by Jenny Blake
Make-or-break marker: Let’s say all hell breaks loose: you lose your job or your biggest client the same week your car breaks down, and your bank account is running on fumes. Still, you are not ready to give up on your vision. Or you are not clear yet on what’s next, but deep down you feel that a breakthrough is right around the corner if you can hold out a bit longer. You may not be done with your pivot, but you need to pay your bills, and the fire under your rear end is getting uncomfortably hot. If you hit rock middle, you will know objectively that it is time to rethink things . . . before you have to hit FUBAR rock bottom. A Pivot paradox caveat: Sometimes rock bottom is the beginning of a breakthrough, and tough as it feels in the moment, it forces a new way of thinking, acting, and reacting.
Regardless, plan your worst-case scenario from the outset. In what order are you going to cash out your assets? What is your make-or-break marker to change strategy if things are not going as planned?
When I left my job to start my own business, I decided that if I was still not earning enough income to pay my bills after six months, but I was not yet ready to take a full-time job again, I would (in order):
1. Cash out my savings account ($20K)
2. Sell Red Velvet, my Prius ($15K)
3. Sell my stocks ($10K)
4. Dip into my 401(k)—my make-or-break threshold for when I would start to look for full-time work again
5. Sell my condo in California
6. DONEZO! All assets are gone. (Note to self when I made this list: Do not get to this point! Change strategy at #4 or earlier.)
Pen to Paper
What would you do, in order, to address your worst-case financial scenario if you were not meeting your monthly nut, or after spending your savings runway?
What existing assets could you draw from?
How could you shore up those assets with bridge income or a side hustle?
Pivot Paradox: Scarcity Versus The Secret
Maintaining equilibrium in your money mindset while pivoting can be a complicated dance, particularly since our financial habits are often tied to deeper emotions and operating principles. Find a way to inquire into your financial fear without letting it paralyze you. Ignoring it may send you into scarcity mode, which is not conducive to long-term planning.
According to Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, the authors of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, scarcity is not just a physical constraint, it is also a mindset—one that makes us less insightful, less forward thinking, and less controlled. “When scarcity captures our attention, it changes how we think—whether it is at the level of milliseconds, hours, days, or weeks. By staying at the top of our minds, it affects what we notice, how we weigh our choices, how we deliberate, and ultimately what we decide and how we behave.”
At the same time, there is a danger in some self-help teachings (à la The Secret) that imply merely thinking positive thoughts is enough to manifest a parking spot or a red Ferrari. Going all in on hope, without taking practical steps in tandem, will not pay the bills.
Get crystal clear on how much money you need to live, your income sources, and your emergency plan. At the same time, cultivate an abundance mindset. Life is not a zero-sum game; there is enough opportunity out there for each of us to thrive and be successful. For example, if you are a website designer, even though there are thousands of designers in the world, including inexpensive options for people looking to outsource overseas, you can still differentiate yourself by the quality of your work and find ideal clients who are looking for the premium services you offer.
INCOME-ANXIETY SEESAW AWARENESS
When it comes to money and pivoting, imagine a seesaw with anxiety on one end and income on the other. The income-anxiety seesaw is a checkpoint to determine when you need to correct course.
As you increase your cash flow consistency, your overall income, or your savings, anxiety about making a change will decrease. Your anxiety may not disappear completely, but you will start to trust that your basic needs are addressed.
However, as your income or savings start to decrease, your anxiety may climb. This threshold varies, but for almost everyone too much anxiety creates tunnel vision. You may stop thinking clearly and creatively, start losing sleep, and sacrifice in other areas that are important to you, such as health and quality time with friends and family.
When this starts happening, put the bigger experiments of your pivot on hold while you buckle down and get your income figured out. Very often this will involve creating a source of bridge income or taking a transitional role that will support you along your pivot path, even if it is not the exact result you are aiming for in your one- to two-year vision.
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After running through the calculations in this chapter, you will be clearer on your financial constraints, monthly income requirements, backup plans, and bridge income. You will know how to gauge when your income seesaw tips from ease into anxiety, and how to even it back out.
You might not know precisely what your pivot will cost in terms of time, energy, and money, or exactly what it is yet, but you will be proceeding confidently from a strong financial foundation. You bought yourself breathing room, now what will you do with it?
Plant: Online Resources
Visit PivotMethod.com/plant for additional tools, templates, and book recommendations for this stage.
STAGE TWO
SCAN
Explore Options
PLANT
SCAN
PILOT
LAUNCH
LEAD
SCAN OVERVIEW
THE PLANT STAGE PROVIDES A FRAMEWORK FOR WHERE YOU ARE NOW and where you generally want to end up. Now, in the Scan stage, you will start looking for people, skills, and opportunities to help you get there.
