Episode 37: Are You in the Wrong Room?

Ever walk into a job and instantly know:
 “Oh… I don’t belong here.”

That pressure shift.
 That spiritual eye-roll.
 That full-body Nope.

In this episode, we talk about the unmistakable — and often ignored — feeling of being in the wrong room in your career, your work life, or your creative path. If your job drains you at the cellular level, if you’ve spent years forcing yourself into a shape that doesn’t fit, or if you feel like you’re cosplaying as a functional adult just to get through the day… this one’s for you.

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Sara's award-winning biography of Dag can be found on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Decoding-Unicorn-New-Look-Hammarskj%C3%B6ld-ebook/dp/B0DSCS5PZT

Her forthcoming project, Simply Dag, will release globally on July 29, 2026. 

#DecodingTheUnicorn #IntrovertLife #HSPCommunity #WrongRoom #CareerAlignment  #MeaningfulWork  #AuthenticLiving  

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

In Episode 37 of the Decoding the Unicorn podcast, host Sara Causey discusses the feeling of being in the wrong job, likening it to entering a room that doesn't fit. She shares personal experiences, such as working for a company with unhappy colleagues who spread negativity and accepting a remote job that turned out to require extensive travel. Sara emphasizes the importance of recognizing when a job misaligns with one's values and personality, noting symptoms like chronic under-stimulation, overstimulation, and anxiety. She advises against rash decisions and encourages listeners to plan their exit gracefully to find a more fulfilling environment.

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

wrong room, job dissatisfaction, workplace misfit, Sunday scaries, creative stifling, remote work, travel expectations, corporate culture, emotional toll, alignment, bailout fantasies, nervous system, identity crisis, career transition, self-care

Welcome to the Decoding the Unicorn podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey. 

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 37 of decoding the unicorn the podcast, I appreciate you being here. In this episode, I want to ask, are you in the wrong room? If you've ever walked into a job and felt that weird, icky, tilting kind of sensation like the air pressure has gone wrong, the energy is weird, the vibes are off, and every part of you says, nope, congratulations. You've most likely experienced being in the wrong room.

