How a Career Pivot Can Help You Find More Fulfillment at Work
Looking for more fulfillment from your career? If so, there might be one tool at your disposal that you’re completely ignoring… and it’s costing you big time! Enter: the career pivot.
“So, what exactly is a career pivot?”
A career pivot is a smaller shift, designed to align your career to the things that are important to you. Instead of starting a completely new career path, pivots are about “side-steps”, or making tweaks within the world you already know.
For example, back when I was in advertising, I wasn’t particularly fulfilled by my role as a media buyer. I liked the ad agency I worked at and the people I worked with, but the work itself?...Not so much. Instead of scrapping the entire thing and thinking to myself, “OK, I don’t like this, how do I get as far away from the agency world as possible?”, I pivoted! I thought about what elements of my job I enjoyed, and I leaned in there. This led me to shift to my agency’s internal “Talent Development & Culture” team, where I worked to train and support our employees. Not only was I able to take advantage of my past media buying experience to train people on that work, but I also was able to learn new skills and do work I loved. Win/win.
Pivots vs. Career Changes
The main difference between a pivot and a career change is the degree of the change. Career changes are typically much larger leaps. There is often less salvaged from your prior role, whereas a pivot leans more on your past experience. It’s a great way to use your skills to your advantage!
Why pivots are so underrated
Pivots don’t get enough attention in the career change space, in my experience. I think this is largely because humans love an Oprah-style story. The kind of transformation that would make a compelling book… The doctor who becomes an actor, the stay-at-home mom who starts a business empire, the lawyer who leaves to become a trapeze artist.
People love to hear about the big leaps, so they get a lot of attention! In reality, though, this means that less splashy but often more impactful transformations get ignored. They happen every day and can lead to true career fulfillment, but they get minimized because they're not as cinematic.
The great thing about a pivot
There are 2 main reasons why I love and advocate for pivots:
They protect you from overcorrecting
When people are unhappy at a job, they tend to overcorrect. They “throw the baby out with the bathwater”, so to speak, and decide to do a 180 in their career (sometimes to their detriment). They scrap the whole thing, when in reality they could have salvaged some of their past knowledge and experience!
For example, if someone works in marketing for a huge tobacco company, they might feel disappointed about the negative impact their company has on the world. “Does what I do matter? Or, even worse, is it actively bad?” If they were to overcorrect, they might assume that ALL marketing is soul-sucking and lacking purpose, and leave both their field and the company. If they had paused, though, maybe they would have realized that marketing itself wasn’t the issue. Maybe they would have followed their passion for environmental justice, and began using their marketing skills for the World Wildlife Fund, or a similar organization. See how that works? It’s natural to overcorrect when you’re frustrated at your job, but pivoting can help you salvage the bits of your career that are worth saving.They protect you from “starting over”
“Starting over” is one of the biggest fears stopping people from seeking out career fulfillment. (I wrote an entire blog about it).
Since I work with high achievers, this is especially true! These superstars tend to have very successful careers which they’ve put tons of work into building. As a result, even when they realize they’re unfulfilled or unhappy, they’re hesitant to change things! Enter: the pivot.
The pivot is a great way to spare ourselves the pain of starting over, because if there’s any way that we can possibly make your existing career (or elements of it) be a better fit, we will! No need to start from square 1.
“OK, this sounds great. So… how do I pivot?”
If you’re jazzed up and ready to pivot your role, I’m here to help! I’ll write a whole blog post soon dedicated on how to pivot, but as an introduction, there are 3 main steps I want you to take:
Pause
Clarify
Pivot
You need to pause, taking a beat to understand what’s not working in your career currently. Is it an issue with what you’re doing (the type of work), or how you’re doing it (the organization where you’re doing it)?
Then, you need to clarify which pieces of your role work for you, and which don’t. For my clients, we do this via my process called “interest mapping”, where we look at what you like, dislike, and what that means for you. We focus on the big picture themes to pull out insights.
Once you’ve identified which elements of the work you’re engaged by, you can get creative and begin brainstorming how to pivot in order to preserve the bits you enjoy, and release the bits that you don’t.
Simple!
So, if you’re not fulfilled by your current role, but you’re also hesitant to “start over”, a career pivot might be an option for you. And it’s a really great option!
Are you going to try it?!
Tell me in the comments if you’re curious about pivoting your career (and if I should do a pt. 2 about how to make it happen).
