Happy navigating,
Bridget

Have you ever had the chance to sit down for an hour to discuss something you care about deeply? On a recent summer evening in Chicago, I got to do just that.

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It was 6 p.m. on a Friday and I had just wrapped up a full-day summit. After gobbling down some Jimmy John’s, I met up with the my interviewer, Cianna Hope, popped on some headphones and got ready to record.

Today I’m glad to share that conversation on the origins and applications of the Career River on the latest episode of the Take a Seat podcast.

If you give it a listen, you’ll hear all about the backstory to this project: how my road to journalism started with eavesdropping on my mom as she worked in the basement, how my daughter’s tough but fair observation sparked an idea that had been simmering in the back of my mind, how a tornado changed the course of my career.

You’ll also hear me discuss my advice for people at different moments of transition in their careers, whether they’re Aspiring Explorers, Mid-Career Recalculators or Practical Seekers. And I got to spotlight how, as someone who loathes transitions, I’ve learned to accept moments of uncertainty (“Rejections are Feedback” board included).

But what really struck me as Cianna and I chatted, the sun starting to set, is that we both chose to be in that moment because of our passion projects. We had met the previous month at a women’s leadership brunch, where I learned she was podcasting on the side. I didn’t know what that brief meeting would yield — I just saw someone who clearly cared deeply about her work, even when it wasn’t for her day job. I could relate.

Here’s how we talked about pursuing passion projects on the show:

Cianna: You have this responsibility to show up at work, and then also you have this passion project of yours, Career River. I'm curious on the different hats and how you maintain your well-being and your wellness.

Bridget: The hats question is so interesting. I got used to wearing a lot of hats in the newsroom, partially because we had a lot of cutbacks, and so by the time I left, my boss and I were doing the job seven people had done when I had started. But what makes this feel different to me is because it's by choice.

My choice is to put my energy and time toward something in the world that I feel I can contribute to. And I heard something at a conference once that has always stuck with me, this idea that where you put your time is what you value. Not what you say you care about, but actually where you put your time. And these daily decisions add up to our entire lives.

So I wear those different hats, I meet those responsibilities, and I like my work too, very much. I actually returned to the company (I'm a boomerang employee) that I work at now, that I worked at previously. And for me, it really is about understanding where I feel I can achieve that sense of wonder that I brought forward from my young self and that sense of impact that I brought forward from my first job in a newsroom, and seeing that realized (is) the best way I can move it forward.

That requires a lot of intentionality and also discipline.

Yes.

Is it hard?

I think it's less hard because I care about it, and also because I can start to see the results in real time. So one thing that's so wonderful about having the newsletter and having these conversations with professionals regularly is that I had a woman just earlier this week who started telling me, ‘I hope you know how much this matters.’ She's tearing up a little, and she said, ‘you're a light,’ and I'm like, ‘thank you.’ It feels wonderful to see that.

The response to this idea that your career is going to have twists and turns, and let's talk about what that means and how you can navigate it, that has always — from the time I first posted this highly caffeinated thread saying, ‘I'm rejecting the career ladder in favor of the career river, and here's why,’ and I saw people were starting to pick it up. There were health workers in Britain's National Health Service that were sharing it. There were tech workers. I'm like, ‘Oh, this is really resonating with people.’

I'm able to have that discipline because, one, I've seen how much discipline can incrementally add up to major progress. And two, I'm getting the feedback that, yes, this is achieving something in the world.

Next week, I’m excited to share another recent conversation I had about passion projects (with me back in the host chair), learning how one burned-out marketer made the switch from a side gig to a new full-time career after being told he’d lost his job and would lose his home — on the same day.

Happy navigating,
Bridget

Reminder: This newsletter is migrating off Substack. If you experience any issues, please contact me at exploreyourriver@gmail.com. More:

• Why Substack's new valuation means a monopoly is brewing (Journalists Pay Themselves)

• Substack Was a Ticking Time Bomb (The Atlantic)

• Creators are ditching Substack over ideological shift in 2025 (Digiday)

It got to the point where I started pretending to be a lady in Regency England attending to her correspondence, just so I’d stop endlessly making the rounds of my inbox, social channels and Slack. “The stagecoach only comes morning, noon, and close of day,” I'd tell myself. I could check for new messages, other than when I was directly pinged, only when I started my workday, at lunch, and before I logged off.

Amazingly, it worked. I didn’t miss anything urgent, and I couldn’t believe how much time I got back to actually do some work.