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When I was thinking about this topic earlier, a couple of things came to mind. There was a company I worked for for several years, and for the most part, it was a pretty good experience. Most everyone got along. It was a smaller Mom and Pop type company, and it really was like a little community notice. I don't say family, because I get creeped out by jobs that refer to everybody as family. Like, No, you're not family, your colleagues and managers and shareholders, not a family. But it was a nice little community of people. I will say that, however, there were a small handful of individuals that got in that just absolutely did not like it, and I don't know why they didn't leave and go somewhere else. It was obvious that they were in the wrong room. They were miserable, and instead of leaving, it was like they just wanted to spread their misery around. They got on social media at work, during work hours, and on their work computers, and started having essentially live tweets of how miserable they were, who they hated, what they didn't like, etc, all day. Well, naturally, when you do something that foolish, it's like you're begging to get caught. You're live tweeting on on public social media that you hate the workplace, you hate your co workers, etc, and you're doing it on the clock while you're being paid and on a work computer. Not the smartest maneuver that anybody ever made in their life. In my opinion, of course, they got busted, and surprisingly, they weren't fired for that. They were just raked over the coals, and then any kind of social media website was banned from work computers so that people just simply couldn't access it anymore. They continued to be sour, as you can probably imagine, and it didn't take long before they were fired for other offenses. And nobody was sad when they left. They probably weren't sad, and nobody else was sad to see them go. It reminds me of the old cliche that everybody brightens a room, some people when they enter, and some people when they exit, and the whole environment felt lighter whenever the haters and people that were just spiteful and wanted to complain all the time when they left, clearly they were in the wrong room. Now I'll use myself as an example. There was a position that I took. This has been years ago, and it's not on my CV. There was a position I took, and this was before the pandemic. This was before remote work for white collar workers became much more acceptable and common. And I primarily accepted the offer because it was a remote work from home or work from anywhere position, and I had also been told very clearly and in writing that it was 0% travel, and that appealed to me, because I'm not really a fan of work related travel, like when you're on a job, it's one thing to do something work related, because it's your work, it's your passion, but when you're talking about work related travel, because your boss is forcing you to go Somewhere, no. On top of that, if you know anything about my back story, I have a farm. I have animals to take care of, so it's just not practical for me to be going on business trips all the time. I get there, and on day one, it all fell apart. It was so crazy. In some respects, it was like being in a slapstick. Movie or a novel, or maybe an episode of The Office, you know, where the characters break the fourth wall and look into the camera like what I get in there. And I'm told very plainly that I'm expected to take a business trip to Arkansas and then another one to Texas within the first two weeks of employment. I'm told that in q4 of every year every employee, unless you're in the hospital or the morgue, every employee, is required to go to the corporate office and attend a two day retreat, slash raw raw festival about how great the company is. They made me watch videos of past events, which included the CEO of the company trying to play various musical musical instruments quite badly. And it felt to me, in my opinion, like something from a cult. It was scary. Then I was also told that every January, people in this department that I was working in were required to go on a departmental retreat where they rented a cabin in the woods for a week and you didn't leave, and it was team building. And I'm like, Oh, absolutely not, as an introvert and HSP, absolutely not. I'm not going to do any of that. Plus, I've been bamboozled. I was told this was work from home or work from anywhere, totally remote with 0% travel, and you're throwing two business trips at me, telling me I have to go somewhere in q4 for a cult like rally, and then in January, I'm going to have to go to some also cult like creepy situation where I'm locked in a cabin with other people from the department. Oh, I resigned that very first day I worked one day, and was like, Nope, you can miss me with that, because this has been misinformation. I've been misled, and I don't appreciate it. I was in the wrong room. So what is that wrong room feeling like? If you felt it before, this is going to resonate for you. One part of it can be that creeping sensation like you forced yourself into a shape that wasn't really designed for you. It can be trying to shove a square peg into a round hole. The way that I also described it a lot when I was working in corporate America, for other people outside the home, was that it felt like I was a left foot stuck inside a right shoe. I could walk, I could get around, but it sure was painful and it didn't feel very good. You might feel drained before the day even begins. That can manifest as the Sunday scaries. That feeling on Sunday afternoon or Sunday evening of the weekend is over, and now I've got to go back to that place tomorrow. But it doesn't have to be isolated to Sunday. It can be getting up in the morning being like, oh my god, really that place, your creativity often feels stifled or completely strangled off. You have to conform to somebody else's system. You don't have any autonomy or creative liberty. It's all about conformity and control. You may also feel that you're cos playing the role of a functional person, and here's what I mean by that, from all outward appearances, everything seems cool. You're getting up, taking a shower, brushing your teeth, going to work. You're doing it. You're physically showing up, mentally or spiritually, you may feel completely stifled and choked off, but physically, you're moving almost like on autopilot. If you're working remotely. That may be you roll out of bed at 730 eat some breakfast, and then turn the laptop on at 759 and you're there. You've pasted a smile on your meeting light in teams or on Slack has gone green. Everybody can see, everybody can surveil and you're like, This just feels so grotesque to me. If the job doesn't fit, then that doesn't mean that you are a failure or that there's some moral failing behind it in the Western world. And I'm thinking, you know, as an American, particularly in our society, being somewhat puritanical in its basis, in its early days, we grow up under this misapprehension that we need to grit our teeth, grind