Futurist Jim Carroll“You should never wait for the world to catch up to your obsolescence." - Futurist Jim Carroll
Here's a truth to consider: your gut feels the pivot long before your head admits it.
Sometimes we are forced into a career change or pivot. Other times, we need to make the decision on our own.
Either way, it's a gut-wrenching moment.
I know that when I was thinking about leaving the corporate world behind back in 1990, I was pretty miserable. My career track had changed due to a merger; my opportunities vanished; my successful path forward was now in doubt. And yet, I struggled mightily with the idea of moving from career certainty to becoming a self-employed unknown chasing a future that didn't yet exist.
But I went through with it, and it turned out to be the right thing to do.
Here's what I've learned in the decades since: when a pivot is forced on you, you go through something a lot like the stages of grief: shock, denial, anger, and eventually acceptance. When the pivot is your own choice, the same thing happens, just in slow motion. You sit in denial that things have to change. You get angry that they have to. And eventually, hopefully, you accept it.
As I wrote in my book Now What? Reinvention and the Role of Optimism in Finding Your New Future, the faster you get to acceptance, the quicker you can reinvent.
So how do you get to acceptance? You learn to recognize the signals. Some triggers will tell you when it's time:
The expiry of your relevance
The "soul-crushing" signal
The need for reinvention velocity
The "Sunday night" signal
Read about them in the full post.
And one trigger that sits apart from the rest: if you are drowning your career misery in substance abuse, the pivot question has already answered itself. The first move isn't a career change. It's getting help, from yourself or from someone trained to give it. The pivot comes after.
Here's the filter, though: not every bad week is a signal. Burnout, a difficult client, a rough quarter — those are weather, not climate. The triggers above only matter when they become persistent, structural, and patterned. If a vacation fixes it, it wasn't a pivot signal.
You should never find yourself thinking "I should have jumped sooner."
Because when you wonder if it's time to pivot, it probably already is.
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Futurist Jim Carroll is writing this series, The Art of the Infinite Pivot, because he thinks he has mastered the art of the pivot!
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