by Jenny Blake
But this doesn’t all have to be bad news. Navigating this accelerated pace of change and this transitional career state, learning to embrace it instead of resisting it, can become an edge and advantage. You can learn to enjoy calculated risk and uncertainty in exchange for adventure, flexibility, freedom, and opportunity.
By approaching their career transitions in a positive, methodical way, each of the people whose stories I shared earlier recalibrated toward more resonant trajectories:
Amy sought to prove her value at her PR firm by taking on the projects that no one else wanted to do. In 2009, when it became increasingly clear that social media and blogger outreach were important for PR strategy, she volunteered to learn more about it—a job others in the company avoided, for fear of lowering their status by working with bloggers instead of marquee clients. Amy soon developed a reputation as the company’s social media expert, consulting on all the biggest accounts and parlaying this expertise into a new role as director of digital entertainment.
When he returned to the States after eight months abroad, Adam knew he wanted to combine his interests in fashion, technology, brand strategy, and entrepreneurship. He applied and was accepted into Parsons Business of Design graduate program, which helped build his skills, business acumen, and network over the following two years. After graduation, Adam remained in New York City, where he and his company, ABC Design Lab, are thriving.
Tara had never lived outside of California, but had a hunch that moving to and working remotely from New Orleans, where she had been volunteering annually since Hurricane Katrina, would be the exact refresh her life needed. Within one year, Tara met a man, got engaged, and made the tough decision to quit her job. After taking off a year to have a baby, she returned to work as a consultant in the nonprofit sector for large-scale social impact programs.
Inspired by a fortuitous meeting with a soon-to-be mentor on the day he was traded from the Raiders to the Broncos, Marques decided to pursue his master’s degree in Adult Learning and Global Change at a university in Sweden after retiring from the NFL. A few years later he founded the World Education Foundation, and now travels the world launching initiatives in developing nations to create “improved human experiences in health, education, infrastructure, and sports.”
When Kyle first returned home to the States after serving in the Middle East in 2006, he said, “I was completely lost. That transition was like someone dropping me off in the middle of the desert. I didn’t know what the hell to do with myself.” He downshifted his military involvement, switching to part time in the reserves, and resolved to work for himself so that he could take control of his life and “never let someone else determine his future.” Kyle went on to build a suite of companies, including an IT hardware company, a tax law and accounting practice, and a scalable contracts service for entrepreneurs called OurDeal.
When the company he was working for got acquired, having served as a chief information officer for twenty-two years, John said he was looking forward to a next phase in his career, but had no plans to retire. Within five months of exploring, and allowing himself the freedom to focus more time on his love of travel and photography, he accepted a role as chief operations officer at a global cloud computing software company, his largest role to date. Bud was in a similar position, having spent twenty-five years on the road and ready for a transition that wasn’t retirement. He shifted his consulting business online to spend more time at home. “This is legacy time,” Bud said, noting that he, too, plans to continue working for at least another ten years.
After Brian and Julie exhausted their options internally and opened themselves up to pushing past their career plateaus by switching companies, job offers for full-time leadership roles seemed to fall from the sky. Both were “poached”—sought out by recruiters based on their reputation and work history—for dream roles: Brian as senior vice president of engineering for a start-up company, and Julie as head of global people development for Chanel.
In 2011, I made the difficult decision to leave Google after my sabbatical and launch a full-time business based on my blog and recently released book. People reacted as if I were breaking up with Brad Pitt. “You really think you can do better than Gooooogle?!” I wasn’t sure, but I knew I would forever regret not trying. So I rented out my condo, packed a suitcase, and moved from Silicon Valley to New York City. I have been running my own company in the years since as a career and business strategist, writer, and keynote speaker. I am the happiest and healthiest I have ever been. Even as my business goes through ups and downs, I feel calm and engaged with my work.
As much as we began from similar places of dissatisfaction, our stories all have something in common with how we proceeded, too. We each shifted to new, related work by leveraging our existing base of strengths, interests, and experience. Though it might seem as if each of us made drastic changes, we were not starting from scratch. In Silicon Valley parlance, we pivoted.
Eric Ries, author of the business bible The Lean Startup, defines a business pivot as “a change in strategy without a change in vision.”
I define a career pivot as doubling down on what is working to make a purposeful shift in a new, related direction. Pivoting, as we will refer to it in this book, is an intentional, methodical process for nimbly navigating career changes.
Typically when the word pivot is applied to a business strategy shift, it is considered Plan B: changing directions to save a business from dwindling profits or a dismal forecast. Pivoting was a response to failing at Plan A, the original goal. But when it comes to our careers, learning to pivot is Plan A. Pivoting, within our roles and throughout our careers, is the new normal.
