In this deeply practical and liberating episode of Straight Talking Sustainability, host Emma Burlow sits down with Claire Osborne, accredited climate career coach with 15 years of sustainability experience. Claire also has over 2,000 hours working with individual clients from organisations including the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Amnesty International, Octopus Energy, and Unilever. In this episode, Emma and Claire explore why experienced sustainability professionals are increasingly questioning whether to stay in their roles, leave the sector entirely, or find completely new paths that balance mission with life beyond work. Claire reveals how the tangled ball of wool representing career confusion can be untangled not through endless qualification-chasing or hypothesizing futures, but through inner foundation work, creating tight briefs that make decisions obvious, and crucially, testing your way forwards with two-week pilots that provide felt experience rather than theoretical speculation. Emma opens with Claire's delightful claim to fame: performing as a Union Jack knickers-flashing nun on roller skates in the 2012 Olympics closing ceremony Monty Python skit watched by 27 million people, demonstrating that Claire brings both professional coaching credentials (International Coaching Federation member, accredited climate change coach) and wonderfully human experiences to her work. This sets the tone for a conversation acknowledging that sustainability professionals are whole humans navigating complex lives, not just technical experts optimising carbon footprints. Claire describes a profound shift in how sustainability roles are being perceived by employers, creating significant tension for experienced professionals who entered this work to deliver tangible outcomes (cutting emissions, protecting nature, winning hearts and minds) but increasingly find employers viewing sustainability narrowly as reporting, compliance, and risk protection. This misalignment between purpose-driven professionals and operationally-focused employers, combined with geopolitical changes impossible to ignore, is fundamentally changing people's stamina and making it harder to show up with optimism, energy, patience, and clarity of direction. The conversation introduces two critical concepts: burnout (working too hard without alignment to what you believe in, not just overwork) and bore-out (feeling under-challenged, disengaged, procrastinating, equally stressful as burnout especially when you possess strong purpose). Both conditions leave people questioning whether to do something differently within current work or whether it is time for something completely different, balancing mission with enjoying life whilst delivering that mission. Claire works almost exclusively with experienced professionals (multiple roles under their belt) navigating these questions. Claire describes how people typically arrive with a "tangled ball of wool" where everything feels knotted together: climate change complexity, personal values, location preferences, cultural fit, work-from-home balance, financial needs, family support requirements. The biggest mistake people make is trying to solve this in one leap, jumping straight to job boards asking "which job am I going to do?" when meaningful work (especially with independent businesses or self-employment) rarely appears on traditional job platforms. More fundamentally, this represents an incredibly complex question that cannot be answered through single-step thinking. Emma recognises the Christmas-to-New-Year anxiety spiral (am I doing the right thing, could I be doing more, what are my goals) that Claire validates as common for purpose-led professionals, though she identifies that self-criticism, fear, and judgement often show up in internal debates about "where do we go, what is enough, am I...