Not sure what to do next in your career?

Nat: Excuse my dress code, Kristen, and anyone watching on YouTube. I’m getting ready for my next season as a professional runner. Humble brag, I’m going out for a jog after this. I’m going to run all the way into town, about seven kilometers.

Kristen: That’s awesome. Shock! Are you meeting someone? Is that why you’re going into town?

Nat: Well, I like running along the waterfront, so it’s a really nice excuse, and I am wine motivated. If someone meets me for a drink at the pub afterwards, that’s a win-win. I did take my running top off because it’s fluorescent orange, and I thought that was too much for the podcast. Today we’re talking about getting ready for your next season. If you haven’t picked up on it yet, Kristen does quite a lot of our podcast research and knows more about what we’re talking about, and I just dive in and wing it.

Kristen: We divide and conquer. You do the news. I loved this quote, which comes from some research we’re going to talk about shortly: “Adults are much more likely to act themselves into a new way of thinking than to think themselves into a new way of acting.” I had to say it twice to myself today to get it right. It’s by Richard Pascale, who popularized it to explain that people and groups change behavior through action first, rather than waiting for a mindset shift. The reason we’re talking about it is that we’ve been speaking to a lot of Powrsuiters who are nearing or at the end of a season and want to get into the next one, and bridging from one season to the next is the trickiest part. A season can mean you’ve taken time out of work. It can mean you’ve been off with children and you’re returning to work. It could be that you’ve outgrown your current role, your career, or your organization. You know something has to change, or change is being forced on you, like redundancy. So there’s the end of one season and a natural start to the next, and we’re chatting about how to make that transition successfully.

Nat: This is particularly relevant to both of us. For you, because your children are at an age where they’re moving on with their lives. They’re full adults now, and that’s a whole other season. For me, because we’re recording this fourteen days into spring. For those of us who have seasons in our cities, the physical change in season feels like a change in season in life as well. I’ve noticed myself being a lot more reflective about how I want to spend the sunny months. Do I want to get up earlier and exercise earlier? How do I want to spend my weekends? Even a change in the weather is a nice line in the sand for asking how you want to do this next patch of your life.

Kristen: There’s often a tension that comes with change, whether it’s something you know you need to do or something that’s out of your hands, and there’s a name for it. It’s called liminality, the “betwixt and between.” It can feel like losing the thread of your working life. You get into a routine in a season, then something shifts and everything changes, often including your career thread. It’s a very uncomfortable place, and it’s worth calling out that you’re not alone if you feel uneasy.

Nat: I really love the word liminal. I think of a summer evening in a busy city, when the workers have left for home and the dinner, theater and party crowds haven’t arrived yet, and there’s this liminal space where things are in a state of flux. When you know the word, you start to spot it everywhere. But I also like the recognition that there’s a transition, that something’s ending and something’s starting, and that’s where we can do some really cool things to make the new start something good.

Kristen: The question I had at the start of my notes was, do we have this backwards? The standard advice when you’re going from one thing to the next is to get really clear on what you want and what you love, and then take action. I should say up front that this is a really common piece of advice I give Powrsuiters. They’ve quit a job, or been made redundant, or they’re finishing a contract, and I always say, take a minute. View this as a discovery season. You might have forgotten who you were in that last season, so rediscover who you are, what you love, and what your values are. I usually say take three months and learn about yourself again. But I was never able to say what to do after that, because frankly, I didn’t really know. So that’s what we’re chatting about.

Nat: But if we go back to Richard Pascale, it’s the same advice in a way. The nuance for me is whether we sit around thinking and analyzing and talking about what we might want to do, or go out and discover what we might want to do. I think you say three months because we both took three months off between our last company and this one. Some of that was sitting on the couch going, oh my goodness, I need to rest. But then we walked, I did DIY, we got into things. You rediscover what you like by doing it.

Kristen: I was probably insinuating to these Powrsuiters, just go for long walks and find a space where you can reflect. Go back before you go forward. It’s not the wrong advice, because most of them were burnt out, or had spent all that time raising children and were asking, now what? Or they were separating from a partner, whatever it was.