through it, just be grateful. Be grateful for a paycheck. Just do it. Just shut up and do it. But nobody really teaches us how to recognize if, number one, if a job is fundamentally wrong for who we are, and then number two, how to handle it gracefully, how to hit the exit gracefully if you do figure out, oh my God, I've made a mistake. It's not about entitlement or laziness. It's about alignment. It's not saying, Well, I don't want to do anything. I want to stare at the wall all day, or I want to lay on the couch and watch Netflix and just really not contribute anything unique to society. It's about not having that. Feeling that I described of being a left foot stuck in a right shoe trying to walk or run a marathon when you feel hobbled, I would say that if a job drains you at the cellular level or the soul level, you're not defective. You're not a bad person. And you know what? The job may not be, objectively a bad job. It may not be the salt mines, it may not be the worst thing that anybody ever went through. It just may be that you are in the wrong room. Here are a few signs. Now I always say my standard disclaimer in any podcast, I don't give you advice and I don't tell you what to do or what not to do. Caveat, mTOR, be a responsible adult and figure out for yourself what's best for you and your family. There are some commentators that are pretty bold, pretty brash, just quit that job, just leave, run out the door. I don't know what your financial situation is. If you quit the job, it may feel really good for a day or two, and then when the bills pile up and you have no way of paying them, you might deeply regret that decision. So my my thought is, don't do anything in a rash judgment. Come to your own conclusions, and I would hope that those would be based on common sense. These are just some signs for you to consider. Perhaps you're in the wrong room. Do you feel chronically under stimulated, like you're not being used to full capacity. You feel bored. It's like what the podcaster David bear describes as primal states versus powerful states. Boredom is a primal state. If you feel under stimulated, underused, underdeveloped, that's not a great sign. Conversely, if you feel overstimulated, if you feel like Chicken Little the workplace is the kind of environment where, if you're not on high anxiety, running around saying the sky is falling and we're all going to die, that's a sign of misalignment. It's a sign that you're in the wrong room. I had a supervisor for years that was like that if she had a panic attack, if she came in and said, Oh my God, I've been up since two in the morning, and I don't know what we're gonna do, she wanted everybody else to panic with her. And if you didn't, she got mad at you. It's like, here's your sign. I think I'm in the wrong room. Does the work violate your values? Does it depress your spirit? Do you dread Mondays or, frankly, any day and feel like an existential sense of heaviness, gloom? Do you find yourself asking, Is this really it? Think about Jack Nicholson in the movie as good as it gets, that classic scene where he's in the therapist's office, and he looks around and says, What if this is as good as it gets? Do you feel that way when you go to go to work or when you log in on the laptop? Is this as good as it gets? Is this it? Do you imagine escape scenarios frequently, maybe a little too often. I used to have when I was coaching solopreneurs, I used to have what I called bailout fantasies. And I'm not saying that when I was coaching I'm saying that's the way that I put it to the clients. Are you having bailout fantasies? Because in my first iteration of self employment that failed, I had bailout fantasies all the time. I wish somebody would call I wish somebody would offer me a job. I wish this. I wish that. Because I just kept thinking. I want some way of escaping the hell that I'm in, but I can still save face. I don't have to feel like my pride was completely and totally bashed. If you are a creative an HSP or highly sensitive person, an introvert in particular, it may feel for you that the wrong room is not just uncomfortable, it's suffocating. And it may also be that your nervous system is going to tell you the truth before your brain does. You may have that sensation of anxiety, fear, discomfort, fight, flight or freeze, or it could be depression. You may feel like an Eeyore most of the time. Why bother? Why do this? Who cares? What even is it? Anyway, creative people need curiosity, flow, autonomy, meaning, and if you're stuck in a fluorescently lit cubicle in the cube farm or the bullpen, there's another thing I don't miss from sales jobs the bullpen. If you're stuck in that environment with passive aggressive memos and mandatory icebreakers, it may mean that you are in the wrong room for your entire species. I speak from experience, you are not alone. I think it's also important to remember that not every room is forever. Some of them are seasons. They're stepping stones, and sometimes that wrong room is a clarifier, like how Esther and Abraham talk about contrast, it may show you exactly what you don't want and where you don't need to be. Some people get trapped into staying in the wrong room out of fear family programming, or, as I've said, kind of the religious puritanical background of America that it's all about hard work, and if you're not hustling and grinding, then you're getting left behind, and you're a problem. You're a drag on society. You may also have identity that's wrapped in your job title, and you don't know what it looks like if you're not a this or that. You may think that suffering is noble. If I'm miserable, then it means I'm a good person. So here's my closing thought for this episode. If you're in the wrong room, it does not mean that the right one doesn't exist. In fact, if you look at it by definition, if you're in the wrong room, it means there is a right one. It couldn't be wrong if right didn't exist. You may be nudged gently or forcefully toward that better room. The door out is real. It may not be that you need to run out of it right now. You may want to feather your nest. You may want to get a game plan together of what that's going to look like for you. But if you're listening to this and you've realized, yeah, I'm definitely in the wrong room, it's okay to acknowledge that. In fact, I would argue that once you acknowledge it, it's like acknowledging any problem. That's really the first step. Once you acknowledge it, then you can start to think about what would it look like in the right room, what steps might I need to take to escape this situation to exit gracefully and go somewhere where I'm appreciated, valued, stimulated the right way, challenged, used to better capacity. I feel alive. I don't have the Sunday scaries. What? What would that look like? How could you potentially get there and sometimes the wrong room turns out to be an incubation chamber for exactly that. Take good care of yourself, and I will see you in the next episode.

Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast and share it with others. We'll see you next time.