Is this role still right for me? Should I be pushing for the next level or looking at something different? Why does something not feel right when on paper it all looks fine? If I do leave, what would I do?
Questions like these are often what starts my work with someone – usually they’ve already spent a lot of time thinking about it but have struggled to land somewhere constructive, or somewhere that feels right. Months can go by like that – I’ve been there myself in the past too when I couldn’t see a way forward that felt both interesting and fulfilling, while also being compatible with home life.
The people I work with are all smart and perfectly capable of difficult thinking and solving challenging problems. They make complicated calls at work all week, hold many competing priorities in their heads and other people rely on them for all manner of things. Then they come to this question about their own direction and it stumps them.
Unfortunately, continuing to try and think more or better seldom produces a different answer. Part of that is because there often isn’t a perfect answer to be found, but there is usually an answer that’s better than the current situation, often much better. This typically emerges once you’re clearer about what you actually need and want, what possibilities are out there, and what the trade-offs and work to get there might be.
The other part is more practical – most of us don’t give ourselves proper time and space to think, and on the occasions we do manage it, we’re not always sure what to do with the time once we’ve got it. That one is a more readily solvable problem.
What you might have tried already
While you might not have got to a satisfying answer yet, you may have tried a few things. Maybe you’ve browsed job ads but without a great deal of conviction. Perhaps you’ve even applied for something, it’s not gone your way but you’ve realised afterwards that it probably wasn’t right for you anyway. You might have seen a role you could do most of perfectly well but not applied because you don’t meet every line of the criteria and you don’t want to risk a knockback. At the same time, you probably also know that a lot of roles never get advertised in the first place so you have likely even questioned the point of looking at all.
Many of these activities are a form of assessing, which is obviously an important step – but one that only gets truly useful when you’ve really understood the fuller picture of what you’re assessing it against.
The practical criteria often feel clear – money, location, hours, how much travel you can live with, whether it works around everything else you’re holding together. What isn’t always clear is where you might be prepared to make trade-offs. I worked with a client once who was adamant she needed to work from home, but then her dream job came up requiring three days a week in the office and it turned out there was a compromise to be made after all – but only for a job that met a very high bar.
The other criteria can often feel less defined – what do you want the work itself to give you, what would you like to be known for, what do you want more of and rather less of, where do you want to stretch yourself, and what are you not prepared to put up with any more.
When the ‘assessing’ activities haven’t got you anywhere, it’s usually one of two things, and often both. Either the criteria aren’t clear enough yet, so there’s nothing solid enough that you really believe in to hold anything up against, or the range of what you’re looking at isn’t wide enough. It’s easy for the possibilities in view to be the ones that you happen to have seen advertised, when they may only be a subset of what could be possible.
Lessons from technology transformations
Before coaching, I spent a couple of decades in consulting, a good deal of it working on and then leading transformation programmes. It took me a while to realise how much of that learning had come with me and informed my day-to-day thinking.
You’d never try to design where an organisation was heading without first getting a proper handle on where it actually was – the ‘as-is’ – and how it had got there. You’d also recalibrate what good looked like – the ‘to-be’ – from client to client. Plans to move from one to the other that got built without a robust strategy were risky. The bit that often got underestimated was the change management for the inevitable curve-balls, and what it would take to maintain momentum throughout the whole programme.
All of those points have turned out to have versions that apply to career transformation.
When I started coaching on the ‘what next’ career topic, I found myself falling into a similar sequence, and over time I built that out into my own JIGSAW Framework – Journey, Identity, Goals, Strategy, Action and Way forward – with exercises alongside each part. The aim is to have a growing bank of useful things for each stage, yet to still make sure it stays flexible enough to be tailored to each individual.
How JIGSAW works
The first two elements include a good bit of evidence-gathering:
Journey is a look back over your career to understand what it can teach you – the highs, the lows, the transition points, and what they have in common. Most people find patterns in there they hadn’t consciously noticed.