Nat: Before you go on, something I saw this weekend. Kyla’s cousin, who’s in first-year university, popped in with two friends. I love a pop-in from youth. We fed them cake and I grilled them about their lives. One was studying clinical psychology and something to do with social work, very clear area. Another was studying criminology and law, and the third was studying economics. I immediately did the classic old-person thing of, so you’re going to be a psychologist, and you’re going to be a lawyer, and you’re going to be an economist? They said yeah, yeah, yeah. After they left I thought, none of them are going to do any of those things. This is where I think the combination works. You do some planning, and it might be somewhat vague, or you might be like Richie McCaw, our old All Blacks leader, who wrote it down on a napkin and followed it. People like him are maybe two percent of the population, maybe ten, who know exactly what they want and go for it. The rest of us study criminology and law and say, these are areas I’m interested in, and by doing it you open up different paths and might end up somewhere completely different. It was funny that I wanted to lock all three of them into very defined careers when they have a minuscule chance of ending up there, because the doing part means they’ll wiggle around and find all sorts of cool careers we don’t even know about yet.

Kristen: Speaking of wiggling, that’s exactly what the researcher found. Her name is Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behavior, and she said knowing comes out of doing, so you can’t think your way to the answer before you start. She studied twenty-three people very closely for a year who changed careers, and came up with the concept of a “working identity,” discovered by doing. No matter what these people thought at the outset, it was very wiggly. So I think the rediscovery and taking a beat is interesting, and reflection is important, as long as you time-box it. But moving to action quite quickly is something I’ll probably change in my advice now that I know this research.

Nat: Even with reflection, a lot of people talk about being clear on your core values, and those can be a really guiding start. I think we’re both pretty clear on ours, and we use them to direct us. But how you get to them is often from being in situations where your values are challenged and you learn what you actually do. A silly example from back in the day: I was working in a tech company and someone had been stealing Cokes from the fridge, one or two a day. People were getting more and more outraged because they assumed it was the cleaner. I thought, isn’t it interesting that if it had been a workmate who was a highfalutin tech person, we’d all have been fine with it. But because it was a cleaner, there was this real sense of “they’re stealing.” Why don’t we treat cleaners like other colleagues? So I really fought for it. Come on guys, it’s a couple of Cokes, why don’t we just have Cokes for everyone who works in the office? That taught me I really care about fairness and treating people well, in a way that wouldn’t have come up if I’d sat and thought about it for ages.

Kristen: It wouldn’t have come up.

Nat: Or fight, flight or freeze. I’d love to think of myself as a fighter, but in every circumstance where I’ve been threatened, I’m a freezer. I wouldn’t know that without being in those situations. Same with our podcast last week about time horizons. I thought I had an idea, but it’s doing things that makes you realize it’s slightly different.

Kristen: We tend to drop into obsessive self-focus, partly because it’s been normalized that looking inward and getting really clear about who we are is an activity in itself, so we spend an enormous amount of time doing it. I was listening to The Interview, from the New York Times, which I called out a couple of episodes ago because I think their way of interviewing people is fabulous. This one was with Anna Lembke, who’s a therapist, and she says we’re now a culture of obsessive self-focus. Our culture is so saturated in therapy-speak, with everyone overanalyzing and constantly self-actualizing, that it’s too much, and we’re doing ourselves harm. She said good therapy lets you observe yourself without getting absorbed, but the goal is to get out of your own head. You’d listened to something similar.

Nat: Very similar. I’d compare it with physio, because I think therapy and physio are alike. You have the session, but the work happens outside it, where you apply the tools and exercises in real life. If you just sit in the analysis, it’s almost analysis paralysis, but the topic is you, so it’s validating because you’re talking about yourself all the time. If you’re not taking action as a result, you get caught in a loop where you think you’re becoming more self-actualized, but I’d argue you’re moving further away from it, because you’re removing yourself from the real world and the things that actually make you who you are.

Kristen: Ibarra said that. Reflection is a defense against testing reality, and working out who you are matters less than working out whether you want to do the thing you think you want to do.

Nat: You have to do both. We’re both big believers in reflection, but it has to be followed by action.

Kristen: I love that she says to use reflection to make a shortlist, but action picks the winner. Reflect on your values and the things you love in order to get three ideas worth trying immediately. It flips us into action mode, which frankly is the hardest mode to be in.