The aim of this stage is structured exploration, which involves research, plugging knowledge and skill gaps, having conversations, and clarifying what types of opportunities interest you most. You will harness serendipity by expanding your network and exposure, while being mindful not to scan so much that you fall into analysis paralysis or compare and despair.
Consider Amazon’s “Recommended for you” and “Customers also bought” algorithms. They match product suggestions to what you have previously demonstrated interest in. This is analogous to connecting your scanning activities to the values and strengths you identified during the Plant stage.
The downside of Amazon’s matching algorithms is that suggestions can become myopic, so rooted in what you have enjoyed in the past that you don’t go sideways to discover new, unrelated books or products that might surprise you.
The Scan stage requires that you look at both—new opportunities anchored in your existing strengths and ways you might expand beyond your comfort zone, revealing blind spots or hidden pockets of potential.
The most effective pivoters use the Scan phase to collect ideas and become “discoverable” to interesting new opportunities, even if they do not yet know exactly what will result. These are people who create opportunity, not just find it—so much so that new work and opportunities are often scanning for them.
This stage will help you scan efficiently—separating signal from noise—so you do not flood yourself with unnecessary information. Instead, bolstered by the Plant exercises, you will be like a pig searching for truffles in mud: operating with finely tuned senses to find exactly what you need.
It is easy when scanning to default to a self-focused mode of, What can I get? but scanning should also be about asking, What can I give? Who can I serve? What problems need solving?
CHAPTER 5: BOLSTER YOUR BENCH
Who Do You Already Know? Who Can Provide Advice? What Can You Give in Return?
He will have friends from whom he may seek counsel on matters great and small, whom he may consult every day about himself, from whom he may hear truth with
out insult, praise without flattery, and after whose likeness he may fashion himself.
—Lucius Seneca
NETWORKING. IS THERE ANY TERM THAT GIVES MORE PEOPLE HIVES WHEN IT COMES TO CAREER CHANGE? One study revealed that the word itself actually makes people feel dirty.
You have probably heard phrases like “Connections are currency” and “Your network is your net worth”—clichés repeated so often that they are easy to cast aside. Yet it remains true that authentically connecting with others is a far superior opportunity-building strategy than “spray-and-pray” outreach or résumé blasting across online marketplaces.
Nearly everyone I interviewed for this book mentioned that, in addition to excelling in their current roles, career opportunities came from two key places:
Their existing network, friends of friends, and colleagues
Reputation-building activities, such as writing or speaking on subjects that they have expertise in
Both of these factors hinge on creating two-way conversations with people you already know and those you have yet to meet. I remember speaking with an executive, Sam, at a conference. After my keynote, he approached me to share the story of his most recent pivot. He had worked at one job for twelve years before taking the risky move of leaving to work at a start-up. Nine months later he was laid off.
Shell-shocked and worried about supporting his wife and children, he started placing calls to his network the same day he was fired, on the commute home. Within two weeks, Sam was starting at another job. The speed of this transition was based upon several factors:
Sam had developed a strong reputation as a chief information officer. He was at a high level in his career and could easily be slotted for a new role based on his leadership abilities.
He had a “warm” network that was willing and ready to support him when needed. The conference we met at, the HMG Summit for CIOs, had been a central venue for keeping in touch with his peers throughout the years.
He did not hesitate to jump into action. He reduced his “woe is me” mode (to a pulp) and proactively reached out to people who could help him.
I am not here to tell you to eat your networking spinach. Rather, this chapter covers specific tactics you can use to authentically put yourself out there and develop a robust support system for connecting with people in a way that excites, not drains, you.
The strongest people strategies involve a blend of the following:
Warm connections: Mutually beneficial relationships you nurture over time, from which you both derive a sense of fulfillment and even exchange from your interactions.
Reputation capital: Expanding your sphere of influence by mastering your current role; establishing yourself as an expert; developing a name as someone with a unique skill set at the top of your field.
Thought leadership and platform: Publicly expressing your ideas; giving potential clients or companies an idea of what you stand for; making it clear who should seek work with you, who you enjoy working with, and how you can add value.
EXPAND YOUR SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
Shawn Henry worked his way up from an FBI file clerkship at twenty years old to a leadership role as the “number three guy” at the bureau—the executive assistant director—by the time he retired. Shawn pivoted thirteen times within the FBI over twenty-six years, each time expanding what he calls his sphere of influence.
Rather than stick to the traditional job ladder for his role, rising in the ranks as a bureau chief, he moved into emerging fields based on his strengths and interests. Shawn maintained a short-term vision each time; he focused on mastering the skills required for the role he was in and the impact he could make, incrementally increasing his level of responsibility and his ability to influence a greater portion of the bureau. By the end of his tenure, Shawn had become a key figure in creating international cybersecurity protocol.
