Four Jobs Four Exits
Four jobs in ten years. Each one began the same way, with real hope, a new start, a fresh list of things that would be different this time. Each one ended at almost exactly the same point. The first time it looked like bad luck. The second time it looked like a difficult boss. By the fourth, the pattern was hard to ignore, because the only constant across four different companies, four different teams and four different industries was the person walking out of the door.
We call this four jobs, four exits. It is not a story about restlessness or a lack of commitment. It is a story about a loop that completes itself in the same place every time, no matter where it is set.
The shape of the exit
When we sit with someone who has left four jobs, the first thing we do is look not at the jobs but at the exits. When exactly did they decide to go? Was it at eighteen months, or two years, or the moment a certain kind of pressure arrived? Very often the timing is eerily consistent. The person leaves at the same stage of every role, and the stage is doing more work in the story than the employer is.
Then we look at the trigger. Something specific happens just before each exit, and it is usually the same something. A conflict with a manager. A project that gets harder than expected. A stretch of feeling unappreciated. A moment when the work stops being novel and starts being ordinary. The person experiences these as different events, because the details differ. Underneath, they are the same event, dressed in new clothes.
The same ending at a different address
Here is what makes this pattern so convincing from the inside. Each exit has a perfectly good reason, and the reasons are all true. The manager really was difficult. The project really did get messy. The recognition really was slow in coming. Nothing about any single explanation is a lie.
But a pattern is not judged by whether each instance is justified. It is judged by whether the instances keep arriving. If four different organisations, with four different cultures and four different sets of people, all produce the same ending for the same person, then the ending is not being manufactured by the organisations. It is being manufactured somewhere inside the loop the person carries.
What happens just before you leave
There is almost always a pressure point, and it is worth naming it precisely. For many four-exit people, the pressure arrives when the work moves from the part they enjoy to the part they find hard. The early phase of a job is comfortable: learning, being new, the goodwill of a fresh start. The later phase brings the things that are genuinely difficult: navigating a conflict, holding a boundary, doing the unglamorous middle of a project, being judged on results rather than promise.
The exit usually happens just as the hard part begins. The person reads the difficulty as a sign that something is wrong, either with the job or with themselves, and they leave before the hard part can be worked through. They are not running from the company. They are running from the discomfort of the middle, and the middle is the part that would have grown them.
The story you tell about why you left
The story matters, because the story is what keeps the loop hidden. After each exit, the person constructs a clean account of what went wrong, and the account always places the cause outside themselves. The boss was toxic. The culture was off. The role was mis-sold. These accounts are often partly accurate, which is exactly why they hold.
The problem is that the story is closed. It has a villain, and the villain is never the pattern. So nothing is learned, and the loop is free to run again at the next address. The person arrives at job five with the same wiring, and, unless something interrupts it, job five will produce exit five on schedule.
The cost of the loop
We should be honest about what this pattern costs, because the person usually does not count it. Four jobs in ten years is not just four paychecks and four sets of colleagues. It is four interrupted relationships, four restarts from the bottom of a learning curve, four times you had to prove yourself to strangers instead of building on trust you had already earned. Each exit resets a clock that took years to run.
The deeper cost is the ceiling. Every job has a point where the hard, valuable work begins, and that point is usually just past the stage where the four-exit person leaves. So they have spent a decade doing the early, easier part of many roles, and never the later part that builds real seniority. They are experienced and under-developed at the same time, and the reason is not ability. It is that they keep walking out just before the growth starts.
What we investigate
When someone brings us four exits, we treat them like four scenes from one story. We lay the exits side by side and look for the shared beat: the same feeling, the same trigger, the same moment of deciding to go. Once the person can see the four moments as one moment, the pattern stops being a series of unfortunate events and becomes something they can actually work with.
Then we trace the rule underneath. What did you learn, early on, about staying when things get hard? What happens in your body when you feel unappreciated or stuck? What did you decide, somewhere in your past, about what you deserve and when to walk away? Very often there is an old experience of being overlooked or let down, and a rule written in that moment: leave before you are left.
Changing the ending
The way out is not to force yourself to stay forever. Sometimes leaving is right. The way out is to leave consciously, for reasons you have examined, rather than to leave on autopilot when a familiar discomfort appears. The test is whether you can tell the difference between a job that is genuinely wrong for you and a moment that simply feels like the ones before.
To know the difference, you have to stay long enough to feel the pressure and not act on it immediately. That is hard, and it is the whole work. The person who can sit inside the discomfort of the middle without bolting is the person who finally gets to see what happens next, which is usually that the difficulty resolves and the role becomes something they could not have reached by leaving. Four exits can become three, and then none. The address does not have to change. The ending does.