A gut check for anyone who's been "thinking about it" for a year
It is Sunday evening in Summerlin, and you have just told a friend you are "considering a move," the same line you used last fall. She nodded and let it go. She didn't need to say more. Twelve months of mulling it over amounts to no real decision-making at all. It is a choice you've already made but haven't admitted, or one you keep reversing every couple of weeks.
That means tonight, give something unfamiliar a go. You pull up a blank page and jot down what has actually taken place, leaving aside your feelings about it. The to-do list stretches further than you expected it to.
What stands to be lost here
Remaining a year past your best point costs more than those twelve months. It costs the professional recruiters in the Valley still recall, the account of leaving on a high note, and the drive you would have carried into your next role. Leaving a year too soon has its own price: a vesting date, a project left half finished, and the possibility that the trouble was a passing season rather than the job itself. Both missteps are genuine. What separates the two groups is that just one of them stays silent.
The change
A instinct check is more than a passing feeling. It is a tally. You already recognize the warning signs; you have been talking yourself out of them one by one, and that gets much harder when they all sit on the same page. Of the entries, a dozen are pushing you toward the exit. Three point toward staying. Be honest in the count, because nobody else will read the page.
Why this matters well past your own case
In Deloitte's 2025 study of 7,500 women, merely 5% said they planned to stay with their present company past the five-year mark. Women are not failing to commit. They are declining to stay out of habit, and the ones who depart well are the ones who did the counting first.
A dozen indicators that a change may be due
1. Headhunters in Henderson have quit reaching out since you declined them three separate times.
2. When you describe your job, it sounds like something you have already left behind.
3. What you called "one more year" has quietly become a second installment.
4. Whoever championed you at the start is no longer in the picture.
5. Management redrew the new org chart in a meeting you were never invited to attend.
6. For more than half a year, you have been playing a part in a role that isn't yours.
7. Your pay has merely kept up with the cost of living in Clark County, yet your boss presented it as a gift.
8. You rehearse meetings in the car on the drive down the 215 and still lose the argument.
9. Colleagues you mentored are now ranked above you, and nobody will tell you the reason.
Step ten. You no longer bring forward suggestions, because you assume they would go nowhere.
11. In Las Vegas, Sunday night now starts on Saturday afternoon.
12. If someone offered you this very position today, you would turn it down.
Three indicators that the timing may be wrong
1. Your difficulty traces back to a single individual, and that person is someone who could be reassigned or swapped out.
2. Half a year has been hard, but the three years preceding it were genuinely satisfying.
3. You are tired in general, not just of this job, and two real weeks away would show you which it is.
Making sense of your score
Six or more in the first list with none in the second is an answer. If you land two or three signs on the first list and one on the second, the right move is a candid talk with your manager, not handing in your notice. Pick a moment this week to say, "I would like to remain here and keep developing." Ask what would have to shift for that to become real, and by when, then jot down whatever they say, or whatever they leave unsaid, in your notebook.
When a friend from Spring Valley asks again next October, you will be able to offer more than "I'm still thinking about it," because you will have a concrete number to share.