766: Why Researching Your Next Career Doesn’t Work (And What to Do Instead)

[00:00:00] Caity: That's where I kind of knew, I've lost my curiosity and my passion for this job.

[00:00:04] Scott Anthony Barlow: Caity had spent 20 years in tech. She was in account management, then she was in sales, then product marketing, up to senior leadership. Now, product marketing was thing that she'd loved, or at least she used to love it, but she knew that she'd outgrown because the curiosity was gone.

[00:00:21] Caity: I wasn't excited about the profession anymore, and I didn't wanna educate myself anymore.

[00:00:26] Scott Anthony Barlow: She'd stopped wanting to learn about her own profession. Going to conferences no longer sounded exciting. She'd been there, done that. Now, what made this hard was she still liked parts of it, which is why most people tend to stay in roles years past when they should be leaving to find something new.

[00:00:41] Caity: It was hard for me to blatantly walk away because there were parts that I really did like. And so that left me a struggle of, okay, how do I keep the elements of product marketing that I really enjoy, but not be doing this job?

[00:00:51] Introduction: This is Happen to Your Career. Most people let their career happen to them, falling into jobs by accident, staying longer than they should, and wondering if this is really all there is. But a few people decide to stop settling and do something different. This podcast is for you to take control, get intentional, and design your career to fit the life that you want to build. Real stories and real research so you can stop waiting and start making it happen. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow.

[00:01:20] Scott Anthony Barlow: Caity spent months trying to research her way into a new career.

[00:01:23] Caity: Being a product marketer research is, like, one of the biggest things that you do. Like, it's one of my strengths, and so I'm like, "I can do this," right? I'm on Google. I'm searching. I'm reading books. I'm doing all the things I think I need to, right?

[00:01:35] Scott Anthony Barlow: That never works, but most people don't understand why.

[00:01:38] Caity: I'm, sort of, talking to some close friends and coaches and mentors, and I'm just not getting anywhere, right? I'm just thinking, "okay, I see all the pieces to this process." And I think you've mentioned this on a previous podcast, of people just kind of jump from step A to you know, R. Right?

[00:01:52] Or, like, they just think, like, "okay, I think this is it. I'm just gonna go target this role or this company, rewrite my resume, and just go for it," right? There's not a lot of exploration, education, learning, experimenting, right? And testing. And I didn't know that's what you needed to do, which sounds, kind of, silly now, but it seems obvious, but you really don't know it.

[00:02:11] Scott Anthony Barlow: Now, when she did leave, she actually took the summer. She traveled, didn't think about work, and then she sat down at the start of the year to work out what should intentionally fill the space. That's where she spent countless hours on Google. All the recommended books, conversations with friends, okay, didn't get her where she wanted to go. The answer wasn't out there someplace waiting to be found. What had to happen was she had to take a very different approach. It had to be designed. And then, once it was designed what she found out she wanted, then it had to be reverse-engineered to find it in reality.

[00:02:44] Caity: I just wasn't getting the hands-on direction and education around what I needed to do this process, and that's when I discovered HTYC and really bought in and just understood your approach, right?

[00:02:58] I read your book, and I saw you have the short sort of trial boot camp, and I thought, "this is so different," right? Like, this is hands-on. There's a blueprint, and it's very methodical. And as me, I'm a very much,a doer, an executor. Just tell me what to do and I'll do it, and that's what I needed.

[00:03:15] Scott Anthony Barlow: So she started out with strengths. She'd taken an assessment 10 years earlier, done nothing with it, so she redid that. Went through every role, every project, every responsibility she'd ever had, put her strengths up against each one. Which work drained her, which work she raised her hand for.

[00:03:30] Then, she scored how often each strength showed up. Now, the thread running through the 20 years is that she always gravitated towards operational projects, improve a process, build a system. Not launch the product, but make the company run better through times of change.

[00:03:45] Caity: And I think that was a real aha moment, 'cause I started to find these patterns and these threads throughout each job that I was starting to tie together, but in relation to my strengths. So one example was that, maximizer is my number one strength, which is really about you love to optimize things.

[00:04:00] You always want to make things better. You really like systems and processes. And one of the things that was threaded throughout my whole career is I've always gravitated towards operational projects. Always raised my hand to make a process better, institute a new system, and it was really operational and more people-based, and less so just launch this product or go do this audience research. It was very much focused on making the company operate better.

[00:04:26] Scott Anthony Barlow: Then the interesting thing is she also ran experiments because she loves planning trips, so she looked hard at becoming a travel agent. Nearly signed up for a paid course for travel agents before we got to meet her.

[00:04:38] Caity: I started exploring being a travel agent on my own. And I saw this program, and "it's gonna cost X dollars. Sign up now." And I got so close to just launching into it, right?

[00:04:47] Scott Anthony Barlow: Instead, she talked to people brand new in the field and people 30 years in. She found out how much self-promotion it takes. The exact marketing work that she was trying to leave. The part she loved though, the planning, doesn't exist in a job that pays for the life that she wanted at a very, very high salary, so she ruled it out.

[00:05:05] Caity: I'm so glad I did this during the program because any sort of networking, experiments, talking to the right people, that's actually where I figured out it wasn't gonna work. I think, I was able to make a few critical connections of people I didn't know who have recently either become agents or were new to the field or people who've been in the business for 30 years, and found out a lot of things I would have not known otherwise of just, it's extremely difficult to get your business started.

[00:05:30] A lot of the stuff in marketing I just... I knew I didn't wanna be doing looking over at my strengths, right? Like, going over there and seeing, okay, there's actually a lot of this job that's not quite what I wanna do.

[00:05:39] The part that I love doing was the planning. And so then I was trying to figure out is there a role within the travel industry that is just the planning piece? I didn't find that the role exists in the space that I wanted it to. I think there was this discovery that the piece that I love doing so much about travel doesn't exist in a profession unto itself. That would've paid for a full-time job, that would've sustained my lifestyle.

[00:06:01] Scott Anthony Barlow: And while most people might look at that as a failure because she still didn't know where she needed to go, her word for how it felt was relief. She'd done enough work to close the door without wondering anymore about whether or not that would be a fit.

[00:06:12] Caity: But it made me feel so relieved that I did the work. Because had I not figured that out, I always would've been thinking in the back of my head, "oh, I should go do this."

[00:06:21] This helped me be okay with coming back to being in a professional corporate job. It was so great to make me feel great about it and know why I'm still in this space, and it actually shows the things that are most important to me in my life.

[00:06:34] Scott Anthony Barlow: So if you wanna hear how she made a change going from that product management to eventually finding organizational psychology, which led her to change management, a field that she didn't even know existed, and then found that work in the real world without having tons of change management experience, well, I would encourage you to listen to her episode on Happen To Your Career podcast where she shares that in her own words. Caity tells the whole thing on episode 582.

[00:07:02] If you want help with that, by the way, then I would love to invite you to drop me an email, scott@happentoyourcareer. Put 'Conversation' in the subject line, and I'll connect you with the right member of my team, and we'll have a conversation. We'll understand what you're trying to accomplish. We'll understand some of the concerns that you have and help you figure out how to navigate through your exact situation. It's what we do, and it's what we love to do. Until next time, I'm Scott, and this has Happen To Your Career. Adios. I'm out.