S2 E21: Embracing transition
with women’s career expert Jess Galica
Key Takeways
And I started out these conversations, thinking that it was really about me and my career, and I'd learn a few pragmatic tips from women on what to do next, but pretty quickly the flood gates opened. And I was inundated with women to speak to who had these similar experiences. And I also realized that the conversations became really big. So it wasn't just tactical job searching advice. It was these big questions about how to find a purposeful career, how to balance work and family, really how to live a life well lived.
And so this year I launched my project to Reclaim Your Career, which shares the stories of women who have gone through major career changes and pivots really in the middle of their career and typically successful careers. I'm splitting half of my time in my traditional day job, you could call it. And then half of my time dedicated to sharing these stories of women and helping other career pivoters and changers just like me.
Most of the women who I interviewed their pivot is really well-planned out. It's usually executed over a long period of time and it's done very strategically and intentionally rather than just impulsively. So I think that's the first thing for women to understand is that you can take this kind of a pivot and change at a pace that's comfortable for you.
Running the parallel path of starting a side gig or a side hustle or a passion project, not only gives you the benefit of launching that project but it also can really change the relationship that you have with your primary role or primary work in job. Launching this passion project makes women feel more fulfilled and more satisfied in their traditional day job. It doesn't have to be an all or nothing. Sometimes the best way to do it is to find a way for both paths to co-exist.
Becoming a mom had a massive impact on my mindset towards my career, and I think my willingness to take risks as well. I had this very strange clarity around what I wanted my daughter. And that wish was that I wanted her to be really comfortable in her own skin. And I wanted her to be authentically who she is, whoever that is. And I think the power and the conviction that I had around that desire was contrasted with looking at myself in the mirror and realizing that when it came to my career, I really was not being authentic. And I was not really comfortable in my own skin and pursuing what I wanted to. My career had been built up based on a lot of listening to the voices around me telling me what was a good career move or a smart role to take. But the one voice that I didn't seem to be listening to was my own. And all of a sudden in becoming a mom, I really saw this opportunity to model for my daughter, what I hope for her.
If you think of your life as a pie chart, before you're a parent, there's different pieces of the pie, your friends, your family, social life, fitness, whatever is important to you. And no matter your circumstances, no matter how career oriented you are, no matter what, when you become a parent, that role as a parent is going to take up a really big piece of the pie. And so to think that the other pieces, and of course, career and work being one of them won't be impacted in a fundamental way is illogical. You've got a piece of the pie coming in that maybe takes up half of it. And so everything else has to shift and find a new way to co-exist and fit in place.
Normalizing these changes in your career. It's never going to be a straight line. There'll be pivots. There might be pauses. There might be steps down or steps back. That's just the way of careers today. So I think normalizing that and taking a little bit of pressure off of parents or moms who maybe are in a moment of pause or a moment of, a dip in their career. And only you can define really what success looks like. So trying to live up to someone else's ideal or what culture tells you, Feeling guilty about going back to work when you had young kids. It's so easy to fall into that trap, but at the end of the day, none of it matters except for you and your definition of what the right way to do it looks like.
There is no one size fits all model. There is no uniform checklist for how to pivot right, or how to find an authentic, fulfilling career. But what I did see is that there are very common emotions and challenges that all women go through. There's a fear. They don't feel ready. They're worried about what other people will think, or they feel guilty about wanting to give up their current role. And yet there's this voice inside their head, still urging them or compelling them to move forward and to think about a change and to move toward it. The most impactful mind shift is when they move from what if this wildly fails to asking themselves what if this wildly succeeds? And I think all successful career pivoters and changers have that shift at some point that compelled them to move forward.
Now, the next thing that most career changers have in common is that they're often aligning their future career path with a genuine interest, a genuine purpose, or cause that is meaningful for them. You might use the word passion though that's actually not my favorite word. Oftentimes we think about that as something fluffy and a nice to have a what, a privilege that you get to, follow your passion. But it's actually really strategic because it means that women can show up as their best selves performing at their highest level. And it also means that women are able to sustain that career. They're able to run the marathon because they're not suffering or faking it until they make it throughout those decades of a career.