Identity is where you are now, what makes you tick, what you enjoy. Values, strengths and feedback from people who’ve actually seen you work. Some of this draws on structured inputs as well as reflection.
Out of those two we then end up with some themes – the threads that keep running underneath your most fulfilling work, backed by evidence and with some thought to future value.
Themes are a way of organising what’s emerged rather than an answer in themselves, and alongside them often sits a practical list – the money and location and environment questions that also have to be satisfied. Between them they tend to do three useful things. They give you the bones of your career story, something meaningful to hold options up against and also help you work out where you might want to grow.
From there the work gets steadily more individual because we all have different definitions of what good looks like for our lives and our careers.
Goals is where that really starts. You might arrive with three possible options you can’t choose between, knowing that something needs to change where you are, or no idea at all what’s next. Depending on where you’re starting from that might mean opening up the full world of possibilities, weighing up options already there, or thinking through the job you’ve not seen advertised yet.
Strategy is the high-level building blocks, given your themes and your goals – where the gaps are between where you are and where you want to get to, and which of them most need attention. For one person that might be internal networking and visibility, for another it might be exploring an industry she doesn’t know yet, for another it’s rebuilding confidence or getting interview-fit.
Action turns that into specific steps and a plan that’s realistic, working out what to do first.
Way forward is then all about consolidating the learning and keeping momentum going. This might include what could knock the plan off track, what would keep it going when life gets busy, and who’s going to hold you to account and be there to help if it stalls.
No two JIGSAWs look the same in practice. The six elements hold the shape of the work and keep it flowing, and if you’ve previously done a good amount of your own thinking, we roll that in rather than repeating anything already done.
In practice – the same question, different answers
Two client examples, both of whom arrived with questions about what was next.
The first had several directions she could pursue, but was feeling stuck and going round in circles when she was trying to work out which would fit best – there were a wide range of pros and cons. She was also struggling with her positioning given how varied her experience had been and how divergent some of her interests were. Once we’d built out her themes, which were more consistent than she had initially realised, she had something to assess opportunities against. She also had the bones of a coherent story of her career that she could use, accompanied by evidence and examples to draw on, as the basis to talk about herself when needed. She went on to find two part-time roles that fit really well together both logistically and in terms of playing to a broader cross-section of what she both enjoyed and was good at.
The second came to me, having had a successful 15+ year career for her current employer but feeling increasingly disconnected from her work. Through various re-orgs, her role had changed into something she liked less and alongside that she’d also become a parent. The balance that used to work didn’t any more, yet she was still ambitious and still wanted to grow her career. Her role and her priorities had drifted apart without her fully realising quite how much. She ended up staying, making a case to backfill some of her current role, and starting a new project that brought some more variety, stretch and fun back into it all. As the new project was global and remote, she also gained more flexibility in the process which was a win-win.
Two very similar starting questions but two quite different answers. Getting clearer about what you want doesn’t necessarily mean leaving – but it does give you a much better basis for understanding the gap and deciding what to do about it.
Somewhere to start
If you’d like a starting point, the Career Clarity Compass is a free tool built around the four patterns of feeling stuck I see most often. It gives you some good questions to start asking yourself to further your understanding of what’s going on for you. You can download it here – https://antoniawatson.co.uk/career-clarity-compass/
If you’d like to take this further
Every career situation is different, and a conversation is usually the quickest way to work out what would actually help. I offer a free call to talk through where you are and whether working together makes sense. Book a complimentary call
You might also find these articles useful:
◆ Lifting Your Gaze – Why Strategic Career Thinking Shouldn’t Wait – on making space to think about where your career is heading before you’re forced into a decision.
◆ Redefining Success – When the Framework No Longer Quite Fits – on what happens when the version of career success you’ve been working towards no longer feels quite right.
◆ Finding Time for Your Career When Life Never Seems to Slow Down – on creating the time and space for career thinking when everything else feels more urgent.