Most mid-career professionals I coach are surprisingly bad at assessing their own success in real time. They tend to focus negatively on what they haven’t been able to do, what hasn’t gone well enough, and what still needs to be accomplished. It’s as though they believe staying vigilant and critical in the short term ensures success in the long term…but this is an outdated belief.

Just about every week, a client, friend, or acquaintance shares something with me that’s rather painful…and not like, “gee, that sucks” painful. I’m talking like, “I don’t share this with many people…” painful.

To be clear, it is a privilege to be entrusted with these personal and painful stories, as they are usually rich with insights. However, I can also tell you that there are two words that always come up that I wish we would all stop using: FIX IT.

Watching someone you love navigate change is hard, and initiating it yourself is even harder - so whether you are preparing for a disruptive career move, or planning to shake things up at the highest level of your organization - I can tell you that good change is absolutely achievable when you dedicate yourself to three powerful priorities.

…and this may shock you, but none of them are about nailing the time, budget, or plan just perfectly!

At an early age, Sarah* was trained to follow instructions and win.

She became a stand-out student, athlete, and musician. She attended great schools, landed competitive internships, and was on track to surpass her own career expectations, but in the last few year's relationship with work started slipping.

Her deep-seated drive to avoid missteps, impress her stakeholders, and expedite decisions consumed all her time and energy, and she was finding it impossible to…

Several weeks ago, my husband and I met with an architect to articulate a vision for our family’s future home.

“A take on Nordic modern, with a warmer palette and loads of windows to maximize natural light…” we blathered with unqualified confidence.

The architect graciously replied, “Can you share some pictures with me?”

Of course, we had a few ready because we’d been geeking out on the idea of building a home for years, but it wasn’t until we were asked to share them that I realized just how undefined and incoherent our ‘good' ideas still were.

Way back in 2015, I had the privilege of consulting on strategic work inside a world-famous corporation. It was, and still is, known all around the world for its bold brand positioning and its high performance culture…so you can probably guess which one I’m talking about.

If not, I’ll give you a hint: its name rhymes with “Mikey.”

During my tenure, I got to work with some truly brilliant professionals: category leaders, functional leaders, innovators, and creators, and I was charged with leading workplace transformation inside various departments.

Since 2023, I have invested a lot more time and energy into understanding the science of behavior change and the art of subconscious programming (aka mindset work), all to transform my clients’ career performance.

I have dug deeper than smart decision-making frameworks and collaborative leadership models and I’ve examined the invisible levers that drive performance: your perceptions and beliefs.

About ten days ago, my family and I completed our “Relocation Roadtrip” from Bend, Oregon to Flagstaff, Arizona - by way of Idaho, Wyoming, Utah, and a handful of national parks!

But as I continue to unpack boxes, set up our rental home, and facilitate new norms for the people I love, I can’t help but bristle at that word ‘completed.’

…because if you’ve ever initiated a big career move, been tasked with a re-org, or spearheaded a turnaround, you know that big change never really feels ‘complete.'

So this month, let’s get real about living in seemingly endless change and how you (and I!) can lead through it.

Last month, my husband and I embarked on the trip of a lifetime. We dropped into the Grand Canyon to raft 220 miles of the Colorado River.

For 14 days, we loaded, floated, braced, paddled, splashed, and crashed through more than 80 whitewater rapids under the tutelage of five remarkable guides and their two assistants - most of whom were as strong in body as they were in character.

For ambitious, mid-career professionals, career transitions are complex, and over time, they can become quite disorienting and destabilizing. While we may do our best to make the optimal choice, our minds are often littered with questions and unknowns. We vacillate justifications around money, time, family, well-being, security, autonomy, etc. This messy mental state is related to what psychologists ‘cognitive dissonance’ - when your mind tries to reconcile two or more thoughts (or behaviors) that are inconsistent with your beliefs or values. So why does your smart brain launch into these mental gymnastics? And how can you outsmart it to minimize exhaustion?

I spent decades collecting some pretty strong beliefs about work, money, and professionalism.

My beliefs carried me (and a lot of people I know) pretty far, but at a certain point they stopped being helpful and they started complicating my career transitions.

In 2019, I finally figured out what it actually takes to make a successful career transition: getting really clear on your own definition of success.

Every month, I have the privilege of engaging in wide-ranging conversations with ambitious professionals - bankers, attorneys, physicians, start-up founders, non-profit executives, and small business owners.

Every week, I take a front row seat to their busy schedules, their remarkably complex responsibilities, their tenuous relationships, and their bold visions.

I know how exhausting it is to be a human at work these days, and how much you long to feel seen, heard, understood, and respected by your colleagues, clients, or customers. (Because we all do!)

I don’t know a single professional who hasn’t been confronted by heightened emotions at work, or tried to suppress heightened emotions in the midst of work. This is because we’ve been told for decades that emotions don’t belong in the workplace, and they are bad for decision-making, but this broad advice couldn’t be further from the truth, especially as we march forward into an AI-supported “relationship economy.” Knowing how to gather emotional data and work with it is an extremely valuable competency - especially if you aspire to lead yourself, your clients, and colleagues toward more creative and innovative solutions.

As we step forward into the “relationship economy” - an new era of work supported by adaptive AI technologies - it's increasingly clear that human skills like interpersonal communication, customer engagement, and collaborative leadership will be needed to help us all stay engaged and collaborating on increasingly complex challenges.

Have you heard the old adage, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”? It sounds cheesy, but it’s actually a valuable reminder that in a battle between established norms and new ways of working, the norms usually have the upper hand. Similarly, in a battle between relationships and rules, relationships usually have the upper hand!

A client’s willingness to re-group and start over is all that really matters to me, and it’s all that should really matter to YOU because it's a integral part of the adult learning process…and it’s usually tethered to a whole bunch of other valuable information like…

There’s a performative security we’ve gained from setting S.M.A.R.T goals year after year, and for those of us who’ve bounced around the corporate world, drafting those specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals has become an increasingly meaningless ritual.