Navigating a Career Pivot
Career pivots spawn both from internal and external forces. They tend to start with a growing sense that the work you've been doing no longer fits the person you've become, or an environment that you’ve finally grown apart from. By the time most people commit to the pivot, they've already been questioning the status quo for a while.
What I've noticed with professionals in a career transition is that feeling stuck usually comes from trying to identify their new destination before doing the groundwork to figure out their position, then orientation. Where am I going? is almost always the wrong first question. The more useful questions are: who am I now and what value am I actually bringing with me?
3 Tips to Unlock Your Potential
Self-awareness is one of those concepts that sounds simple until you try to practice it. Most people believe they know themselves reasonably well — their strengths, their tendencies, how they come across. In my experience, both as a professional and as a coach, the gap between how we see ourselves and how we actually are is one of the most consistent sources of friction in people's careers and lives.
The good news is that self-awareness isn't a fixed trait. It's a practice, and like any practice, it can be developed deliberately.
Confronting the Mirror
Most of us have a reasonably good internal self-image. We know our intentions are generally good. We know we're not trying to be difficult or dismissive or overbearing. But intentions don't determine impact. What lands with the person across from you is the observable thing — the tone, the timing, the body language, the choice of words, what you prioritize, what you let slide.
Closing the gap between internal experience and external impact is where a lot of professional growth actually lives. It requires feedback, which most people don't receive cleanly because it's hard to give, especially when the people around you have learned how you respond to it. If you've historically gotten defensive, or have deflected, or chose to respond in a way that made the feedback-giver regret offering it — they've stopped.
Empathy as a Business Strategy
One of the clearest lessons from my career is that the empathy that matters most in product work isn't between designers and users — it's within the team that builds the product. UX folks who are deeply connected to end users but disconnected from their engineers, product managers, and stakeholders will rarely ship something great. The collaboration required to build something excellent demands a certain quality of relationship that you can't manufacture. People of different roles can't afford to act like consultants to each other. They need to actually trust one another.
A team that has that quality — where people genuinely care about each other and about the shared outcome — produces better work. Not marginally better. Dramatically better. This is the kind of care you see in a high-performing sports team, where trust is built through sustained shared effort, stress, and discomfort. Where people know they can depend on each other when it counts — in real-time on the playing field when the stakes are the highest. Take that mindset from the field to the office and see how well it works.
Leading Without a Title
Some of the most effective leaders I've worked with in my career have been individual contributors. Not because they had informal authority in some abstract sense, but because they understood something specific: leadership is behavior before it is position. You do not need a title to shape a room, move an idea forward, or change how a team approaches a problem.
If you're an individual contributor (IC) who wants to grow into leadership, or who simply wants more impact where you already sit, the question isn't “how do I get promoted?” The better question is: “what would I start doing differently tomorrow?”