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. Data shows that job changes continue after 45, but the pace slows compared with earlier ages.
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 most interesting examples of continuous career pivots even in their 50s and 60s are Christine Lagarde and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
You would think that their names hardly belong together in one sentence but they do: they show us the kind of success a person is able to achieve in many different and independent 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.
You might think, well, it’s easy for them they are Christine Lagarde and Arnold Schwarzenegger. But regardless of who they are, each time people change a role they have to prove themselves all over again. They have to do the job.
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 – like I mentioned, you have to prove yourself all over again.
Second, you face the loss of professional identity (Ibarra, 2023). Your sense of identity is anchored in your title, the groups and organisations that you belong to. This sense of loss can make you feel anxious and irrelevant – at least temporarily, causing you emotional ups and downs.
Third, you have to create your own steps for making progress. You have to take charge because career changes aren’t predictable and linear anymore. You have to be proactive and design your own path.
You might think why change anything at all, unless I really have to?
There is a time for change and time for stability. Sometimes you might feel that you have outgrown your role but don’t how to start creating the next steps.
If you have been thinking about a big life decision – such as career change, here are some suggestions on how 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 made the 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.