Someone asked me recently how I’d made the career changes I have. Not what I did, but how I did it. This person wanted to make one too, and they were scared. Can’t blame them to be honest, I was too.
I gave them the practical answer of how I worked it through and executed. But I’ve been thinking about it since, because the practical answer is only half of it. The other half is the part that I didn’t say or write down: what it actually feels like to change direction when you’ve spent years building something you’re good at.
It feels like starting over, like you did a Select All and Delete, and you’re left second guessing what the hell you just did.
The thing about a career pivot is that your brain doesn’t distinguish between “I’m making a deliberate, well-considered change” and “Let’s FAFO and I have no idea what I’m doing.” Both feel the same at two in the morning when you wake up fretting. Both produce the same low-level hum of anxiety that follows you into meetings you’re not quite comfortable in yet, or conversations where you know less than the person you’re talking to. It’s very disorienting, and can lead to the exhibition of unintended behaviors, certainly did in my case.
That discomfort is not a warning sign, or even something to really be concerned with, it’s just the gap between who you were and who you’re becoming. It closes over time, but you have to walk the mile and allow yourself to change.
There are different kinds of pivots, and they don’t all feel the same.
Sometimes you’re changing where you apply your skills. Same discipline, different world. A marketer moving from finance to healthcare, say. This one’s pretty manageable, because you know the “how”, and you’re learning the “what.” It’s uncomfortable but you have ground to stand on.
Sometimes you’re changing what you do but staying in familiar territory. You know the domain and have SME expertise, but you’re learning a different role. Many of the best product marketers I know came from technical sales. They didn’t need to be taught the product or how to tell a story to a customer, what they needed to learn how to construct that story. That’s a discipline pivot, and when it works, it’s because the person had more transferable skill and capability than they probably realised.
And sometimes it’s a reset, a legit start-over. New role, new industry, maybe even a step back on the career ladder to get a foot in the door. These are the hardest, and the most underestimated, because you carry everything with you … every lesson, every mistake, every bit of context you’ve built up … and even when it doesn’t look like it on paper, you actually have a whole catalog of movies you have watched, but your new world either doesn’t know, or in some cases doesn’t respect it.
The thing nobody told me, is that you never start from zero, even though some days you feel like an amoeba. You just start from a place where your value isn’t obvious … yet. To others, and sometimes to yourself.
That gap between the value you have and the value other people can see, is where most of the fear come from, and not from your ability to actually do the work. I found that waiting period and journey to get to the point I felt valuable, I felt valued, was the hardest.
It gets easier when you stop trying to prove what you were and start showing what you can be. Slowly, the new world will start to make sense and over time you stop feeling like an imposter in someone else’s story and start feeling like yourself in your own.
If you’re sitting with a decision about whether to change direction, I’ll say this: the uncertainty you’re feeling isn’t proof that you’re making a mistake. It might just be proof that you’re taking it seriously enough to care about it and worry it.
Change can be hard. It can also be the thing that reminds you what you’re capable of.
Be Awesome. And Nice.