Describe a difficult decision

I'll talk about a decision I made about four years ago to leave a stable job and switch to a completely different field. The decision itself was whether to stay in a finance role I'd held for several years — which was well-paid, reasonably secure, and frankly a little dull — or to take a significant pay cut and retrain in data analytics, where I was starting from near zero. The options were clear enough. Staying meant continuing on a trajectory I'd grown tired of. Leaving meant a real financial hit for at least a year, the risk of discovering I wasn't suited to the new field, and some uncomfortable questions on my CV. How long it took me to decide: several months of going back and forth, followed by a specific conversation with a friend who asked me a pointed question — if I stayed for another three years, how would I feel about that? The answer I gave immediately, before I could think about it, was "worse." That conversation more or less made up my mind. What made it difficult wasn't the uncertainty itself, which I'd expected. It was that the option I was walking away from wasn't bad — it was just not where I wanted to be. Saying no to something adequate is considerably harder than saying no to something actively wrong. I decided to leave. It took longer to rebuild my income than I'd planned, and there were months that were uncomfortable. Whether I made the right call is still a question I ask occasionally. What I'm more confident about is that I made it for the right reasons.