🚪 When the job you love is actually costing you

⏱️ Reading time: 5 minutes

Welcome to Fearless — my weekly-ish newsletter where I share leadership insights and honest advice for women of color in social impact navigating power, career, and change.

A client of mine loves what she does.

She loves the communities she serves. She finds the work genuinely exciting. Her colleagues, her mission — none of that is the problem.

Here’s what is:

She can’t grow at this organization. She can’t make more money here. And there are toxic elements chipping away at her — being overworked even when she sets boundaries, unrealistic expectations, a boss who micromanages her until she stops trusting her own judgment.

Her dream job has become a kind of purgatory.

She knows she has to go. What she doesn’t know is how, or when. She relies on this income. She can’t just walk out tomorrow.

If any part of this is landing a little too close to home — you are not alone. I hear a version of this story constantly, and there’s actually a name for it in my world: it’s what I call being a Strategic Exiter. Not indecisive. Not dramatic. You’ve been weighing this longer than most people would tolerate, and you’re still not impulsively walking out the door. That’s discernment, not delay.

So what actually moves you forward?

Not a mantra. Not “just leave.” The number one reason an exit ends up feeling like it’s taking forever is that you don’t have a strategy behind it — you have a feeling. A very valid, very exhausted feeling. But a feeling isn’t a plan, and without a plan, “I need to leave” just sits there, unresolved, for months.

Real strategy starts in two places: the inner work (getting honest about what this is actually costing you — your sleep, your confidence, whether your boundaries hold or quietly get run over) and the strategic work — figuring out your actual timeline.

That second part is where most people get stuck, so let’s do a piece of it right now.

🧭 A real exercise: find your decision window

Grab a piece of paper (or just do the math in your head) and answer two questions honestly.

1. What’s your runway? Take your accessible savings — not retirement accounts, just what you could actually get to — and divide it by your bare-minimum monthly expenses (the number if you stripped everything down to essentials). That’s how many months you could survive with zero income.

Runway = liquid savings ÷ bare-minimum monthly expenses

(Example: if your bare-minimum is $3,000/month and you have $9,000 saved, that’s 3 months of runway.)

2. What’s your capacity? Separately, ask: realistically, how many more months could I stay in this role before the cost to my wellbeing becomes something I can’t recover from? Not “how many months could I technically survive it” — how many months before it starts costing you your health, your confidence, your relationships outside of work.

The gap between those two numbers is your decision window — the space between “earliest I could leave” and “latest I should stay.” Your actual exit date lives somewhere inside that window. Not before it (that’s the panic move), not after it (that’s the slow erosion move).

Most people have never actually run this math. They’re operating off a vague sense of “I can’t afford to leave” or “I just need to push through,” neither of which is a real number. Give yourself the real number. It changes what’s possible.

If this was useful and you want to go further — sorting your actual non-negotiables from the ones you’ve just been assuming, building a search strategy that matches your timeline, a full 30-day plan — I put together a workbook that walks through all of it, plus a full story of how one leader navigated her own exit start to finish: 👉 Strategic Exiter Workbook​

And since you’re already on this list, you don’t need to take a quiz to know you’re navigating something like this. But if you’re curious whether your specific situation actually lines up closer to a different result — Explorer, Fast Track, Intentional Developer, Strategic Stayer, or Transition Navigator — take the Career Crossroads Quiz.

Every result unlocks its own personalized workbook, so wherever you land, you'll get something built for exactly that situation. Hit reply and tell me what you got.

You've got this.

Maya 🧡

P.S. For those of you who’ve been following my birthday saga — I finally celebrated my milestone birthday. At home on Sunday where a handful of people turned into a full house and then again yesterday in the jungle under the rain. It was a genuinely wet day at the pool, and people showed up anyway. I felt an enormous wave of love in spite of the weather. Thank you for being on this journey with me — birthdays, rainstorms, and all!

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💛 Hecho con amor en el archipiélago de Puerto Rico 🇵🇷 | 1607 Avenida Ponce de Léon, GM6 PMB165, San Juan, Puerto Rico 00909