Nat: I was having a conversation on LinkedIn the other day with another woman founder who came out of a fintech with a very successful exit. She wrote a post about how everyone is shocked that her new company has nothing to do with fintech, and in fact nothing to do with technology. It’s physical. I said I’ve had the exact same experience. We both came out of financial technology and learned very brutal lessons about how hard it is to build a financial platform, the regulation, and how hard it is to grow. So with all the optimism of someone who hasn’t just learned that lesson, we decided to do something completely different, thinking, sure, that’ll be easier. Then you learn that it’s the same thing, you’re just learning a whole bunch of new lessons. Starting a different type of business has its own different types of hard. I just didn’t know it, because all I’d done at that point was think about it, and I didn’t know all the situations I’d never even thought to think about. If you apply that to a career, it’s exactly the same. There are three ideas worth trying, but you don’t know whether you’ll like them until you do.

Kristen: I love it. Back to Ibarra, let’s move to section two. She says you can’t work out your identity by thinking about it. She calls what you need to do “play,” which I suppose softens the idea of actually taking action. The reason she uses play is that she wants to remove it from decision mode. If it needs a decision, it’s too big. Play is trying the thing in an experimental form. So if you put yourself out of your comfort zone, learn a new thing, speak on a new topic, shadow someone for half a day, or have a bunch of coffees, she says to consider that play, and that’s how you discover whether you’d like it.

Nat: If you subscribe to our newsletter, a couple of weeks ago we wrote an article about banning the term “meetings.” The first label we’d replace it with is “creatings.” Those are sessions where there’s no tangible outcome. You’re in the unknown, operating in ambiguity, brainstorming and grappling with things. When we define that as part of the process, we do it a lot better, because many of us like to land on one solution and move forward. That’s why we say, I need a plan for my career. If we say you’re allowed to play, to take those three ideas without needing an outcome or deciding straight away which path to go down, we give ourselves permission, and we stop thinking the goal is to land on the answer quickly. The goal is to explore, try things and find out something about ourselves. A lot of us find that hard because we’re so used to being goal-focused and ticking tasks off, but I think it’s a real waste, because discovery mode is where you actually learn stuff.

Kristen: Let’s talk about playing when you have limited time. I did a quick LinkedIn poll asking, you’re at the end of one season and don’t know what’s next, what’s your first step? It’s only been up a few hours, but about a quarter of people said have a bunch of coffees. Even one a month is three in a quarter, and you’ll learn a heck of a lot from three coffees. Half leaned towards thinking back on what you love, so there’s a vote for a short, sharp reflection period, as long as we time-box it. Sixteen percent said get a coach, counselor or mentor, and thirteen percent said set a goal and go for it. There were a few comments saying “I’d do all of them” or “I love the pause.” Any other thoughts, Nat?

Nat: We’ve learned a lot from running reflection exercises with Powrsuiters, and a great outcome is that people often say, I used to do this thing and I stopped, and I used to love it. It sparks them to go back to it. It’s often hobby or sport related, or something they used to enjoy at work and gave up as they progressed, and they realize they can bring it back in a slightly different way. I also like the coffee idea because it’s such an easy win. My mum is retired and has a ton of time, and I’ve been really impressed that she just turns up to random things. There’s something called University of the Third Age, designed for older people, with lectures on all sorts of topics, so she turns up and learns about space or whatever. She’s joined a singing group, and as far as I know she’d never sung in public, and she turned up on her own. She goes to line dancing. She has a full calendar now. She’s well and truly into retirement and experimenting with things she may or may not like. Like most of us, she doesn’t love turning up to a room on her own where she doesn’t know anyone. At her singing group, a few people mentioned a clothes swap community event, and she went straight home and bought a ticket. They might be there, they might talk to her, they might not, but she was going anyway, and she did. The coffee thing is similar. Find little opportunities to get out of your comfort zone and try something. It’s like what they say to toddlers: you don’t have to eat it again if you don’t like it, but try it before you decide.

Kristen: That supports another point, which is changing who you spend time with, because the new version of you probably needs people who don’t see you the way you were before. That’s clearly what your mum’s doing. I thought a tip on the coffee thing might help, because it can be a bit awkward. Be upfront: “I’m exploring my next step and I’m curious about what you do. Would you have fifteen minutes for a virtual coffee, or thirty in person?” That’s plenty of time, and very few people will say no. Then when you’re there, be upfront again: “I’m in exploration mode, really curious about my next step, which could be in a different arena or in what you’re doing. I’d love to hear what a typical Tuesday is like for you.” It sounds odd, but you get a sense of what a day in the life looks like, and the conversation flows from there. I also think saying yes to something totally different professionally is a good idea. That might be helping a friend, a mini side hustle, or a very small contract, if that’s allowed in your current role. I know a lot of people who built up a side hustle in the evenings to see if it was something they wanted to do before they left.

