The Answer is Not in Your Computer
While I was speaking to a transition advising client yesterday, they said, “I spent the last year and a half sitting at my computer and trying to figure out what was next for me. The answer wasn’t in there. I had to get out of my apartment.”
BOOM.
I so, so wish that the answer was in our computers. And I see why we think it might be: there is SO MUCH in them, how could the answer not be there? The research opportunities are endless. The wormholes. The advice. The examples. Unfortunately, what a lot of us need most is absolutely not in there: the clear and obvious What You Should Do Next in Your Work-Life.
That’s because finding that answer takes exploration and experimentation. Not an A/B test, poll, or consult with a reference librarian. You can, of course, still do those things and they are SO helpful for inside research purposes. But exploration and experimentation requires a certain amount of trying options out in the world, with real people, and real time reactions. Sure, this can also be done via virtual calls but, if it’s possible for you, mixing in at least a few IRL options is ideal.
Exploration can look like:
Learning more about particular industries, companies, and roles by talking to people that have or work with those roles or who work in those industries (informational interviews).
Talking to potential clients or customers if you want to start a new business.
Finding out what types of events people are attending and going to them. Even if you don’t talk to anyone, just go see what they’re seeing!
For example: take my client person who wanted to transition from graphic design to running a Mexican restaurant. When she went to the new, delicious hole-in-the-wall Mexican place near her apartment, she asked the man working there if he is the owner and what it had taken him to get the place going and how he is liking it. This conversation provided insights that are specific to the realities of the city she wants to have a restaurant in and personal insights and learnings from someone who had done it recently!
Experimentation can look like:
Finding a couple of ways of saying what you want to do and trying it out on the next few people you meet. It might help to use introductions like “I’m a _____” or “I help ______ with ______” to start.
Starting to draft the copy for your website and sharing it with someone to see how it feels to know someone else will look at it.
Doing a small volunteer project to see what it’s really like to do the work and how you would structure it. Plus along with information, you’ll get a nice portfolio item, if you need those, and a boost of confidence that you really can do this!
(Note: do this for someone deserving like a non-profit or a friend who you’d like to help, not a business who can and should pay for your labor.)
I had a client who was previously a Content Strategist who had *five* potential paths. One of them was to start her own agency and do content strategy and company culture better than the companies she had worked for. In addition to talking to designers and developers she might partner with on such a venture (an exploration), she also put together the copy and design for a website that would sell her agency’s services. By the end of putting it all together, she had run out of steam. The idea was exciting but the next steps of sharing the site with clients and having conversations with them about scope and other elements sounded wholly unappealing. She crossed that one off the list and moved on to trying the next path.
A combination of Exploration and Experimentation helps you to learn so much so quickly. As you can see, both of these career transition methods are greatly helped by being faced with—or even projecting what it would be like to have—social interactions with real people. The way we imagine things will go as we dream up our future and the stories we tell ourselves about how others perceive us or what the world is like, can be wildly out of whack with reality. Reality is extremely contextual and specific and there are an infinite number of ways to interact with it.
So, what might you learn when you go explore and experiment with reality in new ways?
