Processing Complex Career Transitions
Over the last six months, I've been given a strange dose of my own medicine.
I've had to grapple with the uncomfortable reality that a career transition is inevitable. Not for me, but for my partner.
Given the nature of his work, this reset will require our family to fully relocate to a different state, a different climate, a different community, a different house, a different employer, a different income, different schools, different schedules, different EVERYTHING.
Am I the first person in the world to confront such a complex career transition? Absolutely not.
Are we completely inexperienced with this sort of messy, personal and professional change? Absolutely not.
Doesn’t that mean we should be able to wrap our smart heads around it and move forward? Absolutely not.
This month, I will begin to unpack why processing complex career transitions is so exhausting, and how you can outsmart your brain when you want to stick the landing!
MID-CAREER TRANSITIONS ARE MESSY
For ambitious, mid-career professionals, career transitions are extremely 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 between justifications around money, time, family, well-being, security, autonomy, etc.
This messy mental state is related to what psychologists call ‘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?
Let’s get into it…
yOUR SMART BRAIN TRIES TO HELP
Anytime you are confronted with a complex career transition, three parts of your brain are activated.
Your Prefrontal Cortex - think of this as your CEO brain. It's responsible for decision-making, planning, and goal-setting. It helps you weigh your options, anticipate consequences, and envision future scenarios. On a good day, it’s the strategic muscle that guides you towards your long-term objective…but it can also trick you into ‘smart’ rumination and catastrophizing.
Your Amygdala - think of this as your emotional brain. It’s responsible for detecting threats and triggering our fight-or-flight response to keep us safe. It’s vital for our survival when we encounter unfamiliar or uncertain situations…but it can also flood your CEO brain and make a mess of your most rational processing.
Your Hippocampus - think of this as your librarian brain. It’s responsible for archiving and retrieving your past experiences, and informing our interpretation of present opportunities…but it strongly prefers patterns and can encourage you to become overly attached to what you already know.
SOMETIMES YOUR SMART BRAIN NEEDS HELP
When these three parts of the brain start firing at the same time, it can get pretty wild in there! Logic can gets twisted, priorities can get scrambled, and smart people can pretty bent out of shape.
But if that does sound appealing, there is a better way to work through complex career transitions…
And it starts with asking each part of your brain to quiet down and answer one question:
Prefrontal Cortex: All things being equal, what is most important to you?
Amygdala: What would make you feel safe(r) when prioritizing that?
Hippocampus: What might you learn from trying that?
By isolating the most important variable (“it”), you can focus your attention and effort.
By acknowledging each part [of your brain] with a question, you can validate the important (and equal) roles they play in keeping you “safe.”
By practicing curiosity, you trick your mind into imagining more than one possible outcome or benefit.
…and sometimes that’s enough to help you take your next step.
