Restlessness Is a Signal, Not a Flaw
Most people treat feeling restless as a flaw.
Something to hide, something to suppress, something to push through because it’s “not that serious” or because everything on paper looks fine.
But for as long as I’ve lived and worked, restlessness has always turned out to be one of the clearest, most reliable signals in my life.
Not a problem to fix. Not a defect. Not a personality weakness. But a clear message, like a pressure point, that something in me is calling out, tugging me toward truth.
And it can be the uncomfortable kind of truth, yes. The inconvenient kind. The kind that startles you at 11:30 on a Monday morning when you’re sitting in a meeting nodding along to someone else’s priorities, and suddenly there’s a tiny inner voice that says, “This isn’t it. Something here isn’t right.”
That voice always arrives in when you least expect it, and always at a terrible time.
Your restlessness doesn’t care about timing.
It cares about getting you in alignment.
And I’ve learned the hard way: ignoring it only makes it louder.
Restlessness shows up first. As your messenger who wants you to live with clarity, thrill and joy.
Whenever I’ve gone through a big shift in my career, it never started with a grand decision or a dramatic breakdown. It always started with restlessness. A body-level sense that something was slightly off, slightly misaligned, as if I was playing a role that no longer matched the person I felt like on the inside.
One of the clearest examples happened years ago, when I sat in a particular type of role at an agency: a role that, on paper, made perfect sense.
It was stable. It was respectable. It was something I was “supposed” to be grateful for.
And for a long time, I was.
But then the restlessness started to tap on the door. Not every day. Not dramatically. Just a little knock-knock frorm the inside, in little moments where I could feel a kind of interior friction. Like two musical tones that should harmonize but instead dissonate, creating that uncomfortable, unresolved sound that makes your whole system tighten.
That’s exactly what it felt like: dissonance.
A mismatch between what I was naturally good at, the things that gave me energy, made me curious, made me come alive, and the actual tasks that filled my calendar every day. The more I ignored it, the more the dissonance grew. And because it was inconvenient, because I had a job, a salary, a trajectory many would want, I thought, it took me a long time to even allow myself to admit it.
Denial is always the first stage of misalignment.
Restlessness is always the second.
The courage it takes to listen to yourself
Eventually, the discomfort became impossible to ignore. I started mentioning it, very carefully, very tentatively, to people I trusted. I dipped a toe in the water. I said things like, “Something feels a bit off,” or “I’m not sure this role fits me.”
That was all I could say at first, because saying the full truth felt too disruptive, too risky, like it might unravel something I wasn’t ready to let go of.
But once I started saying it out loud, even in tiny pieces, something softened. I got a bit braver. I started paying closer attention to what actually interested me. The things that lit me up. The areas I kept gravitating toward. I spent my evenings and weekends learning about the kinds of tasks and domains that felt more “me,” even though none of it was required for my job.
I realized I wasn’t trying to reinvent myself.
Or becoming a new person.
I was trying, gently, carefully, to move closer to the truth of who I already was.
And eventually, as these things do, the truth built enough momentum that I had to do something about it.
The conversation that changed everything
There came a day when I realized that holding all of this inside wasn’t sustainable anymore. So I spoke to a trusted colleague: someone in a team whose work matched what I secretly wanted to be doing, and she encouraged me to pursue my intuition, and she validated my instincts, and said something like, “I think you’d be amazing here. And I think this is exactly the kind of work you should be doing.”
Her affirmation didn’t solve it, but it made one thing clear:
I wasn’t imagining it.
So I did the scariest thing I could do at the time.
I asked for a meeting with my direct report.
I remember walking into that room with my heart pounding, because telling the truth in a professional setting can feel like stepping off a cliff. But I also remember being deeply present. More present than I usually was, because this conversation wasn’t about ambition or performance. It was about integrity. It was about naming the dissonance that had been eating at me for months.
And my dear boss — to her enormous credit — she listened. She didn’t dismiss me. She didn’t push back. She didn’t question my loyalty or my capability. She simply received what I said with surprise, yes, but warmth and curiosity. She recognized that something in me had already shifted, and she treated that truth with respect.
What happened after was almost surreal:
I was moved to the team where I belonged, the one doing the kind of work that matched my strengths, my interests, my natural way of thinking. I started a new area alongside the colleague who had encouraged me. I got a new title that fit. And everything, suddenly, made sense.
Looking back, it was one of the proudest moments of my career: not because I made a bold external move, but because I honored the internal one.
Restlessness is painful. But it’s never random
I know what it feels like to walk into work every day with that internal scraping sound: that sense that you’re out of place in your own life. I know how it eats at you. I know how it grows louder the more you try to suppress it. And I know how scary it is to even begin acknowledging it, because acknowledging it means you might have to do something about it.
But here’s what I’ve realized:
Restlessness always shows up for a reason.
And the reason is never that you’re flawed.
Restlessness appears when:
You’ve outgrown a role.
You’ve been acting as if you’re “fine” for too long.
The world’s expectations no longer match what’s right for you, when you’re honest.
Your own potential is knocking on the door.
Something in you is asking to come forward.
It may feel like self-sabotage, but it’s not.
It’s not ingratitude.
And it’s not immaturity — the opposite, in fact.
It’s your inner truth trying to get your attention.
And while not everyone has as supportive a workplace or manager as I did, I still believe this:
There is always something to gain, and nothing to gain by ignoring it.
Because the alternative is to stay in that scraping, dissonant state.
To stay misaligned.
And stay half-present in your own life.
And if you’ve ever been there, you know:
that’s no way to live.
Restlessness isn’t telling you to burn everything down. It’s telling you to pay attention
This is the part we misunderstand.
Restlessness doesn’t demand a dramatic move.
It doesn’t ask you to quit your job overnight or change your whole life.
It simply asks you to be honest with yourself. In fact, it’s the consequence of not being honest.
Honest about what feels wrong and what feels right.
Honest about what’s actually calling you, even if the calling is inconvenient or subtle or emerging in fragments.
Restlessness is the earliest sign of alignment trying to return to your life.
Welcome it as a well-meaning messenger, inviting you to step onboard a journey to reconnect with yourself.
It signals that you’re ready to step into your own authority.
Not a new identity, but your real one.
Not a reinvention: a remembering.
Not a leap into the unknown, but a small, steady move toward what has always been yours.
If You’re Feeling Restless Right Now
Let it mean something.
Not everything — just something.
Trust that it’s a message, not a flaw.
A beginning, not a problem.
And if you want a gentle way to understand what your restlessness might be pointing toward, the deeper patterns, the expectations, the inherited scripts, the internal misalignments, you can take my self-assessment, Uncover Your Unspoken Script.
It’s designed for these exact in-between moments, the ones where you feel restless not because you’re wrong, but because something true is trying to surface.
I hope that you will be brave enough to stay with that restlessness, and let it reach you with it’s message. You will not regret it.
That’s where every real transformation begins.