5 quick career experiments you could do this week (part 2)
Over the past few days, we’ve been talking about quick and easy career experiments you could do pretty much immediately.
If you have a vague sense that you’re not quite where you want to be in your career…
But you’re not exactly sure what you what to do next…
The solution is not more thinking and theorizing.
The solution is more DOING and data-gathering.
These 5 career experiments are designed to get you out of your head and into the real world.
Out of the abstract clouds of theory ☁️ and onto the firm ground of data ⛰️
Because action gives you data.
Data gives you clarity.
And with clarity, you can decide what you want to do next :)
In the introduction to this series, I told you to pick ONE idea to test. ONE job or career path that you’d like to explore (doctor, lawyer, artist, product manager, etc.)
And yesterday, I gave you Experiment #1: Listen to podcasts where people “talk shop” about that industry.
Today, let’s talk about Experiment #2—
Experiment 2: Do coffee chats with people in the industry and get facts, not feelings
The least helpful thing you can walk away with in a coffee chat is a bunch of THEIR feelings about the job.
The most helpful thing you can walk away with in a coffee chat is a bunch of FACTS about the job…
And then you can sit down and decide what YOUR are feelings about those facts.
You don’t need to know—
I love what I do! It’s so meaningful and impactful.
I feel challenged every day, and I really think I’m making a difference.
You DO need to know—
I spend 80% of my time in meetings and 20% of my time creating PowerPoint slides that will be discussed in meetings.
I think about which marketing channels we should use. I don’t think about what the marketing message should be or what the graphic design should be.
I’m working toward a 10% increase in conversion and in order to make that happen, I’m doing a lot of research and experimenting on how to hack social media algorithms.
Now here’s the thing…
It’s weirdly hard to get people to talk about facts.
If you ask someone about their job…
99% of their response will be their subjective thoughts and feelings about their job…
And 1% of their response will be the objective facts of their job.
Because your Automatic Brain moves so fast in making snap-interpretations of everything around you…
As go about your day-to-day life…
You don’t really see facts.
You only see your own thoughts.
I know this better than anyone as a coach :)
A massive part of my job is helping people separate the facts from their thoughts.
Now, you don’t have to coach everyone you do a coffee chat with.
You just have to get them to tell you the facts — not their thoughts & feelings about the facts.
Here are some questions to help you.
To learn more about their day-to-day, ask things like…
If I followed you around all day, what would I see you do? How about if I followed you for a week? Or a month?
How often do you make a plan for the day and follow it, vs. how often is your plan blown up by unexpected requests?
Take me through a project from beginning to end. What did you do every week?
What parts of the project are your responsibility vs. other people’s responsibility?
To get more specifics on HOW they actually complete their tasks, ask things like…
You said you spend 80% of your time “communicating with clients.”
How exactly do you do that? Are you writing emails or getting onto calls with them?
Are you doing a lot of preparation for the calls, or are they mostly improvised?
What does that preparation look like — is it PowerPoint slides or Word documents?
Do you start from scratch every time to make those materials, or do you go find previous work, copy-paste most of it, and then make adjustments?
Do those materials have to be reviewed by other people on your team and revised again and again, or can you just make them yourself and go to the call?
To get a sense the month-by-month or quarter-by-quarter arc of their job, ask things like…
What are the recurring meetings on your calendar, or recurring tasks on your to-do list?
What are the big goals you’re working toward this month or this quarter?
What exactly do you to make progress toward those goals, on a day-by-day or week-by-week basis?
Do those goals change halfway through, or do they tend to stay stable?
How often do the goals get achieved vs. not get achieved? Why or why not?
Now, don’t turn the conversation into an interrogation :)
If you fired off every single one of these questions one by one, it would probably be too much.
But this is the dance you have to navigate.
What’s going to feel most comfortable and natural is talking about their feelings.
What’s going to be most helpful to you is talking about the facts.
So keep it friendly and conversational…
But keep your eye on getting facts, not feelings.
And don’t be afraid of a little bit of awkwardness.
It’s most likely a sign that you’re on the right track.
Do it right, and your coffee chat will essentially be a mini-shadowing experience.
And once the chat is done, you can go home, look at the collection of facts you’ve gathered, and ask yourself the most important question—
What are my feelings about these facts?
If you do a few of these calls, and you have breakthrough clarity and you know exactly what you’re going to do next — Amazing!! Go get it!!
And if you do a few of these calls, and you’ve gathered some great data, you’ve definitely made some forward progress, but you’re not totally sure how to interpret what you’ve learned or what to do next…
Come talk to me.
That’s exactly what we’ll figure out when we work together.
These experiments are just the starting point.
Let’s get together and get you over the finish line :)
What my clients have to say…
“Pretty immediately, I was able to break through the decision of whether or not to leave my job.
I was able to see: Staying at my job is hard. Looking for a job is also hard. Which hard do I want to sign up for? Because being here in limbo is not productive.
I was also able to rewrite the story of what had happened at my current job in a way that gave me more confidence and started to untangle some of the emotional turmoil I had with that.
And then I recruited for and got my next job and got comfortable moving forward with that as my next step.”
—Client | Early-Stage Tech Startup Director turned Design Consultant
Did you know I have a full table of contents, where all my work is categorized by topic, so you can easily find what you need right now? Check it out below! :)
⬅️ Experiment #1 || Experiment #3 ➡️
💻 Website | 📸 Instagram | 🎧 Podcast | 💌 Newsletter | 👋🏽 Free resources