There are some women who are burnt out because they're simply working too many hours, maybe that's your most traditional definition of burnout. But then there are women who are burned out because they operate in a culture or an environment that's very traditionally male and masculine and really not built for them. And so they're having to show up to work and a performative way to fit in with the culture. And they're burnt out from doing that, they're saying, gosh, I'm exhausted from paying this tax of having to show up as someone that's not really myself, because in order to fit in with my work environment. And then there's women who are burnt out of not being engaged with their job, not feeling any genuine interest in the work that they're doing or getting that kind of joy out of it.
One of the big career questions is what do I want to do? And I think that the hard part and the work and the effort in answering that question actually is not really that you don't know the answer it's that you do know the answer, but I think it's been buried and buried with all of these other priorities or the suppression that you described of not listening to that inner voice, not listening to those emotions that you've had inside of you. And so that really is I think the work that women need to do to unlock the answer of what do I want to do and where do I want to focus?
Companies are becoming more aware of the work that they need to do to make their organization and great place for women to work and to retain women in their organizations. And so increasingly we're seeing a movement towards companies that are investing in working with experts for how do I make this a great place to work? Whether that's consulting companies that can come in and support back to work programs after parental leave, whether that's bringing in coaches to work with women or really working with HR or talent development teams to understand how to make a long term career at the organization compelling and interesting and competitive for women. So I think there's lots of work to be done on both dynamics, both at the employer level, trying to get to that more systemic change, but then of course, helping at the individual level for women who are trying to figure it out and sometimes need an experienced, but neutral third party person to help them reflect and organize their thinking.
The first thing is you've got to create a culture where you are listening, believing in and trusting the women who are part of your company. I think the second thing is that any meaningful effort to improve the experience for women needs to be invested in as a strategic imperative, not as the right thing to do, or a corporate social responsibility effort. I think companies that are serious about this are making this truly a KPI. So companies need to be investing strategically. Need to have upper level management C-level CEO, buy-in for initiatives. And you need to have investment both from that leadership perspective, but I also mean cents and dollars investment to work on these issues. And then the third thing I would say is that companies need to be guided by the data and they need to take immediate and direct action.
If you're an organization who your data maps up with this study, showing that, wow, we noticed a bias in that women are actually doing better at the job, but we're measuring their potential as worse. That's a problem. And then you have to do something about it, right? And yet at the core, the work that companies need to do is so easy. Or I should say so, so simple. You need to listen, you need to genuinely care about this problem, and then you need to take action to correct it.
I think it's a sad reality. the extensive burnout right now, the extent of feeling completely overwhelmed by everything that working parents are trying to balance in a post pandemic world. And yet my hope is that there, if there is one silver lining of that reality, it's that we're having to really see in a visible way and an acute way how broken the system is, right. Parents and women are paying the price for that right now, of getting driven out of the workforce, making really difficult decisions, the great resignation. But my hope is that, we're almost breaking the system. My hope is that companies are going to be forced to be competitive when it comes to being a great place for parents to work.
So I think that women who are in traditional companies need to spend a lot of time focusing on the corporate culture and trying to optimize that as much as possible, and then really spending time dissecting the political structure to understand, okay, what steps do I have to take to get promoted here, to get visibility and be seen here in order to move up through a more structured, sometimes limited pathway towards higher levels of responsibility.
I think for women who are staying in traditional roles, the biggest behavioral change is to advocate for yourself more. Master the art of the humblebrag, master the art of self promotion. If you are someone who this is naturally very difficult to do, then force yourself to overdo it, right? So you like you're overdoing it in your mind, right? You're embarrassingly advocating for yourself and hyping yourself up to get more visibility because even if it feels uncomfortable for you, you probably will end up in a moderate place. That's very similar to what your male peers are doing when it comes to self advocacy.
I think the one behavioral change for companies is when you're investing in initiatives around diversity, equity, inclusion, specifically initiatives around gender diversity make it a strategic investment. It needs to be something that's backed with leadership buy-in and with investment dollars to actually enact any real and lasting change.
Bio
Hi I’m Jess Galica! My company, Reclaim Your Career, helps high-performing women transform their career trajectory to successfully pursue a new direction with purpose. For the last few years I have studied, interviewed, and written about the "why and how" of women who reinvent their careers. I share these extraordinary stories each week on my blog and podcasts, and I’m in the final stages of publishing a book on this topic. My firm also offers private coaching to women who are ready to make a successful change. I am the product of a career change myself, with a corporate strategy background working for top global companies like Bain, Apple, and Siemens and an MBA from MIT Sloan.
Links to Additional Resources
