BONUS: Why It’s So Difficult to Make an Intentional Career Change Alone

Introduction 00:05

This is the Happen To Your Career podcast with Scott Anthony Barlow. We hope you stop doing work that doesn't fit you, figure out what does, and make it happen. We help you define the work that is unapologetically you, and then go get it. If you feel like you were meant for more, and you're ready to make a change, keep listening. Here's Scott. Here's Scott. Here's Scott.

Scott Anthony Barlow 00:30

When we look at career change or building a more intentional life, we know that taking on a big life change, of any kind, requires a great amount of time, energy, maybe even a bit of financial planning and the solid support system or partner. Making an intentional career change is more than just switching jobs or switching occupations. It's about transforming your life, and that transition often requires outside help of some kind. This is Episode Two in a series of bonus episodes discussing what intentional career change is. If you haven't already listened to Episode One, we covered intentional career change versus living unintentionally, and we compared the two, and even talked about some of the very, very, very different results that people get when they're pursuing and trying to do life much more intentionally. We gave a ton of examples, but in this episode, we're going to cover extensively why it's almost impossible to do this alone. But here's the question, who actually needs to be involved in your journey? Because, yes, an outside perspective is almost always necessary to further your progress and ultimately do a career change intentionally. But before we answer that question, let's talk about why it is nearly impossible to do something as big as an intentional career change and that type of life change alone. Okay, I think it's fair to say that anytime you're making this type of change, you're going to get stuck along the way. It's not a case where, like, you're pursuing a degree, or you are doing something that happens in a much more linear fashion. This is much more complex than that. Anytime you're trying to do something that is a complex problem or challenge or project, it means that you're solving many problems along the way. It means that you're going to grow, you're going to develop, you're going to go through periods where you begin to feel stuck. When that happens, you're likely to lose your focus, motivation, or let your mindset get the best of you. So why is it so hard to do this alone? Well, here's just a couple of reasons. Number one, you are incapable of seeing your own blind spots. Number two, it requires behavior change in addition to making what I would call an environmental change. I'll tell you more about that in just a minute. Number three, well, it turns out, if you're not an expert in intentional career change or doing work intentionally, then that means you're gonna have some learning to do from other people along the way, and that's okay. Let's go through these and break down some of these. That way you can figure out what do you do about them and why are they so difficult.

Scott Anthony Barlow 03:17

For example, let's go back to number one. Let's talk about why it's so hard to see outside of yourself, making it difficult to see your own blind spots. Well, it turns out, on one side, we have qualities and skills. Every single one of us has qualities and skills and talents that we might not fully recognize or fully appreciate, partially because we are who we are and we just do them, and you know whatever they are. An outsider can provide an objective perspective and helping you to identify what we might call strengths, or signature strengths, that you likely are going to undervalue and even weaknesses or challenges that you might overlook. Now, we actually have an exercise in our process that does exactly that. A lot of times we're going through this with clients where we're helping them to surface what are those strengths that they might not necessarily recognize. And so I just want to give you an example of a super simple way that we help people begin to understand what those patterns. One of the ways that we will do that is we'll have people go through and we'll have them reach out to their friends, co-workers, people that know them well, people that know them less well, and be able to collect feedback on what are they great at, what do people appreciate about them, what they believe they do or how they act that is valuable to other people. Okay, so this sounds sort of simple, and it sounds sort of absurd. One of the things that we found over and over again is that when people do this, or actually, let's even back up a half step, when people think about doing this type of exercise, it feels a little bit scary. Because even though you're asking other people for, "Hey, tell me the things that are essentially good about me", it feels a little bit revealing or intimidating to ask. And a lot of people, in fact, most people, have a little bit of trepidation about doing this type of exercise, which consequently, many of the clients that we work with almost don't do it. I know that sounds strange, but most of them don't do it. We have to go to some extreme efforts to help people prepare for this and anticipate what's going to happen and that it's going to be okay, and who to reach out to, and all of these different things. And, you know, we're honored to be able to do that, but most people wouldn't do it, and it would be a shame because the other thing that almost everybody says after they've done that is, "Wow, that was so revealing." You know, many people said the exact same thing, and I under appreciated how big of a deal that was and what I do, or how I act or how I tend to behave that other people really do seem to value. It's actually kind of crazy, but that's like a perfect example of how it's really difficult to see your own blind spots, and to be able to uncover those blind spots. You can't just like, go ask another person. You sort of have to do it systematically, otherwise, you're going to still not be able to see some of those blind spots. But why does that happen? Well, why can't we see those things? It turns out, we unknowingly hold biases and assumptions about ourselves and our career paths, and these tend to be in the form of beliefs. These tend to be in the forms of knowledge that we have or don't have. These tend to be in the forms of assumptions that we make along the way, sometimes as we're growing up, sometimes in how our career has come along, sometimes in what we've had exposure to or haven't had exposure to. These tends to create what might be referred to as limiting beliefs. And when you start to remove these limiting beliefs or expose yourself to new possibilities, especially if we're doing this in a systematic way, that is one of the things that really opens up to see what type of life and or career you could actually build or perform or move to. These outside perspectives can really shift how you think about your strengths, how you think about your experiences, your skills, and ultimately, what you truly enjoy.

Scott Anthony Barlow 07:32

But let's talk about that second area of why it's so challenging to do this alone. When any people come and they are interested in working with us, one of the things that we've seen over and over again is this sort of funny phenomenon. You know, many people, even as we talk about intentional career change or making a more intentional career change, a lot of times, people come and they're thinking about it as, "I'm going to make a job change, or an industry change or a role change. And that's going to take care of a lot of these situations. Because maybe I love my boss and the people that I work with, but I don't love how I'm compensated, and I don't think that that's fair. And maybe also, at the same time, I'm looking for additional flexibility." And when that happens, when we get to talk to folks in that situation, they perceive that if they find a fit as it relates to additional flexibility or any of those other areas, then that's going to essentially take care of everything, and it's going to create a more fulfilling situation. Well, that's only half true. Here's why. Because let's just oversimplify this whole idea of intentional career change for just a minute and say that if you make an intentional career change, there's going to be two sides to it. There's going to be, one, which is getting the right situation, or what I might call environment. Those are the things that are not necessarily you, but they're the areas that are external to you. What is the culture at the organization? Do the people at the organization that you're making a move to, or the people that tend to be in that industry, do those people share similar values? What is your compensation level? All those things are environmental. Environmental, meaning they are external to you, not necessarily internal to you. So let's think about the other side of that. If we're dividing this into two ways that impact more fulfilling work and ultimately more fulfilling life, then one side is that environmental, and then the other side is you. Your ability to behave in a way to take advantage of that new situation. You can get to the perfect situation for yourself, but if you are behaving in ways that do not allow you to take advantage of that, well, then it's not going to be a good situation for very long. One of the best examples of this is, let's say that you struggle to draw boundaries, and you have accidentally trained many people that work with you to understand that you're going to respond to anything at all hours of the day. So it might not be intentional, and you know, maybe in some of your past situations that has been an expectation of the culture. But there's more than just the environmental pieces. There's also your behaviors and whether or not you are supporting that. So in this case, if you're still going into the new situation and you're behaving the exact same way as you were in the old situation, it's not going to be good for very long, because those things that weren't that great for you are going to follow you over there. So that's what people don't tend to expect. They tend to think that, "Okay, if I make this environmental change, it's going to be good, it's going to take care of most of the things." What they don't anticipate is that it's going to require behavior change along the way. Behavior change is really difficult to diagnose and understand what are the specific things that are going to need to change if you're doing this by yourself. Because a lot of our behaviors tend to happen on autopilot. That's how they became behaviors in many different ways, not all of them, but many of them, which means that we have to be able to recognize what are the behaviors that are serving me well, and what are the behaviors that I need to change that are no longer serving me well, or I have outgrown or I don't want to be a part of my life anymore, and then how do I change those behaviors to work well in the new situation when I get there? That's the other side. So it's going to be more than just changing roles or industries. There's going to be a lot of self reflection, work and habits to break, behaviors to change, and beliefs to challenge. And as I mentioned before, if you're not an expert in intentional career change or helping to recognize those behaviors, it's going to be nearly impossible, you know. And you know, let me give you a another example here. Earlier today, I went with my daughter to take her car. She's 16 right now, and so she's driving and everything, and trying to teach her about car maintenance. So there's a lot of different ways that could have done some of the things that the car needed. It needed new brake fluid, needed an oil change, needed a few other things, right? So we could have busted out YouTube and allowed her to figure out how to change the brake fluid herself, or helped her be able to change the oil or something else along those times. Today, time definitely didn't allow for that, but that's something we could have done. We took it to a professional at a shop. So she could have done it either way. It would have taken longer if she would have done the YouTube route. We took it to professional on a shop, took about four hours. But you know, ultimately, if she wanted to do it, she could learn it for the most part, right? Okay, but here's the thing. The shop called us back today, and they let us know that there were a couple other problems with the vehicle, and we were able to make the decision about whether or not to fix those. And if we hadn't done that, let's say we've gone down the YouTube route, well, probably what would happen is, a month later, two months later, some other problems would pop up, and then something else, and then likely we would have a deeper issue in this case than what we initially realized. And,you know, my daughter could have continued to pull up YouTube and do the work on that, and she's a smart girl, she could have eventually figured it out. But definitely it was so much easier if we took it to an expert, it was done in four hours, they anticipated all of the future proactive things, they recognized that, actually, they recognized that they didn't even need to do a brake fluid switch right now, that, in fact, it could wait quite a bit longer because of the...because it happened to be like a certain type of brake fluid. Anyhow. All that to say, this is not that dissimilar from making an intentional career change. What is very different, though, is this isn't even a fair comparison. This isn't a fair comparison at all to intentional career change because instead of like changing the brakes, it would be more like you decide that you're going to take a car down to the frame and completely start over. You're going to, not just put it back together, but you're going to completely engineer a new vehicle, and you're going to put it back together. You're going to do all the painting, you're going to do all the sanding, and you're going to do everything else that is required to create this new vehicle from scratch, starting over from just the frame and the engine.

Scott Anthony Barlow 15:05

All right. So do you even have all the tools for that? Do you have the time for that? That's where it starts to get really, really challenging. For myself, you know, I've spent years and years and years learning about this. I have become obsessed with it in many different ways, and it's fun for me, but that doesn't mean it's fun for everyone. Took me approximately seven years for me to begin to figure this stuff out for myself, not even necessarily to make all the changes that I wanted to, but just to begin to do so. All that to say, this time, you know, intentional career change is really something that you can do on your own, but it's so much more effective, and it's going to be really hard, in some cases, even impossible to do with the time that we have on Earth if you're trying to approach it without support. So whether that is having feedback and friends and co-worker type of support, having mentorship support, having experts in this area, you know, the equivalent to a mechanic in the form of career coaches or otherwise, all of those things make it much more feasible, much more possible, but more importantly, it allows you to do it within a smaller amount of time. If the average person lives to 80 years, one of the things that we've seen over and over again is that even with expert help, it still might take 8 to 10 months, sometimes even longer. So if you say that that's one year out of eight years to be able to do this type of thing, that's a pretty significant chunk. Okay, with everything we've covered today, I think it's safe to say that it's going to be really difficult to do this alone. There's a variety of behavior changes that are going to need to happen. There's a variety of psychological barriers that you're going to need to navigate in order to live a much more intentional career, let alone life.

Scott Anthony Barlow 16:50

It becomes so much more possible and arguably, not easy, but much easier when you bring the right people into the picture. Obviously, we would love to help with that, if it makes sense. But I would encourage you to find the right people, begin putting together your team if living the more intentional life and certainly work as a part of that life is a goal for you. Otherwise, it's pretty unlikely to happen. So certainly, a career coach is a great way to incorporate someone that is impartial to help you navigate through this. A coach is often somebody that doesn't carry any predispositions of like, you know, a family member, or a friend, or a co-worker, or an employee, or even a mentor, or what. But having a coach by your side, or having an expert by your side, is going to allow you to continue to navigate through the career change path much more intentionally and provide structured guidance as you're dealing with those questions of what next, or how do I navigate the next priority, or what is even the priority right now, or how do I move through this type of place where I'm getting stuck, or how do I even recognize what are the places that I'm not even thinking about to move to next. So no matter what, begin finding and piecing together help. If that's us, amazing. If that is some other combination of building your team, that is also amazing. But certainly, if you're looking for support to make an intentional career change, then by all means, schedule a conversation with our team. Our capacity is filling up quickly, and once spots are taken, there's no guarantee of immediate availability. So that has shifted a lot over the years, and as more and more people have found us, we're currently filling up spots. We've completely filled all of July, and now we're beginning to fill up most of August and through September and even into October. Schedule a conversation with our team just by opening up your email and typing in Scott@happentoyourcareer.com and I'll connect you with our team. You can have a conversation, we'll figure out the very best way that we can support you, what makes sense for your situation, your budget, and get you on to finding your version of ideal and extraordinary. But in order to be intentional, just like we covered in the last bonus episode, you've got to make the decision to start. So don't push it off. Take your first action. And if that first action is scheduling a conversation with our team, that's amazing. If it's something else, do it. I would encourage you to do it right now. In the next bonus episode, we're gonna discuss what will it take, what will it actually take for you to make an intentional career change? How do you make something like that happen. Bonus episode three of our intentional career change series will be released tomorrow. I'll see you then right here on Happen To Your Career. Until then, I am out. Adios.