In the Interim: Resources for Navigating Job Transitions
Job transitions — planned or not — are hard to navigate (period).
Whether we decide to leave our job, make a career move, or find ourselves without a job, the space between secure jobs is a mix of things–unprocessed fresh feelings, needs, anxieties, and wondering about next steps. That “next steps” part can feel like an overwhelming mountain. Where to start?
How do you articulate who you are, what you do, and what you’ve done? What do you need to know about working with recruiters? How are your interview skills?
If you find yourself at a career crossroads or facing that overwhelming mountain of how to find your next role, we hope you’ll find the resources below valuable.
“Your career is like a garden. It can hold an assortment of life’s energy that yields a bounty for you. You do not need to grow just one thing in your garden. You do not need to do just one thing in your career.”
— Jennifer Ritchie Payette
Guided Journaling: Questions to Think On
If you’re approaching or in the midst of a career transition, here are some questions to sit with:
- What are the current misalignments between your inner life and your outer life?
- What are the themes that matter, now and looking ahead?
- What happens if the house of cards you built falls apart? Or even worse, what if it doesn’t?
- Who was the person who set out on the path that got you here? What did that person value? What was driving them?
- As you take in the perspective of where you’ve been from where you are now, what is it like to take that all in? What are you grateful for?
- Who is the person who is here now?
- What is the reorientation that’s happening for you here?
- What matters to you now? What do you know about what brings you alive?
- What might you dare to ask for?
- How can you head towards what you love?
- How might you want to move forward?
Podcasts for Transitional Times
Over the past nine years of the Reboot Podcast, we’ve shared a plethora of stories from a wide range of entrepreneurs who have undergone significant transitions — both in work and life. Below, we’re lifting up two particularly useful conversations for anyone who might be on their own transitional journey:
- Reboot Extra #17 — Prep for Career Shifts and Job Changes with Keith McAllister & Ali Schultz
In this episode, Ali hosts a thoughtful conversation with executive recruiter Keith McAllister at Modern Executive Solutions. In their time together, the pair discuss the importance of clearly articulating who you are, what you do, and what you’ve done, and share advice for leveraging your personal and professional networks. Keith details what to do (and not do) when you receive a call from a recruiter, and Ali asks, “How important is your LinkedIn profile?” - Reboot Extra #24: Career Transitions at Midlife
In this conversation, Reboot Coaches Jim Marsden, Marty Janowitz, Ray Foote, and Jerry Colonna sit down to explore career transitions at midlife. Together, they describe their unique midlife experiences and share what was bubbling up for them at the time. They give insight into what helped them get to the other side and acknowledge the importance of honoring endings. Jim walks us through the arc of the Journey of Transformation and shares why we often can’t plan or strategize our way through transformational change.
Finding Ground, Managing Fear: A Free Course
We have all experienced challenges and upheaval, sometimes many times over, throughout our personal and professional lives. These times of uncertainty may be sparked by what’s around us, or they may spring up from what’s inside of us.
In this 30-day course, we will explore what it means to find your ground and manage fears when faced with struggles or feeling overwhelmed. Times of uncertainty are difficult and they can help us step more fully into the leaders we long to be. Also included is a week of guided journaling to help you unpack, reflect on, and integrate what you learn.
“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”
— Gloria Steinem
Inspiring Reads for Exploring Thresholds
We’re lifting up a few of our favorite articles and blog posts to help you process, dream, and explore the thresholds in your life:
- Navigating Thresholds of Big Change
Leaning into what you love and letting yourself imagine what you’d like are some key moves to navigate this time. It’s a time we can’t rely on our rational thinking brains alone. We need to rely on other parts of ourselves and other ways of knowing to move forward on what can require a big leap of faith with clarity and grace. - The Act to Follow
How do you want to be, now, as you look at the act you’re in the midst of or the new act you’re moving into? How do you want to relate to work? What life would you like to create for yourself? How are you directing the course of your own life? - Dear Reboot: When You Find Yourself In A Toxic Workplace
When transitioning out of your current role, it’s important to unpack the ways in which you were complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want before leaving your current role so you don’t recreate that same environment at your next job. - Wondering What’s Next? Start With Endings.
Honoring our endings allows us to reflect on how we’ve grown, brings awareness to the ways we are developing, and supports us in connecting to what lies ahead. - Who’s Driving the Bus? Begin with A Well-Resourced Self
This article is the first of a three-part series. The series, entitled Active Reorientation — Befriending Fear, Discerning What Matters, and Bringing Agency in Times of Uncertainty is intended to support and help us navigate our experiences in times of chaos, upheaval, and uncertainty. - Up and To the Right
We live in a culture that says anything less is failure. Up and to the right, we’re told, is where the happy people are. That’s where the people who never fear, never fail, never struggle live on bonbons. - Your Operators Manual: Craft Your User’s Guide
Do you ever wish you had a user’s guide for the folks in your life? Have you ever wished you could hand them your user’s guide? When it comes to working well with others it can help to share with them a bit about us, such as who we are at our best, our personality, and our working style. - Thresholds of Change
Even if life looks good on paper, if you’re depressed and burnt out, that’s not much of a life, is it? What keeps us in the job that feels bad, or in the relationship that sucks the air out of us (but maybe looks good in your photo reel)? - The Sound of Settling
As you reflect on your work, your relationships, and your role in life at this inflection point, something more purposeful emerges–or wants to emerge: Who am I, really? What am I doing? What patterns, programs, and remnants from the past have directed my life? What do I need to reclaim? What would I like in this second act of my life?
Book Recommendations from Team Reboot
Our team shares the books that stay top of mind and within hand’s reach:
- Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation — Parker J. Palmer
“Is the life I am living the same as the life that wants to live in me?” With this searching question, Parker Palmer begins an insightful and moving meditation on finding one’s true calling. Let Your Life Speak is an openhearted gift to anyone who seeks to live authentically. - The Four Elements: Finding Right Livelihood in the 21st Century — Tim Butler
This is a book for all who are facing career and life transitions. At such junctures, our decisions require the full self, and astute analytical thinking alone will not carry us into the new place that our lives demand. - Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the Second Half of Life — Robert A. Johnson & Jerry Ruhl
Writing with elegant simplicity, Johnson and Ruhl help us understand our own heritage of unrealized hopes — and how they must be examined and transformed if we are to be at peace with ourselves and others in middle age and beyond. - Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up, by Jerry Colonna
Work does not have to destroy us. Work can be the way in which we achieve our fullest self, Jerry firmly believes. What we need, sometimes, is a chance to reset our goals and to reconnect with our deepest selves and with each other. Reboot moves and empowers us to begin this journey. - Ready: How to Know When to Go and When to Stay — David Richo
We have all stayed too long in what doesn’t work. I have done this too, maybe everyone has? The “what doesn’t work” can apply to relationships, jobs, addictions, chronic pain, unresolved conflicts, enmeshment in family drama, affiliation to a religion, organization, or institution — just about anything we become involved in.