Punctuated moments of career success—promotions, launches, and financial windfalls—are nice, but they are only a tiny fraction of our overall experience. By doubling down on what is working best while thinking about how to develop into what’s next, you accelerate the experimentation and change process. You can proceed with confidence, knowing that you already have what it takes to get where you want to go.
Your choice, today and in the future, is to pivot or get pivoted. Pivoting is a mindset and a skill set, and you can get better at both. In this book I will share a framework to help you manage the process with focus, fulfillment, and—dare I say—fun.
CHANGING CAREERS IN THE AGE OF THE APP
Careers are no longer straightforward, linear, and predictable like ladders. They are now much more modular, customizable, and dynamic, like smartphones. Our education and our upbringing are the out-of-the-box model. After that, it is up to us to download the apps—for skills, interests, experiences, and education—that we want and need to feel fulfilled.
But what do you do when your entire operating system needs an upgrade? It is not as easy as clicking “update now” and waiting five minutes for shiny new features to set in. We are not machines; we are flawed, fear-prone, desire-driven, sometimes irrational, endlessly creative human beings.
Career changes seem to threaten our most fundamental needs on Maslow’s hierarchy: food, shelter, clothing, and safety, in addition to higher-level needs for belonging, esteem, and even self-actualization. We are afraid that if we make one wrong move, we will soon become homeless (or forced to live in our parents’ basement) and unemployed, unable to fend for our very survival. Perceiving this potential threat to our primary needs, we freeze, flee, or fight the nagging voice within us that seeks greater fulfillment.
As Stephen Grosz writes in The Examined Life, “All change involves loss.” It is natural to fear change when we know that we must grieve what we may leave in its wake. Even the most exciting changes can be bittersweet, as they often involve letting something else go.
But many of us fear change for a more irrational reason: we anticipate worst-case scenarios, which may or may not occur. To remain calm and to have access to our most creative faculties, we must learn to see the new career
change landscape as normal, expected, and part of a revolution ripe with opportunity. As my friend Monica’s mother advises when she worries about the future, “Don’t suffer twice.”
In the career-as-smartphone analogy, pivoting is about learning to download apps one by one—or a few smaller apps simultaneously—so you can reduce risk, experiment with ideas, and enhance your career operating system without sending yourself into a panic by trying to make moves that are too drastic, too far removed from what you are doing right now.
You will never see the entire pivot path at the outset, nor would you want to. If the next steps were obvious and manageable with a simple spreadsheet, you would either already be taking them or you would be bored. The exhilarating part of tackling new opportunities is the inherent risk and uncertainty involved. It is the “call to adventure” from Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey archetype, which necessitates that we venture into the land of the unknown and become bigger, more fully expressed versions of ourselves in the process.
What Is the Difference Between a Crisis and a Pivot?
There are certain life events that are all consuming; they rock us to the core, break us down, and torch the world as we knew it. The death of a loved one, disease, divorce, getting fired—all of these can be extremely traumatic. To call them pivot points would be a gross understatement.
A pivot is change you make of your own volition when you have reached a point in your career when you are ready for increased challenge and impact. Traumatic events, ones that leave you with the feeling that you are crawling out of your own skin, are most often not voluntary.
Certain events happen to us and they require space for patience, compassion, grief, and sometimes therapy or spiritual guidance in order to heal. These events demand a period of time to retreat, process, and regroup. Sometimes just waking up and making it through the day is an enormous accomplishment. Crises typically require more processing than planning, though not everyone will have the luxury to do those two things in sequence. It is likely that those in the throes of trauma need time to heal before embarking on the more proactive phases of pivoting.
In many cases, painful experiences also serve as powerful wake-up calls, encouraging us to rebuild in an even more authentic direction. I recommend books for each Pivot stage in the Pivot 201 section at the back of the book, but the two I suggest for processing major life events are When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön, and Second Firsts by Christina Rasmussen.
CONNECT THE DOTS LOOKING BACKWARD
When I was twenty years old, I took a leave of absence from UCLA, where I was studying political science and communications, to join a political polling start-up in Silicon Valley as its first employee. This was my first pivot, and it kicked off my examination of what it takes to switch quickly and successfully from one trajectory to the next, even when it seems to go against the grain of what others are doing.
In hindsight I see my entire career as a series of pivots, within companies and also on my own, where I have made several smaller pivots in my business since:
After two years at Polimetrix, where my role included managing our Google AdWords accounts, I landed a job at Google in training and development, teaching customer service representatives how to support the AdWords product.
