Is 2025 the year you quit the job? Here's 3 questions to ask before you jump

If your career is making you feel miserable, unfulfilled or just plain exhausted, here are the three questions you need to ask yourself

Couldn’t resist this Melanie Griffith’s Working Girl throwback

Trish writes: Congratulations, you’ve just made it to the end of the hardest week of January, which kicked off with Blue Monday, supposedly the most depressing day of any year. OK, so this term may have been drummed up by a savvy marketing exec for the travel industry to get everyone booking holidays, but I definitely felt some truth to it as the cold, dreary grey day dragged on. And if it’s returning to your job, rather than the general post festive gloom that is making you feel in the doldrums, it could be time to take action.

A scary fact to start with: we are all living longer, which means we have to keep bringing home the bacon for many more years than our parents did, especially as the state pension is highly unlikely to keep us in the style we’ve become accustomed to and final salary pension schemes are mostly a dream from the past. So what are the options? Well from what we are hearing from midlife women we know and those in the Postcards from Midlife Facebook Group they are either seeking a new challenge and thinking of jacking in the careers they’ve spent decades building to retrain and start something completely different.

Trish, second right, with Amber Heard, hosting an International Women’s Day event in her former career as a glossy magazine editor

Others are starting up ventures on their own, and some want to make a change and are exploring where on earth to begin. For many though, a new start is simply not an option, they need to stick it out whether they like it or not due to financial commitments or other personal circumstances, and that can be the really tricky thing - how do you know you can make it through and bear to stay, or how do you know that the right decision is actually to go? We spoke to two career coaches for some thought starter questions to get you out of the blocks: Gill Whitty Collins, a former senior executive at Proctor & Gamble and author of Why Men Win At Work, and Helen Tupper, co-founder of careers organisation Amazing If, and co-author of The Squiggly Career and You Coach You. Here’s 3 questions to ask: