711: Career Change Advice That Actually Works: 6 Real Career Change Stories From People Who Found Their Ideal Role

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: After many, many thousands of conversations with people who've made intentional career changes, you start to hear the same things over and over again. Things like, "I haven't made a change in a while, and the market feels very different now," or, "I don't even know what else is out there." Or things like, "If I only knew what I wanted, I would absolutely go after it."

[00:00:19] And here's what I can tell you. While these things may be true, if your goal is work that fits you and work that is much more fulfilling, then these are not the parts that are actually stopping you from making that move.

[00:00:32] Where people get stuck is actually everything that happens before this, the doubting, the waiting, the overthinking, the moment you get close to actually doing something about it, and then talk yourself back into staying put for another six months.

[00:00:46] This is a very different challenge. Not a job search problem, it's a mindset problem. In this episode, I'm not gonna actually tell you what works. Instead, I'm gonna let people that have done it tell you themselves. A software analyst, a VP of marketing, a scientist, a sales executive, a tech leader, and even an HR professional, all from very different starting points.

[00:01:07] Every single one of these people found work that actually fits them. The thing that each of them has in common, not the move itself, turns out it's what finally allowed them to make that move. Okay, here's the fascinating thing about every single one of the stories that you're about to hear. You expect the turning point to be the resume or, you know, networking, or finding the right job posting at exactly the right time.

[00:01:29] If you've listened to this podcast for a long time, you might even think it's about getting really clear on what it is that each of these people wanted in their work and in their lives. In this case, that's not actually what changed things. Every single one of these people they'd already tried the obvious stuff.

[00:01:44] They'd searched, they'd applied. Some of them had been at it for months, some even years, and still stuck, not because they weren't capable, not because the opportunities weren't there, but because of something that had absolutely nothing to do with the job market. What actually shifted things is harder to see from the outside, which is exactly why you get to hear it from them directly.

[00:02:07] Let's start with Cheri. Cheri spent 12 years as a software product analyst. She was great at it, but when her family relocated, and she had to find a new role, she landed in something that was almost immediately very clearly not a fit. So she started searching on her own for almost a year, and unsurprisingly, she got lost.

[00:02:27] She actually even knew generally what she was looking for, but she didn't have a high degree of specificity. This made all the difference because without that specificity, she was focused very much on getting away from something that was not good instead of moving towards something.

[00:02:44] When you're on the inside, those two directions feel similar. They feel, to some degree, like the same thing. However, they lead to completely different outcomes. Of course, this means that what stops most career changers isn't fear itself, it's actually direction, or more specifically, the lack of it. Here's what changed for her.

[00:03:03] Cheri: My advice is the same as it was when I first did this. Know what you're running towards. And make sure you're running towards something and not away. That advice that was given to me years ago by a friend, and it has stuck with me, and it's been such a driving factor in a lot of the things that I've done. Basically, have a goal. Know what direction you're headed because otherwise you're just driving around aimlessly, going nowhere.

[00:03:28] Scott Anthony Barlow: Now, this wasn't just a motivational idea for Cheri. It was a practical filter, and it actually saved her from making a bad move. She turned it down, kept going, eventually landed a role that fit her so well she was promoted in less than a year.

[00:03:44] The takeaway from Cheri isn't have more patience. That's, even though that's something everybody tells you to do, it's actually much more nuanced than that. It's before you search for a new job, we have to very specifically define what you're actually searching for. The search itself is the easier part by comparison.

[00:04:04] Knowing what you're looking for in a way that you can say no to almost everything. Creating a target is more difficult work. So here's something else that happens all the time. People come to us and say things like, "I bet there's a whole bunch of opportunities, roles, companies, organizations that I don't even know exist."

[00:04:24] Now, what if the ideal role for you, the one that uses so much of what you're great at and is much more in alignment, what if that happens to be in a field you've never heard of? This is exactly what happened to Katie. Katie was a VP of marketing in tech and successful by every measure, but she'd stopped being excited by the work, and she knew something needed to change, of course, so she did the work.

[00:04:46] She dug deeply into her strengths, what she valued the most, and what she actually wanted her days to look like, how she wanted to spend her time. And then through that process, she landed on change management. She'd never even heard of this before, a field that she didn't even know was out there.

[00:05:02] Caity: I would say that people should be aware that there could be roles out there that, A; they don't know exist and that are gonna maybe take some work to figure out what they are.

[00:05:11] I know a big part of this program is actually custom roles being designed for people. That has happened before as well. But I would say also is to really take a hard look about what you like in your current role and know that there's probably an opportunity to do just the things you like and not the things you don't, and that does exist.

[00:05:29] Scott Anthony Barlow: This is the part that tends to surprise people the most.

[00:05:32] Caity: For me, I thought it was all black or white with product marketing. It was either I was gonna be leaving all these types of projects on the table and having to do something totally new, whereas I'm going into a field where there's actually a fair bit of overlap with some of the stuff I was doing that I enjoy doing, without the stuff I don't wanna be doing.

[00:05:50] Scott Anthony Barlow: That's not starting over, that's editing. The takeaway? The search for your ideal career is also a research project. The answer might be in an area you've never heard of or never encountered yet. The job is to stay curious long enough to be able to find it. In a moment, you're gonna meet Edna, who spent 19 years as a scientist in consumer packaged goods.

[00:06:11] Same company, same industry, and it was really great until it wasn't. She made a move to a new role in the same industry, and within a short period of time it was very clear, absolute mismatch, wrong culture, wrong values, wrong environment. So she quit without another job lined up, and then she did something a lot of people in that moment don't do.

[00:06:31] Instead of panicking and taking the first thing available, she took the time to be intentional about what came next. She ended up in pharmaceutical research and development, a completely different industry, in a role that she absolutely loves. But the part of her story that I think gets overlooked is it wasn't just the process, it wasn't just the how she got there. It was the people around her.

[00:06:54] Edna: You need to make sure you try to get someone who has experience in providing guidance to help you through it. Two, I think for me was to ensure that your network and or the people who surround you are supportive.

[00:07:16] The last thing you need is people who will make you question yourself on this journey that is challenging in and of itself.

[00:07:25] Scott Anthony Barlow: And then there's this, the piece that she kept coming back to.

[00:07:28] Edna: Trust the process. Even when it feels like, you know, you are questioning why you do it, trust the process. In my case, just trusting the process. Trust the process. It worked for me.

[00:07:39] Scott Anthony Barlow: Edna's journey teaches us two, I think, incredibly important things. Get support from someone who knows what they're doing and has been there and done that, and protect yourself from the people who don't. The people closest to you aren't always the best ones who are most equipped to help you through career change.

[00:07:56] And sometimes the most important thing you can do is be very intentional about whose advice you let into the process. Brian's story takes this a step further because you can leverage the people that you already know. Brian had spent most of his career leading sales and marketing teams. He's VP of business development, always intentional about who he worked for, like companies that matched his values, and then a round of layoffs came for him.

[00:08:21] First time in his career he felt like he'd lost control of the wheel. What got him through this was not a phenomenal resume or a flawless interview process. Of course, right? It was his relationships, his network, and interestingly enough, many people that he almost didn't reach out to because he didn't wanna be a burden.

[00:08:43] Brian: I think for me, getting me through this was activating my network and really just like reaching out to... I talked to people that I hadn't talked to in years

[00:08:52] And it's amazing as you reach out to some of these people that you haven't talked to in years, how fast you can just like pick up, like no time had ever gone by at all.

[00:09:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: And then he had said something that I think is the real insight here.

[00:09:03] Brian: I think that for a lot of folks, I think there would be a tendency to not reach out and like, "Oh, I haven't talked to him in five years. I don't wanna be a burden." And yeah, no. For me, it was the network to activate the network.

[00:09:15] Scott Anthony Barlow: The network that Brian thought he'd have to rebuild from scratch was already there. It was already in existence. He had just gone quiet on some of those relationships, but it didn't mean the relationships completely disappeared. All it took was reaching out. The relationships you've built over your career are one of the most underused assets you have, not because people don't wanna help, but because most of us never bother to ask in the first place.

[00:09:39] The discomfort of that ask and reaching out is almost always smaller than we imagine it will be. Jorge. faced a different challenge entirely. He had too many options, which sounds like a great problem until you're actually living it without a clear way to choose. He'd spent over 20 years in tech, and when he was laid off, he didn't just need a new job.

[00:09:58] He needed to figure out whether he wanted to continue on the same path, and if not, what was the right path for him? So we actually got to help him design and run what we would call career experiments. He explored options that he hadn't considered. He ended up not with one job offer, but with multiple, and then had to figure out which was actually right for him and negotiate them along the way. This is a different kind of hard problem. Still a problem, though. Here's how he navigated it.

[00:10:25] Jorge: There has to be some inner conviction, inner values or core values that serves as a core that you go back to. Without that, every single decision in your lives gets complex and complex. And I think that reviewing those core values, reviewing those, that purpose that you have, helps you to assess the opportunities and make the decisions.

[00:10:49] Scott Anthony Barlow: Listen to this part too, though. I think this is one of the most underrated pieces of career advice.

[00:10:53] Jorge: Most people tell you, be curious about the world. But few people tells you, be curious about yourself. So I think that if anything is be curious about yourself, be curious about what you want and can and excel and will excel to give to the world, because every single one of us have great potential.

[00:11:15] Scott Anthony Barlow: Your values aren't just a feel-good exercise. They're a decision-making framework. When you know them clearly, every fork in the road, every competing offer, every unexpected opportunity gets easier to navigate. What happens when you are in that position where you find yourself saying yes to everything instead of answering the question of what do you actually want?

[00:11:35] Morgan had been in HR her whole career, a path that she started building in grad school while studying organizational psychology. But even at that point, from the beginning, there was this nagging feeling that something wasn't quite right. She kept going anyway, and pretty soon she was in deep burnout, stuck in a role she knew wasn't working, but too afraid of making the wrong move to make really any move at all. Here's what she told us after she finally made a change, after she moved into a role that uses her strengths every day and genuinely excites her.

[00:12:05] Morgan: It's okay to say no to things. I think especially with high achievers, which hello, that's me. Especially with high achievers. Hello, I'm high achieving. What's your name?

[00:12:16] Especially with high achievers, it's so easy to be a yes person because we have this assumption that if we say no, it means we're not driven, we're not motivated. But really, I mean, you just kind of have to shift the mindset of it's okay to say no, because it just means that you're looking to further align yourself with being able to use your strengths in a more meaningful way.

[00:12:41] Scott Anthony Barlow: And here's the practical version of that.

[00:12:44] Morgan: If you're stuck in an area that you don't wanna be in, and you know that it's, you've got this inkling of a feeling it's not the right fit, and you get a promotion, I think it might be a really great idea to say, "Hey, I really appreciate this. I'd love to think about it for a little bit." And then deep dive into what do you want your life to look like, how do you wanna show up at work, and just check that criteria out and see if it's gonna align well.

[00:13:10] Scott Anthony Barlow: You don't have to keep saying yes if the honest answer is no. It might seem difficult to move a direction that you want, but person we've ever talked to that has done it always says it's worth it.

[00:13:22] You've heard from six different people, six different situations, relocation, burnout, layoffs, values mismatches, career breaks, wrong industries. Six very different starting points. But when you put the stories next to each other, the same pattern shows up every time. None of them had it figured out at the start.

[00:13:39] All of them had to get out of their own way. Every single one of them had to make a decision to move towards something rather than away from something, and not one of them. And every single person felt after all of that, it was absolutely worth it. We started this episode saying that it's not about the market.

[00:13:55] It's not about the industry or the timing. Yes, those are real challenges, but it's not what makes the ultimate difference. What makes the biggest impact is the decision to be intentional about it. The people who drift into their next role, applying to whatever they feel like is out there, taking the first thing that comes their way, moving away from something bad without moving towards something defined, well, they tend to end up having the same conversation again in their heads three years later.

[00:14:21] Instead, if you do what Cheri, and Katie, and Edna, and Brian, and Jorge, and Morgan all did, get clear, get support, build team around it, get curious, get honest with yourself about what you actually want, well, then you'll probably likely end up somewhere that fits. That's not a guarantee, but it's the closest thing that we've found to one after having thousands of conversations.

[00:14:45] If you really enjoyed this episode and you want further examples of how people are actually making real changes, we put together a career change guide. It walks you through how real people that are similar to you have discovered their ideal career and moved to work that actually fits them, as meaningful and as well-paid.

[00:15:04] You can actually get the guide for free. Just click into the show notes and description. We have the link right in there, and you can from there go over to our website, read it on the website, or you can download the PDF. I just wanna point out, though, that even though society calls what you're feeling a midlife crisis, we wanna help you embrace what we call midlife clarity.

[00:15:24] It's the moment when everything that you've built, everything you've learned, everything you've earned finally starts working for you instead of holding you in place, not away from something, but towards something you've actually wanted from your work. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow, and this is Happen To Your Career. Adios. I'm out.