Pivot and Grow Your Career, Step by Step

Confidence is a funny old thing. In business, in life, to take a small step forward requires confidence in some form or another, because we’re never sure of the outcome and we’re moving away from a place a safety and comfort.

And because of that we just stay. Humans hate to burn calories on a wasted endeavour. And yet your life path right now is probably an unlikely ‘dot to dot’ journey you could never have foreseen. Your career doesn’t always seem possible, when you look back properly and see how far you’ve come. How did that happen?! But your dots actually joined up by taking small steps, from one dot to the next.

Guts and glory are bedfellows that need each other. Looking forward is just the same, except you just haven’t made the steps. You have the confidence. You already proved it.

Bear: A Good Bo

Something critiqued…

I was recently privileged to witness a professional actor, writer and producer talk through how she ripped through her solo-show script after the first week’s run at the Adelaide Fringe. It was a masterclass in how to care very much, while - at the exact same time - requiring you to simply let things go. It’s a pivot that requires polar opposites.

To receive feedback from critics, friends, producers on your show of four years is one thing. To then use that feedback to rewrite, rip out and add in new bits when every sinew in your body is wedded to your last four years’ work takes a brutal kind of honesty, guts and introspective awareness. It’s heartbreak meets make-or-break. Here’s the thing: egos must be cast aside if you are to truly move forward. It’s the ability to sacrifice, pivot and believe in the next step - the next leap to the next dot.

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese philosopher

Something shown…

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

It’s a question that rattles around school students’ heads as they try to make sense of what their future could be. The subjects they choose can set the course of their career - and all done at such an early age when they don’t really know what they really want to do, or what choices exist.

Last week I gave a talk to students at Farncombe’s Broadwater School. My focus - my offer to them - was not on ‘career advice’ or ‘the best subjects to take’. It was all about allowing oneself to take small steps, and having the confidence to do it. Because what matters is growing the confidence and conviction to take actions that move you on in your career. To prove the point, I used volunteers and a little improv activity to prove they have confidence. Which they did by ‘doing’. Evidence in real time.

“Processing information demands that the brain burn calories - which acts against its primary job: to help us thrive and survive” Donald Miller, Author: Building a StoryBrand

Something so difficult-ly right…

Here’s another polar-opposites decision to be made - a heartbreaking one at that. A few weeks ago my dog, Bear, featured in this newsletter. Alas, his time has come. He’s an old boy. We don’t want to say goodbye. We don’t want to move on into a world without him. But it’s the right thing to do, for him. As he declines in health the selfishness of us wishing him to be with us is betraying what is best for him.

His next dot is here, but it won’t be his final dot on our lives, because he leaves us richer for him having been with us over the last 15 and a half years.

Farewell, Sunshine.

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