The Painful Truth

Here we are with another blog that considers what we do, and what it takes to work with purpose, lead with impact, and engage with people in a way that really makes a difference.

In our Work Unplugged podcast last week, Amrit spoke about something that might have felt uncomfortable to hear, and for good reason. It's what he called the painful truth: the experience of staying in a job we hate while telling everyone around us it's amazing. The cognitive dissonance of smiling through it, saying "it's great, honestly" while everything in us knows it isn’t.

It got me thinking about the psychology behind why we do this. Because I don’t think it’s weakness or denial. I think it’s something far more deeply wired into our brains than that. It took me back to a conversation I had many years ago with a coach about pleasure and pain, and what Tony Robbins calls the Pleasure-Pain Principle. In his book Awaken the Giant Within, Robbins describes the idea that every decision we make is fundamentally driven by either moving away from pain or toward pleasure. Simple to understand, but in the context of work, and this blog, it means staying somewhere we are struggling, instead of facing into the truth of it and taking action to leave. As Robbins puts it, “at the bottom of most inaction, we link more pain to making a change than to staying where we are.”

In other words, we don’t leave because leaving feels more frightening than staying, even when staying is making us miserable. Better the devil you know, as it were. Until, that is, we reach what Robbins calls the magical moment; the point when pain finally tips over into becoming a motivator for action rather than something to endure. The scales shift. And only then do we move. The tipping point is obviously different for everyone. It’s subjective, emotional, and shaped by everything we’ve experienced before. What feels unbearable to one person might feel entirely manageable, even normal to another, depending on their history and what they’ve been quietly conditioned to accept. It’s not about intelligence. It’s about where each person’s internal scales are set. And in that, I can’t not refer to the differences between men and women in the workplace, and how a woman’s scales are often set differently to that of a man.

For women, the decision to leave, or even to apply for something new, carries an additional weight that most research is only now beginning to properly document. You’ve probably heard the statistic: men apply for jobs when they meet 60% of the qualifications, women only when they meet 100%. That figure originated as a speculative comment from a Hewlett Packard executive rather than actual data. But when Harvard Business School researchers Katherine Coffman, Manuela Collis, and Leena Kulkarni tested it with over 10,000 participants across multiple studies, they found something more nuanced and, frankly, more troubling.

When reading the same job advert, similarly qualified men thought they met the requirements to a slightly greater extent than women did. It wasn’t that women lacked the qualifications. It was that they perceived the bar as higher, or themselves as less likely to clear it. And they weren’t wrong to think that. Katherine Coffman’s research shows that talented women are more likely to shy away from applying for advanced, higher-paying positions because they’re concerned, they aren’t qualified enough, whereas men don’t worry as much about that gap. Critically, when job adverts included only vague qualifications, just 42% of qualified women applied, compared with 56% of qualified men. When the requirements were made specific and clear, that number rose to 62% for women. 

So, it's not confidence. It’s not self-doubt in a vacuum. It’s women accurately reading an environment where they know, consciously or not, that they’ll be held to a different standard. And the research consistently shows that they are. A study of nearly 30,000 retail employees (cited in the American Economic Review, 2026) found that women received higher performance ratings than men on average but consistently lower ratings on “potential.” Even when women exceeded expectations, they continued to receive lower potential scores in the next evaluation period. The researchers’ conclusion? Women were being held to a stricter bar for promotion and an estimated 70% of the gender pay gap at the company was attributable to these differences in promotion rates.

Other research shows that women must demonstrate superior performance to even be considered for leadership roles, and when they do reach those positions, they face greater scrutiny and harsher evaluations. So, when a woman looks at a job description and thinks “I’m not sure I’m qualified enough,” she’s not being overly cautious. She’s being realistic about what is required of her to succeed. And so, the fear of the unknown is understandable, and perhaps more so for women. In Robbins’ framework, most of us won’t leave a bad situation because the pain of staying still feels less frightening than the pain of stepping into uncertainty. The devil you know versus the devil you don’t. That’s a universal human experience. But for women, the unknown isn’t just unknown. It’s statistically riskier.

That risk ties into another layer of psychological resistance, one that’s deeply human and economically rational: the sunk cost fallacy. Many women feel they’ve invested heavily in building credibility and proving their capability in their current environment, no matter how toxic it may be. Walking away can feel like abandoning all that effort, all those years spent demonstrating value and resilience.

The logic becomes, “I’ve spent too much to give up now.” Yet, as behavioural scientists remind us, that’s the same fallacy that leads us to throw good money after bad. We keep investing in something that no longer serves us, because loss aversion - the instinct to avoid the pain of losing what we’ve already put in, feels stronger than the possibility of starting fresh. When women already know they’re so often held to a higher standard, this calculation becomes even more powerful. Leaving doesn’t just threaten security; it risks the perceived erosion of hard-won proof that they belong.

This is where the pain–pleasure framework becomes even more relevant. Because leaving a toxic job doesn’t just mean leaving. It means applying for something new. And for women, that process carries its own pain. The pain of putting yourself forward when you know you’ll likely need to be overqualified to even be considered. The pain of wondering whether you’ll be judged fairly. The pain of knowing that what got your male colleague promoted might not be enough for you. So, the scales aren’t balanced the same way.

The pain of staying in a place that’s making you miserable has to outweigh not just the general uncertainty of change, but the specifically gendered uncertainty of whether the next place will be better, or whether you’ll just be trading one set of impossible standards for another. It’s fear of the unknown, yes. But it’s fear of the unknown compounded by a rational assessment of the odds.

Another factor that keeps the scales tipping in favour of staying is the people we work alongside. When an environment is difficult, something almost counterintuitive happens. Social psychologist Stanley Schachter demonstrated in his 1959 research that when people are anxious or under threat, they don’t just seek out any company, they specifically seek out others in the same situation. As he put it, “Misery doesn’t just love any kind of company; it loves only miserable company.”

In a difficult workplace, real warmth develops between people who are going through it together, a kind of foxhole mentality. And for women, who are statistically more likely to be in those environments together, navigating the same double standards and the same scrutiny, that bond can be particularly strong. Leaving doesn’t just mean leaving a job. It means leaving the people who genuinely understand what you’ve been dealing with. And that registers as a significant loss on the pleasure side of the scales.

Most people I’ve worked with who eventually left difficult environments describe not a gradual realisation but a specific moment when something finally shifted. A conversation that went too far. A comment from a partner or friend who could see what they couldn’t. A quiet recognition that their values were being violated daily and they weren’t willing to accept it anymore. Robbins describes this as the moment when pain finally stops being something we endure and starts being something that compels us to act.

But I think for women, we need to be honest about what we’re asking. We’re not just asking them to overcome inertia or face the unknown. We’re asking them to step into a job market that they know, from lived experience and research, will judge them more harshly, require them to be better qualified, and scrutinise their potential more critically than their male peers. That’s not a small ask. And I think the real work for organisations, for hiring managers, for all of us who care about building better workplaces, is to make the other side of that equation genuinely less painful. To make it easier for women to know they’re qualified. To make standards clearer and fairer. To make the uncertainty less uncertain. Because the normalisation of hard things is one of the most human things we do. And perhaps one of the costliest. And for women, it often starts long before we even walk through the door.

 If you'd like to hear Amrit with his take on this topic, click here to listen to the podcast!