For several years, I’ve experienced an increasing demand for career coaching from long-time clients. They reach out with something that sounds like “Art, I’m done with this work. I need something else that’s not just a job change. I don’t know where to start.”
I help people find that place to start and frequently guide them through to their ‘next’ role. It’s never a full-scale reinvention, but rather a deliberate process that ultimately remixes their skills, wisdom, and interests to find a role that meets their needs at this stage of their lives and careers.
What’s in a name? A lot!
For a while, I called this work Career Reinvent, but that name never sat right with me.
We don’t need to reinvent. Few of us, later in our careers, are motivated to give up everything we’ve done and know and start over. Rather, the right approach is to “remix” and alter how and where we apply our skills and accumulated wisdom.
Connect the “remix” work to your current lifestyle priorities (life-stage filters) and a sense of purpose, and watch out!
What a career remix looks like
Just a few examples:
- An accomplished technical professional and leader, taking on a series of side hustles fueled by their desire to help people, better leverage their strong faith, and coach and write.
- A career-long consulting leader who, as it turns out, is an expert at crisis management.
- An accomplished medical professional interested in narrating audiobooks in her native language.
- A banking executive shifting to a transformation leader.
- A project manager turned operations expert who hangs out their consulting shingle and successfully serves as a fractional COO.
- A USAF intelligence analyst and rising corporate executive jumps into executive and leadership coaching.
- A career-long sales and marketing professional, shifting to leadership development, coaching, teaching at the graduate level, and writing. (OK, that’s me!)
What these career remix examples have in common.
Each individual, myself included, knew it was time for a change. Many delayed the process due to the stress of personal financial commitments (can you say children in college?), and some hesitated because they felt lost.
Most individuals cannot jump without an income parachute and assume this means they must put off shifting what they do and where/how they do it to someday in the future. Sadly, this ‘someday’ isn’t on our calendars. And a well-designed Remix plan takes income needs into account.
The process for remixing
The process I use is a blend of design thinking and project management. Our goal is to minimize overall project risk and offer an iterative, creative approach that ultimately connects ideas to our life priorities. We focus on finding ‘next’, not forever.
For Self-Discovery, we spend time reflecting on moments when we are at our best, gaining insights from others about our superpowers, exploring our backstories, looking for the throughline, and then shifting to ideation.
Exploration moves from unfiltered brainstorming and building a big idea list to identifying the core issues we need in our lives (life-stage filters) and assessing ideas through a distillation process that yields a few candidates to explore. The process moves quickly and deliberately.
Exploring away from the screen by engaging with individuals in the target area quickly turns into experimenting, where, through side-hustles or creative use of vacation time, people try the ideas on for size. If we have a winner, great! If not, we go back to the life-stage filters and the big idea list, and repeat the explore-and-experiment processes.
The final two stages, preparation and launch, are the easiest parts of the process. Preparation is typically business planning. (By the way, most people don’t jump, but rather build a timeline to cultivate skills, line up their financial resources, and even work in a side hustle while keeping their day jobs and the paychecks flowing.) Launch is go-time and often a marketing event.
Don’t Reinvent, Remix
Everyone has skills, abilities, and interests. Find the intersection in the Venn diagram of your abilities and accumulated wisdom, work that interests you, and the right level of marketability where people pay you what you need for your life stage, and you’ve arrived.
The Career Remix process is viable, accessible, and even fun. It doesn’t require you to take unwanted risks. There’s a deliberate process. And with proper design, your Remix output better fits your lifestyle needs than your current day job.
Interested in Remixing your career? Reach out to Art: [email protected] for a discovery call. Visit the program page here.