Next I pivoted within Google, moving from the AdWords product training team to the career development team, a move made easier after having attended the Coaches Training Institute on weekends to become a certified coach. On the career development team, I helped create and launch a global coach training program for managers called Career Guru, which made drop-in coaching available to any Googler—a program still cited as one of the benefits that make Google a top company to work for.
While I was at Google, I started working on a hobby “side hustle” during nights and weekends—my first blog and book, Life After College. This became the springboard to my next big move, even though I had no clue for the first few years that it would eventually become my full-time occupation.
When I left Google, I pivoted to launch my own career-consulting and speaking business. I shifted the context of my work environment, but not the content, given that I applied a similar set of strengths and activities. Two years after that, I expanded my platform to a website under my own name, JennyBlake.me, where I focus on systems at the intersection of mind, body, and business.
As Steve Jobs said in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.” The days of mapping an entire career path are over. You do not have to specify the details of your life five moves or five years out. Consider what you were doing five years ago. Did you have any idea where you would be today? The challenge now is to be present. In doing so, we stay awake to the dots that are right in front of us.
I encourage you to reflect on your work history and connect the dots looking backward to see how you have already pivoted from one related area to the next. It is likely that, before even reading this book, many of these concepts will be things you have unknowingly applied in your own career.
I disagree with Jobs on one point: I do think it is possible to connect at least one or two dots looking forward. Maybe not with perfect detail, but we can get better at making the connection to our one next career step, and we must, as the economy demands that we all respond to change more deftly. By learning how to connect the dots looking backward and then forward, we can get better at making career connections in real time, not waiting too long until we are burned out, unhappy, or forced to make a change.
I have spent the last decade studying and reverse engineering career change, as my own life has been defined by these transitions. By reviewing through the lens of hindsight, examining my career and interviewing others, I uncovered patterns in what makes those transitions successful and what impedes them.
I have worked with people of all ages and career stages. Those who are most successful give themselves permission to explore continually, improving how quickly they spot their next move. They find and create cultures—whether in an office of one or ten thousand—that allow space to shift purposefully from one related area into the next.
While at Google I worked in the People Operations organization for five and a half years as the company skyrocketed from 6,000 to 36,000 employees. I trained over 1,000 people, from recent graduates to senior-level managers and directors, and saw how the feeling of bumping up against a career plateau affected everyone, not just entry-level workers. Moreover, both employees and managers wanted the same things—a happy, engaged, productive workforce—but did not always know how to close the communication gaps that opened between them when clarifying next career steps. When I started coaching entrepreneurs, I noticed how they, too, longed to create success without falling into the pressures of what “everyone else” was doing. They had to connect at least a few dots looking forward, on their own terms and based on their existing strengths, in order to stay in business.
Together, we will explore how to get better at this process no matter what work environment you are in. You can already connect your career dots looking backward to see how each related area led to the next; this book will teach you how to become an expert dot connector looking forward, now and in the future.
To operate this way, let go of expectations and fears about what can or should or might happen. Zoom back in to where you are right now, and where you want to go next. That is all you have to do. Once you make your next move, you will collect the experience and real-world data to plan the move after that.
When I was a freshman at UCLA I plotted all four years of required courses on a quarter-by-quarter, year-by-year spreadsheet to figure out how to double-major most efficiently. I printed this one-page, next-four-years-of-my-life plan, slipped it into a sheet protector, and followed it to the letter until I graduated, setting the stage for a rude awakening after graduation as I entered the unpred
ictable real world.
On one hand, my plan-heavy approach gave me the structure to jump at the opportunity to work at a start-up during my junior year, because I was ahead in my course work. However, this plan suffocated day-to-day spontaneity—and I missed out on following threads of exploration outside of checking boxes for maximum efficiency and compliance. After all, the best thing that happened to me in college, the job offer that set the stage for the rest of my career, was the one thing I didn’t plan for.
PIVOT METHOD AT A GLANCE
Agile development is a collaborative approach to project management that emphasizes continual planning, testing, and launching. One of my favorite sayings from this business practice is “Each time you repeat a task, take one step toward automating it.” Given that we will have many more career iterations than previous generations, it behooves us all to become better at the steps involved.
This book is structured around a four-stage process, the Pivot Method. Through each of the four stages—Plant, Scan, Pilot, and Launch—you will learn how to systematically bridge the gaps between where you are now and where you want to be.
In basketball, a pivot refers to a player keeping one foot firmly in place while moving the other in any direction to explore passing options. Much like a basketball player, successful pivots start by planting your feet—setting a strong foundation—then scanning the court for opportunities, staying rooted while exploring options. Scanning alone will not put points on the board, so eventually you start passing the ball around the court—testing ideas and getting feedback, or piloting—generating perspectives and opportunities to make a shot—eventually launching in the new direction.
