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Taking the Road Less Travelled in Making a Career Change
September 6, 2009 | 1 Comment
Posted by: Kathleen Daniel
In Working Identity, Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career, Hermina Ibarra turns most of how people think about career change on its head. The usual line of thinking is that before making and implementing a plan, you first have to go through a process of introspection to diagnose your true self. Ibarra, a professor of organizational development at INSEAD, suggests that human beings don’t operate in such a linear way. She believes that change usually happens the other way around, that doing comes first, and knowing only later, and that by far the biggest mistake people make when trying to change careers is to delay taking the first step until they have settled on a destination. “We learn who we are – in practice, not in theory – by testing reality, not by looking inside. We discover the true possibilities by doing – trying out new activities, reaching out to new groups, finding new role models, and reworking our story as we tell it to those around us. What we want clarifies with experience and validation from others along the way.”
Though people do have different learning styles, and ways of experiencing the world, this circular, iterative approach makes a lot of sense to me. We take actions one step at a time, respond to what happens, and as our life changes, we experience uncertainty and doubt, or discover it’s hasn’t taken us in a desired direction, and so our ideas for change change along the way.
Not only that, but as Ibarra says, we’re not only one self but many selves. This not only makes it really difficult to imagine how we might reinvent ourselves in any kind of orderly way, but also suggests that there are multiple avenues that might be satisfying. To continue introspecting to narrow it to one might cause an analysis paralysis. Better to volunteer, meet and physically locate yourself with people or the places where your new activity would take place. We all need continuous new sources of information to react to. It’s how we learn.
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1 Comment so far
I think Herminia has it right! I definitely have a few “selves” in me
I like to totally change careers every 7 years or so, just to keep things interesting…
Hi Melodee,
Wow! Is that deliberate, or do you start feeling restless? Are they choices that feed different selves? Were they each good choices? That doesn’t sound easy. So many questions!