Transcript
Vince Chen (0:14)
Hi everyone. Welcome to our show. Chief Change Officer, I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist community for change. Progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. What happens when your shiny successful career starts to feel like a trap? Helen Henderson has the answer. She went from board level PR executive to career coach after realizing that the ladder she was climbing was leaning on the wrong wall. In this two part series, Helen shares how she hit pause, got unstuck and built a career that actually fits. We'll talk about career detour, tough choices, and why midlife isn't a crisis is a chance to redesign. If your job looks great on paper but feels like sandpaper, this one is for you. Let's get into it. Let's dig into the boat. Now you structure it into three X, Act 1, Alignment, Act 2, Career Redesign, and Act 3, Transformation. First, why did you choose these three as the core structure? Why start with alignment? Why follow that with career redesign and then end with transformation? And second, for each of these acts, what are the key takeaways or core messages you would want readers to walk away with?
Helen Henderson (2:48)
Let's start with Act 1, the act of Alignment. To me, the act of alignment is an important foundational step for everyone in career redesign. And I'm pretty insistent actually that we give this proper time and attention at the beginning of working with somebody. Because otherwise if we don't hesitate there on purpose and take inventory, what happens is I'm helping somebody kick the can down the road of what they think or assume the right problem to solve. Is now maybe I'm supporting them, but I'm just supporting their own thought process that they would have had without me. What I'm trying to do very deliberately here is, is say, let's go back to basics. We build a career compass. A very personal, highly bespoke, and it's made up of three components. One is strengths. And I find the professionals I work with tend to be pretty fluent at talking to their own strengths. They build careers on them, they've heard them in appraisals, they're aware of what other people give value to about them and their work. However, if you're feeling very disconnected from what you do, you might not be owning them as much as you used to, or you might feel very disconnected from them. You might be discounting them altogether, assuming everybody has them. So there's something there. And that's important because for any career redesigned to be robust, it needs to be strengths based or else we're in fantasy land. What we can do so it's important, but it isn't as important as values. So we very quickly move on to the value of values. Because behead directional we need to utilize our strengths in order to express our values. So values are less easy for people to access, they operate under the consciousness. But put very simply for time now it's what do you want to stand for? What are the most important drivers for you in life? Because that's what we need to your career to have synergy with. We need to have some kind of logic link between what you do and what you feel is most meaningful. And then we wrap it all up with a sense of purpose. So we start to get a bit more action oriented about living into those values if you like. What is going to feel purposeful now? It's a verb. What are you doing to achieve that feeling, that alive and aligned feeling now Act 2 is really like the meat in the sandwich is career redesign. And it's a completely different gear again. It's all about action. How do we convert that radical self awareness, that incredible career clarity we've got in Act 1 into our real world now? And we translate that into a series of pilot tests. We start thinking about a number of different career designs that have merit, that feel resonant for you. So that starts to dispel the myth that there's one true pathway you should be on or used to be on or wish you were on. It's there's a number of ideas and once you can start to see that, you can start collecting experiences or collecting conversations or both and just testing the. I suppose it's like, can't say that today, stress testing your own ideation because there's no risk that way. You, you've already put yourself in the environments in some way or given yourself exposure to different ideas to before you make any dramatic moves or big leaps. And so it's an agile career design is very agile. You keep attracting incoming information, you keep testing, you keep tweaking and so you're always iterating, always moving though. And that's the fastest route to transformation, which is the third act. The act of transformation is really because even the best of career designs aren't enough all on their own. We need the mindset mastery to strive long enough to actually succeed, to understand how to encounter the inevitable obstacles and barriers and not get thrown off track. And that takes a certain amount of learning to interrupt our inner critics and anticipating practical barriers and obstacles and having the resilience and the tools to keep moving forwards anyway. And yeah, that's all three.