©Ian Schneider

How to Dream

Join globally renowned author and Columbia Business School professor Dr. Sheena Iyengar as she explains how to approach your dreams with a new perspective. Learn to reflect on what you long to accomplish and what stands in your way.

Finding Your Life Purpose with Ikigai

Ikigai can guide you in your quest for self-discovery. Listen to Japanese brain scientist Ken Mogi explain why and how.

Career Anchors

What drives you to be good at your job?

Career anchors are based on your values, desires, motivations, and abilities. They are the immovable parts of your professional self-image that guide you throughout your career journey.

Try this short GLOBIS Unlimited course to identify which of the eight career anchors is yours!

Leadership with Passion through Kokorozashi

The key ingredient to success? Passion.

Finding your kokorozashi will unify your passions and skills to create positive change in society. This GLOBIS Unlimited course will help you develop the values and lifelong goals you need to become a strong, passion-driven leader.

Most of us, as professionals, want our work to be something we’re good at, something that makes us happy, and something that creates value for others.

If you’ve been thinking about quitting your job, it’s probably because your current role doesn’t excite or motivate you like it used to. Perhaps you’re thinking about making a career pivot, about changing the trajectory of your professional career.

You want to be in what I call the “sunshine spot of high passion, high skill.” Making a career pivot to that sunny spot should be more than a dream. It should be your goal.

How to Dream

Join globally renowned author and Columbia Business School professor Dr. Sheena Iyengar as she explains how to approach your dreams with a new perspective. Learn to reflect on what you long to accomplish and what stands in your way.

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How to Make a Career Change

Everyone wants to be in that sunshine spot, overflowing with skill and passion to create something meaningful at work. But many of us are stuck in a role where we have high skill and low passion.

We want a career path that will lead us from the bottom right to the top right in the visualization below. We want a career pivot into the sun. 

Chart showing the four quadrants of skill and passion that drive a career pivot
A career pivot should take you from the darkness into the sun. | ©GLOBIS

Making such a career pivot takes three steps:

  1. Get self-reflective.
  2. Stretch yourself.
  3. Make your own luck.

These are more than theoretical. Following this method, I went from a career managing business development at a defense research center in Toronto to my current job leading global HR initiatives for a Japanese multinational and teaching at GLOBIS University.

It was a radical pivot, but it ‘s sunny here on the other side!

Here’s how these three steps can help you make a career pivot of your own.

Step 1: Get Self-reflective.

A satisfying career requires passion and skill. So to pivot, you may need to reconnect with what you are passionate about. 

Career Anchors

What drives you to be good at your job?

Career anchors are based on your values, desires, motivations, and abilities. They are the immovable parts of your professional self-image that guide you throughout your career journey.

Try this short GLOBIS Unlimited course to identify which of the eight career anchors is yours!

To be clear, asking “What are you passionate about?” is quite a different question from “What’s your passion?” 

Ask someone, “What’s your passion?” and they might say “to become a yoga teacher” or “to launch a startup” or even “to write a book.” These are jobs, actions. They’re career goals, but not the very core of what we’re passionate about.

Finding what you’re passionate about requires digging much, much deeper. Identify the core values that excite and motivate you. These will keep you going through the ups and downs of a career change.

Start by getting reflective. Get into your own head and your own past. Look back over your life, your career, your education, and your hobbies.

In all that time, what things excited you? What made you feel passionate?

Look for patterns and commonalities among all those things. Connect the dots.  That should give you insights into what you are passionate about.

You may discover that your goal to launch a startup is connected to your passion for creating things, and a startup is only one possible way of doing that. That deeper, core motivation helps identify where you need to pivot to. It can help you identify jobs or careers to realize that passion.

One more thing: Don’t do this alone.

Talk to people who know you well. Ask them what they’ve noticed gives you energy, what makes your eyes sparkle, what energizes you so much that your passion is infectious.

Determining what can engage, charm, or inspire others is a huge clue. It reveals where your passion can create value for others. That is where you can be a leader

Leadership with Passion through Kokorozashi

The key ingredient to success? Passion.

Finding your kokorozashi will unify your passions and skills to create positive change in society. This GLOBIS Unlimited course will help you develop the values and lifelong goals you need to become a strong, passion-driven leader.

At GLOBIS, all MBA students are required to identify their kokorozashi, or personal mission, over the course of their studies. They are supported in this journey by faculty, fellow students, coworkers, family, and friends.

Finally, remember to identify a career that you can make a good living at. Passion is great, and passion will drive your career pivot. But passion alone won’t pay the bills!

Step 2: Stretch yourself.

Next, you’ll want to take stock of your skills.

What are you already good at, and what are your gaps? Think about what you need to do to bridge those gaps. Create a plan:

  • How will you get there?
  • By when?
  • Who can support you?

Then stretch yourself to bridge the gaps. Get out of your comfort zone. Learn, practice, repeat.

Go back to school and get an MBA like I did. Or take some online courses. Let yourself be mentored or seek out career coaches. New skills and mindsets can be big career changers in themselves.

Skill mastery should be your goal to bridge the gap to that sunshine spot. Don’t start your career transition when the skills you need are still at zero!

Your skill assessment shouldn’t just focus on the new, either. You’ll probably find you have some portable skills which are transferable and useful to any potential employer. Those are critical to a pivot, as are networks.

As you build your skills, you also need to be building new networks relevant to the career you are pivoting into. New networks will provide you with new perspectives, new mentors, new business partners, and potentially your new employer or customers.

Bear in mind that this second step may take some time. But once you feel like you’ve bridged those gaps, you’re ready for the final step.

Step 3: Make your own luck.

So you’ve identified what you’re passionate about and how that translates into a life purpose. You’ve upped your game by learning new skills and building new networks. You’ve identified the role you want to pivot into.

Finding Your Life Purpose with Ikigai

Ikigai can guide you in your quest for self-discovery. Listen to Japanese brain scientist Ken Mogi explain why and how.

Now it’s time to put all that preparation into action. Time to make the pivot.

For that, you’ll need to take control. Make your own luck.

“Control your own destiny or someone else will.”

Jack Welch

Make and take every opportunity to get noticed. Leverage the networks you developed in Step 2 to proactively land that new role, or to find the people who can help you along. Then show them what you’ve got. Find opportunities to showcase yourself, to demonstrate what you’re capable of.

Don’t rely on mailing out CVs.

Instead, work pro bono. Give talks and seminars. Volunteer. Raise your hand. Find every opportunity you can to showcase your abilities.

Pivot Soon 

These three steps will help you plan your career pivot, but the work itself is up to you.

Moving into the sunshine spot of job satisfaction is not something that happens overnight. It can take time. It took me about two years to make my career pivot happen. But it did happen.

It’s never too late. So if you’re unhappy, it’s time to pivot.

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