Thinking about a career move?

Thinking about a career move?

Recently I was reading a Microsoft study of 30,000 people which revealed that 46% of workers are considering a major career pivot or transition after the Covid years. For many, this search goes beyond just a change of role and into the realm of personal renewal or reinvention. In our experience As career coaches at Family and Child Consultants, many of the professionals who such express an interest in reinvention ultimately fail to follow through.


The hardest part, we’ve found, and where many professionals get stuck, is simply getting started on leaving the status quo. This is particularly true for senior executives. Personal reinvention requires reappraising life choices and imagining alternate paths — but this becomes more difficult when the path a leader is on is seen, at least outwardly, as successful. Because leaders’ identities are so dependent on their work, it can also be hard for them to consider different possibilities. And while these executives have been educated in strategic planning and change at the organizational level, reinvention at a personal level is not part of the curriculum at most business schools.


More ironically, there are also habits that are core to executives’ success that stand squarely in the way of personal reinvention. In our work teaching and coaching managers, we have identified four traps – self-sufficiency, overthinking, procrastination, and searching for the answer – that prevent leaders from taking the first steps necessary for considering and exploring possible new versions of themselves for the future.

In our work, we have found ways to help leaders recognize which traps they are falling into and start imagining a way out — largely inspired by design thinking principles such as rapid prototyping, making ideas visual, and getting quick feedback. Understanding what these traps are can help you take those first steps — and succeed in your quest for reinvention.


Self-sufficiency


Leaders often talk of their self-sufficiency with pride. These leaders rely on their own contributions, work well independently and seldom require motivation or management from others – behaviors that have earned them their senior roles. However, self-sufficiency has a flip side: It can limit connections with others, resulting in restricted access to new ideas, feedback and encouragement. It can also hide a leader’s doubts and insecurities from others. Individuals who are highly self-sufficient need others to help them overcome this trap of self-sufficiency and asking for help may seem obvious, but it also takes courage, especially when admitting to career vulnerability.

 

If you tend to be reluctant to ask for help, or to accept it when offered, it may be a sign of the self-sufficiency trap. If so, find someone you trust and let them know that you would like to talk things through. Jack Welch, former GE CEO, stretched this remedy to “reverse mentoring” where senior executives turn to younger digital natives in order to master digital convergence.


Overthinking


Sharp analytical skills are critical to good problem solving and leadership through complex situations. However, when reinventing themselves executives can get stuck claiming they simply need “a little more time to think things through” before actually taking any steps to make a change. The overthinking trap is born from a dependence on analysis and logic as the way to solve problems that overlooks other ways of knowing — emotional, intuitive, visual or embodied. 


This overthinking leads executives to miss signals from these neglected sources of data and prevents learning from experimentation. Yet personal reinvention is an embodied, experimental experience and executives cannot simply think their way into the future.


If you catch yourself frequently saying “let me think that through,” you are likely overthinking. Instead, notice other often-overlooked sources of data — emotional and  intuitive — and take an experimental approach. Personal reinvention is best served by doing, rather than thinking: 


Trying things out and learning from the outcome. Attention to physical cues, your intuition about how the experiment worked, as well as others’ reactions can provide sources of data that can help you get out of the overthinking trap.


The Right Answer


Our society teaches that there are “right” and “wrong” answers from our schooldays right through to the workplace. But, often, there are no discernible right answers when looking out over the unknown of a reinvented life or career. Executives who have confident replies at the ready in the context of their current roles become suddenly silent when they’re asked about their personal futures.


If you tend to search for the “right” answer when evaluating choices, this may be a sign that you might shy away from embarking on experimentation or accepting mistakes as a pathway to learning and growth. It can be useful to ask what alternate paths are there?


Procrastination


The easiest excuse to avoid starting a reinvention process as an executive is all the other urgent work you have to do. Successful leaders are rewarded with ever-greater responsibilities, which means that they have less and less time to focus on their own longer-term aspirations. That limited bandwidth can also fuel anxiety: It can be hard to imagine a nebulous future when weighed down with the very real demands of today. More than this, personal reinvention can be scary. Who among us hasn’t hesitated in the face of a big decision, not for more insight, but simply in the hope of deferring choices to avoid the associated anxiety and self-doubt? We also know from psychology that people procrastinate to avoid ambiguous, difficult and unstructured situations or decisions — and personal reinvention checks all of these boxes.


If you tend to procrastinate, ask yourself why you are putting off important decisions about your life? And, why you are choosing to prioritize other tasks? The adage “just do it” can help take a first step and act as a reminder that reinvention is an iterative process, so taking that first step no matter how small is better than a perfect idea that remains untested.


The common denominator in these traps is that they aren’t bad habits in and of themselves — quite the opposite. Executives follow strategies that have worked well for them throughout their lives — self-reliance, thinking their way to an answer and throwing themselves into work that demonstrates their loyalty to the status quo. But it also keeps them safe from the messy, emotional work of exploring new possibilities.


Only when executives recognize the dissonance between their inner yearning and the status quo can they address existential questions about who they are and what they want from life. Confronting the traps — their legacy beliefs — that prevent them from doing so can help them finally imagine their next selves and start on their way.

 




Niki has worked in Child Protection, Family Law, Juvenile Justice and NDIS for over 19 years.  Having worked extensively with families, government departments, not for profits and privately owned large and small businesses, Niki understands the needs of families, the pressures of compliance, quality and sustainability, and the need to work smart, be resilient, and know who we work for and who we work with.

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Niki has trained staff and governments both nationally and internationally on child safeguarding and exploitation and established multimillion dollar government and non-government departments.  


Niki is a mum of 4 and a Grandma to 1 and lives in Adelaide with her husband of 25 years.

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