There’s no shortage of writing at the moment about what’s changing in the world of work, and most of it is some shade of worried. I understand the worry. But it tends to bury something, and the something is this. The same moment that’s unsettling everyone is also one of the most open moments many of us have had to choose a different way of working, and of living. That’s the part I want to talk about.
So I want to put four things to you, and with each one, something you can actually do with it, rather than nod along and carry on.
A word first on why I’d give you something to do, rather than just something to think about. A question like this isn’t one the mind can think its way through. Left to itself it will turn the thing over and over and mistake that for progress, when mostly it’s another way of staying put. Each of these is a way to stop thinking about your life for a moment and actually look at it. To get the question out of your head, where it only circles, and onto the page where you can see it. None of them take long, and they ask for a pen and a bit of honesty more than anything else.
The first is that this time is pointing you somewhere, and the direction is almost always inward. Underneath the pressure, it tends to point at the part of you that has quietly wanted a different kind of work, or a different kind of life. In the transitions I’ve walked people through, and in my own, the outer move was never the start of it. Something shifts on the inside first, some honesty about whether the work still means anything to you, and the outer change follows that.
Exercise
The arc of your choices
Map the three or four main jumps you’ve made in your working life. For each one, note the context at the time and the real reason you moved. Then stand back and read the whole arc as a single story. What was it actually about?
When I did this with my own, what I saw was that every move looked like an outer decision and was really an inner one. The same two questions sat underneath each of them. Am I doing work I actually want to do? Am I serving the way I want to serve? And the trigger was nearly always the same, that the meaning had quietly drained out of where I was, and I was looking for a way to feel useful again in something I cared about. You might find a different thread in yours. The point is to go looking for it.
The second is about safety, and it runs straight on from the first. When everything is moving at once, the mind struggles to find safety, because there’s too much going on for it to get its arms around. So the search for it has to go somewhere deeper than thinking. That deeper part, the felt sense of things, is what actually knows whether this is a moment for you to sit still, to move, or to make something. The mind wants to grip onto a plan. The quieter part underneath it tends to already know which way is yours.
Exercise
What wants to come out
Accept where you are for a moment, exactly as it is, and let the mind stop trying to solve it. Then feel into it. What feels right, and what doesn’t? What is the part of you that wants to come out right now?
Sometimes the honest answer is to stay where you are, and that isn’t a failure of nerve. It’s as real an answer as deciding to move. This isn’t about talking yourself into a leap. It’s about letting the deeper part lead, wherever it happens to lead.
The third is more practical, and it’s easy to miss because of the way the mind works. When I ask myself who I could help, it goes straight to the people who already know me, the inner ring or two of my network who know me for doing a particular thing. And it stops there, as though that were the edge of the world. It isn’t. Past those rings is a whole population with all sorts of needs, and more of those people are within reach now than they have ever been.
Exercise
Past the edge of the map
Picture the rings of people you could serve. The inner ones are the people who already know you. Now look deliberately past them, past your network, past your city, past your country, and ask who is out there with a need you could meet that you’ve never pictured, because they were never in the room.
Reaching those people isn’t free. It costs money, and time, and the kind of marketing most of us would rather not do. But that’s also where some of the creativity is, in the problem of how you actually reach someone. Don’t let the people who already know you quietly decide the limit of who you could serve.
The fourth is about reinvention, a word that unsettles people because it sounds like you have to throw out who you are and become someone else. My experience has been close to the opposite. There are parts of my own work, ways of coaching, of facilitating, of working with a team, that lay dormant for years. I’d quietly decided they were finished, and then a different time and a different client called them back up. Nothing was ever really retired. Reinvention turned out to be picking the same capacities up again and aiming them somewhere new.
Exercise
Imagining futures
The first exercise looked backward, at the arc you’ve already walked. This one faces the other way. Rather than mapping the steps you’ve taken, map the ones you could take. Set out a few of the choices open to you, and feel into each in turn. Where would it take you? How would it feel to be living it? What might it bring into your life?
You’re not choosing here, and you’re not building a plan. You’re letting yourself explore a future that’s still genuinely open to you, which is usually where the nerve to follow a thread comes from. It’s only you, looking at what’s still possible.
None of this needs the world to settle down, which it may not do for a while yet. The opportunity was never in the conditions being right. It’s that a time like this one loosens things that are normally fixed, and in that loosening there’s room to choose again. Most people already half know what they’d choose. They’ve known for a long time what they’d rather be doing, and how they’d rather serve, and have been sensible enough to keep it to themselves.