“Anything on earth you want to do is play. Anything on earth you have to do is work.
Play will never kill you, work will. I never worked a day in my life.”
– Dr Leila Denmark, Paediatrician
There are 6 essentials keys you need if you want to change career at 30, 40 or 50. If you have these 6 essentials, career-change is largely a practical matter, no matter what age you are. It can have its challenges, but the 6 essentials will help you navigate the inevitable obstacles that present themselves. If you don’t know these 6 things, career-change is likely to result in procrastination, frustration or failure. Here are the 6 essential transition keys:
Transition Key #1: A ‘good enough’ sense of direction
To change career, you need to have a ‘good enough’ sense of the destination you’re heading for. You may not know exactly how to get there, and you may not be clear on every single detail of what your destination looks, sounds and feels like, but there’s something you know for sure: you have a sense of your destination that’s ‘good enough’ that once you get there, you’ll know you’ve arrived. This mean you’re already in a position to begin. Often, I hear people repeating mantras like this…
– ‘I’d follow my heart if I was guaranteed it would work out OK.’
– ‘I’d do what I love but I can’t get paid for it.’
– ‘I’d be happy if I could find work that fulfils me.’
– ‘I’d do something meaningful if I knew how to do it.’
– ‘I’d do what I love if only I knew what it was.’
But when I ask them if they’d like to have more freedom, more fulfilment or more enjoyment in their work… more autonomy, more mastery, more meaning… they immediately say “Yes!”
That sense of freedom, fulfilment and enjoyment you desire is a direction you can head in. That’s what a ‘good enough’ sense of direction is.
Transition Key #2: Your “Innate Skill Set”
The exponential nature of technology is transforming our world at an ever-increasing pace. Robots are becoming more versatile and artificial intelligence is becoming more commonplace. According to MIT Sloan School of Management professor Erik Brynjolfsson and his collaborator Andrew McAfee (co-authors of the book Race Against the Machine) repetitive jobs are being automated more quickly than new jobs are being created. As computing power continues to get faster and cheaper, whole categories of employment are likely to disappear.
The jobs at the highest risk of automation are those involving repetitive tasks and expertise that can be specified and codified. The jobs at the lowest risk of automation are those requiring high degrees of perceptiveness, creativity and social intelligence. There’s an obvious conclusion you can draw from this: the capacities you’re most likely to need in order to change career and prosper in the twenty-first century can be summarized as perceptiveness, creativity and social intelligence.
The good news is this: perceptiveness, creativity and social intelligence are innate capacities; you’re born with them. Even if you haven’t used them much in your work until now, you definitely have them in potential. You can develop these capacities by getting a deeper understanding of the principles behind clarity.
Transition Key #3: Openness to learning, development and experimentation
Depending on the direction you’re heading in, career-change means developing your existing capacities and learning new skills and competencies. If you end up starting your own business, there are a variety of new capabilities you’ll learn. In addition, rapidly changing technologies mean you’ll constantly have the opportunity to learn and use new tools. Many of the tools and platforms that will be ‘flavour of the month’ two or three years from now don’t even exist today.
The idea of being a lifetime learner can sometimes seem overwhelming at first. But as you “give it a go” and start developing your ability to experiment and learn rapidly, you may be surprised at how quickly you find yourself mastering new tools, grasping new concepts and embracing new opportunities.
In fact, the only thing that ever stops people from learning and experimenting is contaminated thinking, showing up as fear: fear of failure, fear of criticism, fear of the unknown, fear of change, fear of loss etc. When we cling to an outdated model of the world, we may enjoy the temporary comfort of the familiar. But all the while, the gap between the model and reality is continuing to increase – and closing that gap can seem scary.
But as you get a deeper understanding of the principles behind clarity, you’ll start to ‘see through’ contaminated thinking and discover that you live in a world of opportunity. Exponential results come from insight, experimentation and action, and every experiment is an opportunity for learning.
Transition Key #4: Become a value-creator
This means honing your ability to create value for others in whatever your chosen field may be. The good news is that it’s never been simpler to get the information you need. Almost every “how to” you need to master is only a google-search away. So why isn’t everyone doing it? The same ‘contaminated thinking’ that stops people taking action and experimenting (e.g. fear of failure, fear of criticism etc).
But when you decide to focus on creating value for others (whatever direction you’re heading in), you open the gates to become great at what you’re doing. If you’re willing to keep learning, developing and becoming a value-creator, that success is within your reach.
Transition Key #5: A resilience mindset
In 2016, the Institute for the Future (IFTF) identified ‘resilience’ as being a foundational quality for the future of work.
Resilience allows you to respond to difficult situations in ways that support your growth and development rather than slow you down. It’s the foundation for motivation, experimentation and action-taking. The ability to respond positively to challenges is going to be a huge and essential asset, whether you’re transitioning to a new career as an employee, or starting your own venture.
Fortunately, resilience is an innate quality; everybody is born with it. Instead of asking ‘how do I develop resilience?’, it makes sense to ask, ‘what gets in its way?’ The only thing that ever obscures your innate resilience is contaminated thinking. But just as the sun is still there shining behind the clouds on an overcast day, your innate resilience is still shining behind the clouds of contaminated thinking, even when you’re not aware of it. And as you get a deeper understanding of the principles behind clarity, you’ll find your innate resilience shining through more and more frequently and reliably.
Transition Key #6: Your transition strategy
Huge numbers of people want to transition from their full-time job to something more fulfilling and on-purpose. But far fewer people have a clear sense of exactly how they’re going to make that move, and what it’s going to look like.
As a result, they often procrastinate, hoping that it will ‘just happen’. But that attitude puts you in a ‘passive’ relationship to your new career and your transition. As such, it rarely works, and can even be counter-productive, leaving people wondering, “Why hasn’t it happened yet?”
A more proactive and reliable approach is to choose a specific transition strategy. Millions of people have successfully transitioned from an existing career to doing something more fulfilling and on-purpose, and they’ve left a trail of breadcrumbs. Looking at the strategies already used successfully by people wanting to transition can allow you to highlight some of the key advantages and disadvantages of each. As you get clear on which strategy makes sense for you, you’ll start to get a clear idea of how to move forward with your new career.
By the way, I’ve created a free guide where I outline “The 5 Transition Strategies” you can use to leave full-time employment and move to something that inspires you. To get your copy, just go to www.JamieSmart.com/transitionguide where you can download it for free and find out which strategy makes sense for you.
To your increasing clarity!
Big love
Jamie
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