#41: How Do You Know When It's Time To Pivot?
Here's how I knew I'd reached the PIVOT POINT.
Laid Off Life is a place of respite for the weary workforce. Whether you’re unemployed, underemployed, or just trying to make it through the workday, let this be your 5-minute mental break from the grind of late-stage capitalism.
For this week’s edition of Laid Off Life, I’m sharing my speech from yesterday’s session at Streaming Media NYC. If you were there in person, THANK YOU! I was overjoyed to see so many friendly faces in the crowd. I’m still buzzing from the day. If you couldn’t be there IRL, I got you. Enjoy, LOLers!
PIVOTING: A planned and purposeful change in career direction.
How do you know when it’s time to PIVOT?
And I’m not just talking about being forced to PIVOT because you were laid off. How do you know when YOU’RE ready to make a change?
For me, it’s when the path I’m following feels like I’m doing what other people expect of me rather than what I want to do.
Experts have a fancy term for that. They call it Misalignment burnout. Which is something that happens when we engage with environments and in activities that go against our innermost values and beliefs, and that leads to a disconnect between our true selves and professional identity.
For instance, if you’re a creative person who likes to make things, but you’ve ascended to an upper management role where your job mostly consists of meetings. That might give you misalignment burnout. Sound familiar?
So, how do you get from misalignment burnout to a place of inner harmony between who you are and what you’re doing in your career?
I call that process CAREER TRANSFORMATION.
I want to share my own experience. I’ve gone through two major CAREER TRANSFORMATIONS. Once in 2009 and again in 2023. Both times I was suffering from misalignment burnout and both times I got laid off. And this may be a controversial thing to say but I’ll say it anyway. Both times, I felt relieved when I was laid off.
MISALIGNMENT BURNOUT #1: Back in 2009, during the economic crisis, I was working in Broadway production. Even though theater had been my passion and I had been in the industry since I was a kid, I knew I had reached the end of the road in that industry. I had a moment of clarity one day when I was pushing a 1,000 pound set piece down 11th Avenue in the dead of summer. And I was like, Is this my life? How did I get here? I wanted to be writing the scripts, not pushing the set pieces. But I had no idea how to make the transition.
Here’s what I did next. I started blog called WhatIDidTodayAtWork, where I wrote about the existential absurdity of my job and work in general. It was a way for me to express what I was experiencing personally. For the first time in a long time, I was excited to go to work, if only to gather new anecdotes and material from my blog. Within 6 months, I was laid off.
And I saw the layoff as a golden opportunity to transform my hobby (blogging) into a full-fledged career. How did I do that? And in the middle of an economic crisis?
I started by starting.
I took a writing class. Met other writers. Asked them out for coffee. Learned more about how that industry worked. I used some of my blog posts as writing samples, and started pitching ideas to publications. Initially, I wrote freelance for different publications and took up side jobs to sustain myself. Eventually, my hustling paid off, and within 9 months, I landed a regular writing contract at a women’s lifestyle website TheFrisky.com (R.I.P.) that was launched by Turner Media. For the next 5 years, I climbed the ladder from a staff writer to senior editor, and I loved it. Until I outgrew the role. I was ready for a new challenge.
In 2014, I left my editorial job for an opportunity at Discovery (now Warner Brothers Discovery), first as the editor-in-chief of Investigation Discovery’s true crime news website and eventually expanding my role into the VP of all digital content and social media for two networks.
In the 8 years that I was there, I built a team of 12 people, I got promotions, went through mergers, and many reorganizations, (I had10 bosses in almost 8 years if that gives you any idea of how many reorganizations). Through it all, I always had a nagging feeling that this job was not my ultimate destination.
With every promotion, that feeling grew as I spent less time writing, producing, creating and more time sitting in meetings, meetings, meetings.
MISALIGNMENT BURNOUT #2. It was 2019 and I was ready to make a move. “2020 is going to be my year,” I thought (like many of us did). The Pandemic had other plans for me though. Golden handcuffs are real. Bills are real. The financial security of the job during a global Pandemic made it very hard to leap. So, I persevered through the pandemic even though the job was sucking the life out of my soul. I was torn between feelings of gratitude for employment and envy towards those who were making sourdough and jumping on the Great Resignation bandwagon. Ultimately, I found myself too exhausted to envision or plan for the future.
In 2023, I was laid off. Once again, I found myself unemployed in the midst of an unpredictable economic climate and a chaotic, difficult job market. Still, the layoff brought me a huge sense of relief—I knew I needed a pause. I hoped my career transformation would be as seamless as the last time.
Spoiler alert: It hasn’t been. The endless applications and rejection emails (the worst are those automated ones you get like 3 months after applying) weren’t doing good things for my self-esteem. And they certainly weren’t helping me get any clarity on what was next. More like gnawing anxiety and sheer terror –many nights awake, wondering if I would ever work again.
I was using the throw spaghetti at the wall method of job searching, applying rapid fire for pretty much any position at all –if I could answer, sure I know how to do that, I applied. I hit rock bottom when I applied for a junior level editorial job I was wildly overqualified for, preparing for days for the interview, only to have the hiring manager tell me I didn’t have enough B2B experience to land the role.
Feeling sorry for myself after that rejection email, I had another one of those moments of clarity – like when I was pushing that 1,000 pound set piece down 11th Avenue. Um wait…I didn’t want that job anyway!
What I really needed to do was focus on the things that light me up. And if I wasn’t clear on what those were, I needed to figure that out before I sent out another application.
So, what did I do? I went back to my playbook from 2009 and in August of last year I launched Laid Off Life, which has allowed me to write my way through this career transformation, process the process, and build a community of people going through the same thing.
That’s when everything really started to turn around for me. I experienced a major paradigm shift when thinking about what comes next in my career and really it was simple:
I wanted to go from running other people’s agendas to running my own agenda.
In October, I started my own business Align Digital + Social, so I could apply my skills to help individuals, businesses, and brands build simple and sustainable content strategies to help them meet their goals.
I also doubled down on what I love…writing. Being the creative person that I am, I had all these ideas I’d been working on in my spare time over the last decade. I started pitching my ideas and I’m proud to say that I sold my first movie script and recently joined the Writer’s Guild.
I can’t sum up my career aspirations in one clean LinkedIn profile headline. I’m trying to blaze a new trail, create my own job title, one that might not even exist yet. Like
, MEDIA CARTOGRAPHER. I don’t have everything figured out yet (ahem, health insurance) but I do know that I am happier than I’ve ever been professionally because I am in the driver’s seat.Drop a comment or send a message. I want to hear from you, readers!
Tap, tap, tap…are you there? Have thoughts about what you read, have suggestions for future topics, or just want to say hi?
Become a paid subscriber! 🌷🐣
This newsletter is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoy Laid Off Life, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Catch the Spring Fever! Subscribe now and receive 50% off an annual membership.