When it comes to making career changes, it’s tempting to approach it with the same frenetic energy of endlessly checking for new messages. We comb through job listings, fire off applications, and refresh our inboxes in the hope that an interview invite appears. And the more urgently we feel we need to make a change, the more energy we pour into it.

Without putting some intention into these actions, though, we risk wasting our precious time on the performance of activity, without actually getting any further toward our goals. At a certain point, it’s like pushing your paddle frantically through empty air — you’re doing a lot, but you’re not going to get very far.

Instead, it pays off to actually do the deep work required to move forward, guiding yourself paddle stroke by stroke toward the next bend in your Career River. Today we’ll look at how to focus your energy toward meaningful career progress.

Technique

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In March last year, my wife left her job to pursue a master’s degree. She graduated a few weeks ago and today, she starts a new job.

Why am I sharing this (beyond being proud of her incredible hard work and excited for this next chapter)? Because one of the most common concerns I hear from people considering a career move is how to make the financials work.

As I’ve spent the past 479 days (not that I was counting) confronting exactly this issue, I wanted to share what worked for us, along with some helpful resources I’ve found.

I’ll be honest: This was tough, on all of us. She doubled up her courses while also completing internship hours in order to finish sooner, which meant I was often managing our three kids (and dog and guinea pigs, it’s a full house) while she completed assignments. And while I landed a better-paying job within a few months of her start, it was still quite a stretch for us financially. I had a spreadsheet showing exactly when we would be able to stop affording child care, and we were two months away from that point. In fact, the day she got her job offer I had just canceled an outpatient procedure my doctor recommended because of the price.

So why go through the stress, the uncertainty, the slowly growing credit card debt? I knew it was worth it when, after her first visit to her new workplace, my wife got in her car, pumped her fist and yelled “Yes!” She had found a job at the type of place she wanted. It all came down to a fairly straightforward equation.

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As I just published my 100th post ( 🎉!), I wanted to celebrate by highlighting five excellent pieces of advice from some of the professionals I’ve interviewed for this project, focusing specifically on:

• Managing burnout

• Crafting a compelling career story

• Defining yourself

1. Saying “Yes” (with a *) to avoid burnout

After Ken Schneck burned out in his role in academia, he learned to recognize the signs that he was taking on too much.

“I was saying yes to everything, and I didn't care what I was saying yes to.

“I was taught by someone to say yes to everything. ‘You never know where it's going to lead.’

“There's an asterisk there. Yes, say yes to everything that's on brand for you. But if you don't know what your narrative thread is, if you don't know what your brand is, you are going to burn out.”

Learn more:

2. Connect to recover from burnout

When we’re burned out, Sam Ragland of the American Press Institute said, we pull away from others to try to protect ourselves (🔌: Don’t miss our Community Call on burnout this Wednesday). But that doesn’t actually work. Connection, as explained by Dr. Bruce Perry in What Happened To You?, has the power to counterbalance adversity.

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Colleagues are some of the most important relationships you have, Ragland noted — “they’re the safety net that protects you in the midst of the news cycle.” It’s crucial to prioritize connections.

“When I was burned out, I just remember disengaging. And I think that that is the default for most people. They get burned out and they think ‘If I could just rest, if I could just rest I would feel better.’ But that’s not true because burnout hits us all differently. And so I needed to know that my burnout existed across a few different parameters, that it wasn’t just exhaustion. And that meant that I needed to prioritize the things that got me closer to who I was and refilled me on a regular basis.”

Learn more:

Community Call this week: 🔥 Burnout 🔥

Supporting subscribers: Don’t miss our upcoming Career River Community Call, where we’ll discuss recognizing, responding to, and recovering from burnout. This call will be at noon ET/9 a.m. PT this Wednesday, July 16.

As a supporting subscriber, you can register for this call series and join anytime you can. I’ll record my comments for registrants, but the Q&A discussion will not be recorded.

Let's get together!

3. Show hiring managers how you could fit in

The most important thing when you’re looking to move into a new role, said Laura Krantz McNeill, is to tell a really good story. Krantz McNeill, who moved from reporting into product work, said to act like a reporter and interview people who already have the job you want. Ask them:

• What do you do all day?

• What are the skills like?

• What tasks are on your calendar?

• What skills makes you successful?

• What challenges are the things that you're trying to solve?

Even if you find 80% of your current role isn’t relevant to the new job, she said, focus on the 20% that is.

“People will love to talk about their work and you can listen to the words that they use — the phrasing, the jargon, the positioning — and use them. Figure out how to frame your past experiences in the language of where you want to go, and make it easy for the hiring manager to see how you could fit in.”

