"...You alone are the architect of the universe you inhabit" ~ Beau Taplin
Photo Credit: Kevin Jordan, Gary Farrell Winery, Healdsburg, CA. March 23, 2024
Greetings -
I hope you, your families and friends are well!
We are enjoying the early days of Spring, including a lovely outing this past weekend with a good friend at Iron Horse Vineyards (their champagne has been served at many a White House function) and Gary Farrell Vineyards and Winery. Our adventures also included the discovery of an old speak-easy in the basement of The Grape Leaf Inn, a B&B local to Healdsburg. This was quite a find!
This edition primarily looks at professional transitions, including perspectives ranging from the existential to the pragmatic, with a dash of other thoughts and reflections in between. The concepts of career change and transition have been a significant focus of my current work, with some folks navigating internal organizational changes, while others are architecting off-ramps out of and on-ramps into a variety of companies. Initiating and executing thoughtful change is paramount, and these resources provide an array of frameworks and tools to be intentional and deliberate during the change process.
The theme of change has also consonance for me, as a focus of my professional development work this year is learning to more effectively navigate and sustain change. To that end, I have embarked on certification work in the neuroscience of change as well as nervous system mastery. I am in the early days of both programs, so I will have more to report in the coming months. This is all very exciting in an exceptionally nerdy way! I am looking forward to the course work and the opportunity to leverage the lessons for my growth and that of my clients.
As always, happy reading and listening!
Be well, take good care of your families and community.
-kj
PS - (Missed a newsletter? Past editions can be found here: https://www.kevinjordan.coach/blog. And if you hit paywall on an article(s), feel free to send me a note and let me know what you need. I have subscriptions to many of the sources that I cite.)
Featured
Whether it is a significantly new or different strategic approach or a smaller, tactical move, the desire to thoughtfully and deliberately navigate career transitions is key. Yet, with so much churn and an often overwhelming set of choices that need to be considered, it can be difficult to define and implement a meaningfully tailored plan.
As I work with clients in this space, we focus extensively on understanding their values, strengths and the professional identity attributes. This process is grounding, as it offers them the opportunity to construct a framework to direct what they value the most to organizations aligned to their purpose and ambitions. The rigor in this work is fundamental, as it also allows them to determine how they can best move forward to realize their career consonance and achieve their career aspirations. Ultimately, the goal is to be able to answer the question: is this role, organization, etc. truly worthy of my greatest gifts?
In her Harvard Business Review article, Why Career Transition Is So Hard, Herminia Ibarra posits that "you need to diverge and delay, exploit and explore, and bridge and bond to find a new narrative thread. In doing so it’s essential to engage with others and tell them your story—again and again, as much to make sense of your experience as to enlist their help...As constant reinvention becomes the norm, the stories that define us have no start or ending. Instead of closure, the prize is learning: What we learn about ourselves when we embrace, rather than resist, the loss of status and identity will give us access to more options in the long term. Proficiency in being liminal won’t reduce the great uncertainty before you. But it will increase your capacity to successfully navigate the present and future transitions that are the signature of a modern career."
Articles
Harvard Business Review: 6 Questions to Ask at the Midpoint of Your Career. "It’s common to wrestle with feelings of unmet expectations, missed opportunities, and paths not taken when you reach the midpoint of your career. But experts say that arriving at middle-age is also a profound opportunity for growth and self-reflection. It’s a chance to reevaluate your priorities, draw from your experience, and carve out a path that aligns with your goals for the second half of your professional life."
The Wall Street Journal: Stop Obsessing About Having the Perfect Career Plan. "The paths we thought we knew are crumbling fast. Maybe it’s time to think differently about getting ahead."
Gartner: 4 Secrets to Success for Executives Starting a New Role. "Reducing the time it takes to make an impact is key to a successful transition, but many executives are unsystematic in their approaches. To avoid making a transition more difficult than it needs to be, take these four steps — starting before you even accept an opportunity." [While this article is geared toward executives, the principles apply to a variety of other professional roles as well.]
Harvard Business Review: The Most Successful Approaches to Leading Organizational Change. "When tasked with implementing large-scale organizational change, leaders often give too much attention to the what of change — such as a new organization strategy, operating model or acquisition integration — not the how — the particular way they will approach such changes. Such inattention to the how comes with the major risk that old routines will be used to get to new places. Any unquestioned, 'default' approach to change may lead to a lot of busy action, but not genuine system transformation."
Blog Posts & Opinions
Scientific American: To Lead a Meaningful Life, Become Your Own Hero. "From Gilgamesh to Star Wars, the narrative blueprint underpinning many heroic tales can offer a powerful way to reframe experiences."
LinkedIn: A Circus of Endings and Beginnings. "Careers and jobs run their course too. What was once an important job is no longer. Skills that were once highly sought after are not any more. If you are in a spot where you can identify with the circus closing, because you know things have run their course, it’s time to make a change before they fold up your tent."
Substack: bookbear express: not disappointing myself."What’s the most beautiful life I can imagine for myself? What’s the truest? And am I making the decisions that would get me there?"
LinkedIn: Start Strong: Your First 30 Days In A New Job. "The first 30 days are when you have the best chance to set your brand reputation up for success." [A shout out to my Bay Area colleague Dr. Jo Ilfeld for authoring this post.]
Podcasts
HBR IdeaCast: Making Peace with Your Midlife, Mid-career Self. "Research shows that happiness bottoms out for people in their mid to late 40s. We might struggle with mid-career slumps, caring for both children and aging parents, and existential questions about whether everything has turned out as we'd planned. But Chip Conley says we can approach this phase of our personal and professional lives with a different perspective. He's a former hospitality industry CEO and founder of the Modern Elder Academy, and he explains how to reframe our thinking about middle age, find new energy, and become more fulfilled and successful people at work and home."
Freakonomics Radio Network: No Stupid Questions: What Does Success Look Like? "What matters more: meeting our own ambitions, or winning fame and glory?"
TED: The Way We Work. "Starting a new job can be really scary, but it doesn't have to be. Here's what career navigation expert Gorick Ng says are the keys to making a great first impression, plus what you can do to ensure your new workplace is a great fit long term."
Arts, Music, Culture, Literature & Humor Corner
Paste: Rushmore Introduced the World to Wes Anderson (and Reintroduced Bill Murray). "Shot in anamorphic widescreen by cinematographer Robert Yeoman, Rushmore launched Anderson’s career as an original, American filmmaker on the rise."
Literary Hub: Of Songs and Stories: What Bruce Springsteen Learned From Flannery O’Connor. "Warren Zanes on the literary influences underpinning Nebraska."
The Atlantic: How a Playwright Became One of the Most Incisive Social Critics of Our Time. "The subversive vision of Michael R. Jackson."
The New Yorker Fiction: The Time Being, by Joseph O'Neill.
The New Yorker: Obituaries My Mother Wrote for Me While I Was Living in San Francisco in My Twenties. "In an attempt to prove that she’s some kind of 'free spirit,' she decided to balance her body on a stranger’s hands and legs—like a child."
Reflections
"To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope." ~ Anne Carson
“And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns...that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale...that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself.” ~ Bob Dylan
"Trusting in the universe
means placing trust in yourself.
It is determining now, in this moment,
to fight on the side of your future,
to face all that has been holding you back
from claiming the life you desire.
Trusting in the universe
does not mean leaving your fate
to chance or the passage of time;
it is the faith that you have within you,
the capacity to improve your own circumstances,
it is the promise that you will one day
meet your true potential,
it is the understanding that you alone
are the architect of the universe you inhabit
and you are limited only by your
imagination."
~ Beau Taplin