Research suggests people experience many significant transitions across adult life—often a dozen-plus job changes and numerous major life events.
A good, concrete benchmark comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth: People averaged 4.5 jobs between ages 25–34 and 2.9 jobs between ages 35–44.
That means: for many people, the 30s and early 40s include multiple job changes even before you count promotions, layoffs, role changes, or career pivots.
The best examples that come to mind particularly in terms of promotions, jobs changes and career pivots are Christine Lagarde and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
You would think that their names hardly belong together in one sentence but they do: both are coming from different backgrounds and show us the kind of success a person is able to achieve in many different and non-overlapping areas.
Arnold Schwarzenegger (born in Austria 1947) started his career in bodybuilding in Europe, moved to the US shaping the bodybuilding industry into the mainstream culture and winning Mr. Olympia title 7 times.
He transitioned from bodybuilding into film in the 1970s becoming the biggest box-office star in the world, known for True Lies, Predator and Terminator.
In the early 2000s he pivoted from film into politics winning the 2003 California recall election and becoming a governor. He was re-elected in 2006 and served till 2011.
Today he is an investor, entrepreneur and a public advocate around fitness and health, environment and community.
Christine Lagarde (born in France, Paris 1956) is a French lawyer who started her career at Baker McKenzie and became the first Global Chairman of the firm in 1999.
She entered the French government in 2005 as Minister for Foreign Trade, briefly served as Minister of Agriculture, and then became Minister of the Economy, Finance and Industry (2007–2011). She is widely noted as the first woman to serve as finance/economy minister of a G7 country.
She was selected as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund in 2011 and served until 2019, overseeing major global economic challenges and policy negotiations.
She is currently a President of the European Central Bank, starting on 1 November 2019.
Christine Lagarde is widely recognized as the first woman to hold several of these roles (notably at the IMF and ECB, and as a G7 finance minister), which is rare not just individually but in combination.
We know that change and transitions (such as these) are possible and beneficial for our growth and life satisfaction, but why are they so hard?
First, some of it has to do with the loss of professional identity (Ibarra, 2023). Your sense of identity is anchored in the well-defined groups and organisations with which you are associated and by which your are recognised. Without it, you can quickly start to feel lost, anxious and irrelevant.
Second, emotional ups and downs are to be expected in transition. You must navigate between a past that is over and a future that’s still uncertain, the so called liminal state and the main reason we don’t like change.
Third, you have to create your own steps for making progress because career changes aren’t predictable and linear anymore. You have to be proactive and design your own path.
Change is hard and risky but so is the status quo (everything changes at some point).
If you have been thinking about a big life decision – such as career change, here are some suggestions on how to to approach it:
- Start before you have it all figured out. This is especially important if you tend to overthink. No amount of thinking is a substitute for action.
- See change as an iterative process, especially if you don’t know what you want yet. Explore your interests until something new becomes viable; if you need a license for a job that interests you, see how you can obtain it, if you need a certain course or studies to start the new career, go and study.
- Create new relationships beyond your current circle. New opportunities often arise from so called weak ties – people we don’t know well but are likely the ones that can connect us to new opportunities.
- Seek out and talk to people who have the made change that you want to make. Find out what steps they had to take, what obstacles they faced and what helped them. One of the biggest ways to build your own self-esteem is look up to people who have achieved what you aspire to achieve.
- Anchor yourself in who you wish to become while pursuing your outcomes. Change is essentially about changing our habits. Many people begin the process of changing by focusing on what they want to achieve. A better alternative is to focus on who you wish to become – an identity based shift (James Clear, Atomic Habits). This subtle but major shift in how you see change can make all the difference; change is actually about how you see yourself. Are you someone who wants to take charge of their career path? Do you see yourself doing the same role for the next period of time? What career path aligns best with who you want to be?
Though this idea might be counterintuitive (considering that we are writing about changing careers) but once you define who you wish to become, you can bring that person to the work you are already doing. Perhaps there is a place for expansion exactly where you are at the moment; new projects, new departments, new ways of doing things. The best way to start is where you are already and build from there.
If you aspire to make a change in your career or life in general you have to have a starting point, experiment and connect to people that can help you. Most importantly, define who you want to be in the process but don’t get stuck in overanalysing. Lagarde and Schwarzenegger show us know that it is possible to make big changes and succeed. Find your own role models.
You can always start small, get clear on who you want to become and trust that you can achieve it.
Change is hard but very much possible.
Image: Christine Lagarde, Getty Images 2011, The Irish Times.
Source:
Why Transition Is So Hard, Herminia Ibarra, Harvard Business Review, November-December 2023.