What do I actually need more of — time, energy, predictability, money, flexibility?
• What constraints do I have to work within right now?

Once those pieces are clearer, then you gather data. Options. Pathways. Experiments.

None of that requires you to have a shiny new role picked out in advance.

Kim knows the answer already. It involves some big changes. Doable changes — but still big.

And that’s often the real blocker.

So if you’re sitting there thinking, “I just need to figure out my next job and then I’ll deal with the rest” — pause.

You might not need a new job yet. You might need to fix the conditions around work first.

The job title comes later.

And yes — a quiet January resume update still makes sense, just in case the right opportunity appears. This is your gentle nudge to retrieve it from the digital archive and pretend you’ve been maintaining it all along.

~Lisa

Your Q&A

Is This Job About to Wreck My Nervous System?

Hi Lisa,

I have been burned three times by terrible company cultures, and I really want to avoid another awful work situation. What is your best advice about approaching current employees on LinkedIn to try to gain insights about what it’s really like to work somewhere?

Thanks Carol

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Hi Carol,

First things first: I’m really sorry you’ve been burned. Once is bad luck. Three times is enough to make anyone want to work feral in the bush with no colleagues and a satellite phone.

Now for the slightly annoying truth.

Current employees will almost never give you the full, unfiltered truth about company culture to a stranger on LinkedIn.

They’ve got bills, reputations, and internal Slack channels to think about.

So you’re not actually hunting for the truth. You’re hunting for signals.

And signals are surprisingly loud once you know where to look. So start with the boring-but-useful stuff.

Before you DM anyone:

• Check Glassdoor (yes, it’s dramatic, but patterns matter).
• Do a people search on LinkedIn and look at tenure. If half the team seems to last 9–18 months and then mysteriously “seeks new opportunities”… that’s a clue.
• Watch the job ads on Seek. If the same role keeps popping up like a bad rash every few months, that’s rarely “growth”.

None of these prove anything. But together, they start telling a story.

Next up, who you talk to matters more than what you ask.

If you do reach out, don’t aim for:

• The hiring manager
• The company cheerleader
• Someone who’s been there 12 years and drank the Kool-Aid in 2014

Instead, look for:

• People one or two levels away from the role
• Employees who’ve been there 1–3 years
• Former employees, if you can find them (they’re often much freer with their words)

Before going in cold, check whether you’ve got a 1st-degree connection who can introduce you. Warm intros change the entire tone of the conversation.

A simple intro might sound like:

If you don’t have an intro, a direct message is fine — just keep it human and low-pressure:

One last thing, you’re not asking people to trash their employer. You’re giving them permission to share how it actually feels to work there.

Tone, hesitation, what they don’t say — that’s where the real intel lives.

Culture problems rarely shout. They whisper. Repeatedly.

And if your gut tightens while reading between the lines? Listen to it. It’s been right three times already.

You’re not being difficult. You’re being sensible.

Thanks for writing in.

~Lisa​