Shawn encourages others to be cognizant of what their sphere of influence is, whether as a janitor or the president. “By examining your sphere of influence, you have the ability to quantify what you are doing every day,” he said. “There are very specific times in my career when I remember engaging with people where I know my being there had an impact. Whether quietly working behind the scenes or standing in front of the camera, I looked for opportunities to affect people, policies, and processes.”
That sphere of influence does not just magically appear—you have to actively pursue those opportunities. “People always say it’s a small world. That doesn’t just happen,” Shawn said. “The world becomes smaller when you increase your circle and make that happen. It’s a huge world for someone sitting on the couch watching TV every night.”
BUILD A NETWORK OF COLLECTIVE BRAINPOWER
Change does not happen in isolation. Even something that feels solitary, like training for a marathon, becomes much easier with friends and family checking in from time to time to hold you accountable and cheer you on throughout training and the big day.
As Adam Grant revealed in his book Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, there are three types of people: givers, takers, and matchers. Those who are most successful in their careers are givers who help others freely, without expectations, and thereby establish goodwill, reputations, and relationships that enhance their success.
Impacters, though driven strongly by their own learning and curiosity, are givers at heart. For all of the categories below, consider yourself not just high net growth but high net giving, and you will reap rewards on both sides of the coin.
One-Off Mentors and Shadowing
Standard career advice says make sure you find a mentor. However, in practice this can be intimidating. Who? Where? How? Will people say yes to a mentoring relationship if I reach out? Rather than pressuring yourself to find one Holy Grail Mentor, start by setting up one-on-one conversations with people you admire, people doing work that interests you, and peers who might also be able to provide sound advice (and vice versa).
Given that you may not have the specifics of your pivot figured out yet, start with wide-ranging outreach. Approach those you are intrigued by, and make a point to include people who are doing work that seems only tangentially related to what you are currently doing or might want to pursue.
A one-off mentor is someone you admire who has achieved something you aspire to, or who knows more about an area of interest than you. Rather than awkwardly asking a semi-stranger, “Will you be my mentor?” or trying to start a long-term relationship with someone you hardly know, approach one-off mentors for short, targeted, fifteen- to twenty-minute interviews instead.
If your initial conversation goes well—you hit it off and you value their advice—you can always ask to follow up at a later time with updates or questions. Even if that person does not end up providing specific counsel on your next pivot, you never know where the relationship might lead, or how you could be helpful to each other later down the road.
People often tell me they are nervous about reaching out to someone out of fear of rejection. Keep in mind that the worst someone can say is no. A no is almost never personal to you. The person you approached may be focused on other things at the moment; prefer a different format than the one you suggested (i.e., a phone call instead of lunch); or, in some cases, giving specific advice is how they earn a living, so they may direct you to existing programs they offer. Chalk up every no as another successful outreach effort and keep moving. Many will say yes if they can, remembering everyone who helped them along the way.
Allow one-off mentorships to evolve naturally if both parties are interested in developing the relationship further. In some cases, the person you speak with may even offer to stay in touch, as one of my longtime mentors Susan Biali did with me nearly ten years ago. During our first call, she said she would love to support me on an ongoing basis, and asked if it would be helpful to set up a monthly check-in. I am deeply grate
ful for her counsel and our idea exchanges throughout my career, and for her believing in me from such an early age and stage in my business.
In other cases, you may be the proactive one in following up after having these one-off conversations. No need to harass or bombard; just start with sending a thank-you note afterward, then check in a few weeks or months later with an update on action you have taken related to your conversation.
Find people in roles that interest you, whom you could ask about their daily experiences, perhaps even by shadowing them for a day or more. This will help determine whether the realities of their work match how things appear from the outside. Does the reality of this role fit your strengths and interests?
That was my brother Tom’s approach with his first mentor, an accomplished real estate investor. After he graduated from UCLA, where he played football as a defensive end, Tom began attending football alumni tailgate events to network with real estate professionals, a group that was living his one-year vision. Tom asked one booster he admired if he could help manage his portfolio of commercial properties and apartment buildings without pay for a few months, in return for getting an inside look at his operations.
By starting with a shadowing arrangement, there was little risk to Tom’s potential mentor other than teaching time, and it helped complete a significant amount of work. Tom performed well and ended up parlaying that arrangement into a full-time role managing his mentor’s properties for two years. Bolstered by the base of experience he acquired from this apprenticeship, Tom then pivoted into commercial real estate brokerage and started investing in multifamily units for his own portfolio.