Nat: The other one is slightly bigger. We’re of an age where we know a lot of people whose lives aren’t going to be a hundred and twenty years long, and you start to think about how precious our time is. We sometimes think of jobs as a long-term marriage, but I think we underestimate the value of a side step or a totally different step. If you spend a year doing something very different, even if you have to take a step back and start again, and you hate it, you can get back to where you were afterwards. I know there’s some privilege in that, but we’re talking to professional women who generally have a bit of it. We can delay and delay, and if you’d been told you only had ten years left in your career, which some Powrsuiters do, you’d feel really stuck. Whereas many of us have a bit longer, and these are the times to ask, what’s the worst case if I try something I think I might really like and it doesn’t pan out? I’ve still got all my experience. I said to Kyla, since we’ve chosen not to have children, we’ve each got two parental leaves we’re not taking. I used one when we left Hatch, and I get to take a year to do nothing and explore if I want to. Yes, you have to save some money. The way our finances operate, we think about it six months in advance and ask what we can cut back on now to build a stockpile, so we could spend three or six months doing something completely random. I know that with less time the solutions have to be smaller, but I’d put in a plug for blowing up your life sometimes and trying something, knowing you can go back.

Kristen: That gives some good permission to a couple of listeners, no doubt. We’re big proponents of not over-volunteering or doing non-promotable work for free. When people tell me they want to get onto a board, like the local community trust, I hesitate, because so many women do that, whereas men go straight for the board roles, learn to sell themselves and start networking. However, I have a friend who’s moving from kids leaving home back into the workforce, and when an unpaid opportunity came up to sit on the board of a local sports club, I said do it. The people on the board were interesting, each with their own careers and networks, and she could learn the workings of a board. It’s been an amazing year for her. She’s seen politics, how to communicate, influence and change hearts and minds, and fundraise, and she’s got coffees out of it. That was a no-brainer. So once in a while it’s okay to say yes to that, whether it’s sport, community or a school board, for this transition period.

Nat: The liminal state. I completely agree. Part of the reason people say not to do community boards is that professional boards these days want to see that you’ve managed a certain level of responsibility and risk, and those roles often don’t come with that, so they don’t create a pipeline. But I said this to a friend the other day. Time wasn’t much of a constraint for him, and he had the chance to do something really cool that he knew wouldn’t pay well. He could either do the bare minimum or go overkill, and he said, I’m not getting paid for it. I said, time isn’t a constraint for you. You can’t promise it’ll give you X, Y and Z, but I guarantee it’ll give you a much bigger opportunity to meet different people and impress the right ones. If time isn’t a constraint, it’s sometimes worth doing.

Kristen: I want to end on the reminder that confidence comes from action. Action precedes confidence. I learned this working with a personal trainer this year, but also from saying yes to things, knowing I’ll figure it out and find my feet. I might feel wobbly or scared when I start new things, but I know the skills I’ve picked up along the way will serve me well. There’s been a lot of research showing that women returning to work don’t feel confident, but within a month or two, all the skills they had when they left are still there. They haven’t gone away, and confidence comes after taking that action. My trainer says you’ll never wake up and feel motivated to come to the gym, but motivation comes after. Action precedes motivation. So it’s a promise that confidence will come from action, and you might as well take the action first, play around, try some stuff, and you’ll feel better about the transition.

Nat: I so agree. And even if it’s the wrong path, you find out faster. I always wanted to be a vet, and I did some work experience when I was about fourteen and fainted, and realized I didn’t want to be a vet. I could have gone through the first couple of years of university thinking that’s what I wanted. Turns out I just want to be surrounded by puppies, and that’s fine. The recognition that it’s the wrong path comes a lot faster from doing than from analyzing and analyzing and putting it off. You could spend ten years thinking you might want to do something and find out on the first day that you don’t like it.

Kristen: I love it. Everyone, check out powrsuit.com. Drop us a note if you’re in a transition season. Which of these are you going to try, and what have we missed? We’d love to hear from you. Give us five stars and share this episode. We’re still growing our brand and our small but dedicated listener base.

Nat: Thanks, everyone. Although “smaller listener base,” I’m thinking, gosh, all these people are going to wonder if they’re the only one.

Kristen: It’s healthy. Relative to what? What am I comparing it to? Anyway, we’ll catch you next time.

Nat: Bye, everyone!