It’s July and I’ve just finished my last working day in a permanent role. The panic hits, the cold sweat starts, and I nervously start looking on LinkedIn. Nothing. I’m reading the job descriptions with a dead-pan expression. I don’t know what I’m looking for and yet, I know I’m not looking for another cookie-cutter role to slot into. It’s at this point, I know I need something more but it’s something I need to create myself. It’s time to move back into self-employment.

Since that moment, I took time out to reflect on my business offerings with the clear intention of being more purpose-led. After 3 WordPress websites, 3 brands and 3 imminent launches, I wanted to share how I got here.

Why career redesign?

I’m calling this a career redesign because it adds a positive spin to the otherwise stressful task of quitting something and starting something new. It shifts the mindset away from the soul-destroying task of searching on LinkedIn, into a mindset that is pro-active, guided by your values and principles.

I’m bringing my insights from working in the digital and tech sector for many years into this process. Like with any good website redesign, the best kind of process is one where you start simple, so this is how we’ll look at your career redesign:

1. identifying the problem statement; what’s happening now that you like and don’t like
2. exploring possible options; combining your purpose and market opportunities
3. doing something and testing for insights; trying something new where you can live, feel and breathe it
4. iterating or pivoting based on knowledge gained; deciding to continue or stop with the thing

This process helps to combine the principles of: developing self-awareness, skills development and creating positive action.

Identify the problem statement

By identifying values and knowing what you need, you can inch closer to the type of work you want.

Values

At any point where I know a huge amount of change coming up, I find the values exercise is a great way to feel grounded again.

First up, let’s cover definitions:

Values: the beliefs that are most important to you. They are the things that motivate and drive you. That fill you with a feeling of purpose.

Once establishing what your values are, it’s super important that you connect up your values with everyday behaviours:

• how are you honouring your values on a day to day basis?
• what situations are creating distance between you and your values?

If you want to find out what your values are, then download my task sheet below and see how you get on.

Download my values task sheet

Quick reality check: moving jobs doesn’t always solve the problem if you’re trying to escape a certain negative situation.

The same people, situations and general triggers could crop up, even in the dream job, what’s important is how you respond to the situation. Knowing what your values are can help you to understand why you reacted in a certain way (if your values have been compromised) and equally will help you to navigate through.

Know what you need

The best way to understand what type of work you want is to address first the type of work you don’t enjoy.

My go-to exercise is a time tracker, plot your chart to look like the image below:

Questions to ask:

1. Reflect on your last working week, what were your mood levels like from day to day?
2. When you were at your lowest – what tasks, situations, or people made you feel like that?
3. Next to your chart, I want you to expand upon each of those labels and write down how the task, situation or person made you feel.
4. Now let’s flip the question: what do you need more of?

What we need from work is very transient, and so it’s important to keep checking in on where you have unmet needs.

Example

When I had Huxley last year, I spent a lot of time meeting up with friends during maternity leave or I attended baby classes, I really enjoyed the face to face interaction and deep conversations with other mamas about this monumental change in our lives. It made me realise how much I now value: connection and community. It also made me objectively question whether my current role was helping me to meet those needs. Whilst it’s entirely possible to seek connection and community outside of work, when so much time is spent working, it’s hella important that it ticks the right boxes!

My problem statement

“I don’t have enough connection and community working fully remote, based on my experiences during maternity leave, I’ve realised that these are important values to me. I will look for (or create) new income streams that will encourage greater connection and foster a community that will fulfil me.”

Explore possible options

This is a two part phase, first up, I highly recommend completing the Ikigai exercise to help you explore the multi-faceted nature of following your purpose.

I did this next to Bristol Harbourside on one sunny afternoon as I tried desperately to search for my answers. Think I was the only person there that day without a tinny of cider.

Ikigai is a well known psychological concept in Japan, with a definition of “what makes life worth living” so it’s closely attributed to finding purpose. There is a very popular Venn diagram associated with Ikigai but it is an adaptation on how the Japanese see and use Ikigai , regardless, I’ve been thinking of how the questions asked in this venn diagram, changed the direction I was heading in:

• what do you love?
• what are you good at?
• what does the world need?
• what can you be paid for?

This exercise helped me to map out all of my ideas, and to see overlaps or opportunities. I started to feel a sense of curiosity when it came to what the world needs and what I could be paid for.

At this stage, we are investigating ‘areas of interest’, there’s no commitment to any of these options but your searching the market to see what’s out there, what roles exist that align more to where you are, where the gaps are and how you could fill those gaps. Considering new roles or new business opportunities as an area of interest to explore, it’s entirely non-committal, just about exploring potential ideas.

Now it’s time to get creative, grab a notebook, let’s go analogue here!

1. Write down the behaviours that help you to stay connected to your values in a bullet point list
2. Next, write down activities that make you happy in a bullet point list
3. Below these lists, draw a large circle, this represents your working week.
4. Ask yourself: How do you want to be spending your time?
5. Chunk up the circle like pizza slices, accordingly based on the activities you want to do

Visualising how you want to spend your time is a good way to help you prioritise what’s most important to you right now.

Doing something… anything!

I am a firm believer that mood follows action so you will feel substantially better knowing you’re moving forward in some way. In this instance, we want to know that the action is helping you to solve the initial problem statement.

The challenge here is not to get decision paralysis or to let the fear build up inside, after all, this is about acting on your curiosity to help you validate ideas. This is how we look at in my coaching, but with the added fun of me holding you accountable to actions.

Your action could be anything like:

1. Booking in a mentoring call
2. Subscribing to new blogs in the area of work you’re interested in
3. Doing market research to confirm your theory about the gaps
4. Applying for a job
5. Registering a URL!

After 1-2 weeks of creating action, I want you to reflect on your original problem statement and critically evaluate whether the action is helping you move closer to your goal. In other words: getting more of what you need, living more closely aligned to your values, reducing what’s not serving you.

Career redesign 101

Wow, this was a real crash course into redesigning your career but of course the actual process takes weeks, if not, months of consideration, reflection and action.

I’m keen to hear from you now – are you in the process of changing careers? Did you do your own redesign? If so, what did it look like?!