Learn more:

4. Define yourself by who, not what

Midwife Kristine Lauria steadily worked for years toward her goal of joining Doctors Without Borders, sticking it out in a job that, frankly, she no longer wanted to do.

When I asked her what advice she would give to people who might want to pivot but can’t necessarily leave their industry, she said to imagine where you might like to go and what it might take to get there, and find ways to move forward slowly.

With creativity, you can do your own version of the work that interests you.

“I made a concerted effort very early on to not define myself by my career,” she said. “I saw people who had to leave because of one reason or another. And it just crushed them, and it's because their whole identity is wrapped up in it.”

“Don't define yourself by what you do,” she said, “just by who you are.”

• Related: The Cocktail Party Challenge: Change your response to this common question to unburden yourself from career ladder expectations

Learn more:

5. Uncertainty can be OK

As Neil Golden moved his way up the ranks at McDonald’s USA over nearly 25 years, he told me he was never pursuing a specific title, but following opportunities as they emerged. When he left the company and needed to figure out what would be next, he was concerned that he’d only be perceived as a “fast food guy.” He didn’t want to be defined by someone else, and instead learned how others had approached transitions. That allowed him to find a new role, which met all his criteria for what he wanted to do, even though it wasn’t what he had expected.

“Your career will always make sense in retrospect.

“It’s OK to have a little uncertainty in your career, it’s OK to move from one category to the next. It’s up to you, however, to make it connect.”

Learn more:

Happy navigating,
Bridget

More to explore: View the full Navigator Q&A archive here.

🌎 Career River in the World: SRCCON 2025

Map Your Career River

Note: This displays best on desktop.

What does it mean to map your Career River? It means thinking about what progress meant for you during moments of transition, and revealing the journey that never shows up on a resume.

Here’s how my early career shows up on the ✨shiny new✨ Career River map site:

Ready to get started? Here’s a handy two-step guide to map your Career River:

Map Your Career River

Step 1. Consider what career progress has looked like for you

Think about roles you have had. A role is a type of job you have done. You could list the official title for each role, which would be on your resume, or simply describe the type of work you were doing. This could be full-time, part-time, freelance or a side hustle. You can also combine similar roles into one (my “Editor” role actually contains three different titles on my resume). If you consider it part of your career, it belongs on the map.

Consider: How have you progressed throughout your career? This could mean mapping whether you moved up or down a traditional hierarchy, from entry-level to management to leadership, if that’s what mattered to you at the time. You could also have an idea of progress that’s more closely tied to your independence, or your ability to make an impact, or to enjoy pursuits outside of work. The great thing about this new online tool is, you can play around with different types of progress and see how your river changes.

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We’re typically taught to consider our career progress in terms of status: getting more responsibility and more pay by moving up the hierarchy in our chosen field. But there are other options for measuring our success as well. Here are different categories of progress to consider:

• Status: more pay, more direct reports, moving up the hierarchy.

• Stability: getting a steady paycheck, knowing your position is secure.

• Skills: learning something new, applying existing skills differently.

• Satisfaction: greater flexibility, clearer alignment between your values and your work.

In general, for each line on your resume you likely have a sense of what represents a “step up” or a “step down” in your career for you. Just be sure you’re thinking about your real-life experience and not what others might see when they look at each role.

💡 It can be hard to decide how to define progress in your career. You may get stuck or feel lost. That’s a sign that you’re considering something in a new light — give yourself credit for trying and stick with it to see what you can learn!

What you consider progress will change over time. As you prepare to start mapping your career journey as a river, you’ll consider how each role represented progress at that moment for you.

Step 2. Map your river

Score your roles according to your definition of career progress.

Score each role on the chart based on your progress at the time. If you feel a role change allowed you to move forward, whether that was by growing your status, stability, skills, satisfaction, or some combination, give it a positive number for progress. If you felt like the role did not help you progress the way you wanted to at the time, give it a negative score to place it lower.

How to score progress: Most transitions will include multiple types of progress, so feel free to consider how the combination of several different forms of progress felt overall. Or, see if you had one type of progress that was your priority at the time. Did the change allow you to gain skills even if you lost some satisfaction? Then perhaps that meant overall progress if what you wanted most from the move was the chance to grow your skills.

What about salary? Depending on your circumstances, you might include salary or other benefits as a measure of stability (if you need a certain amount) or status (if you want more).

Your professional journey may well contain moments where your progress was stalled or you moved “backward.” This is not necessarily a bad thing. Our lives are complex and evolving, and sometimes taking a step “back” sets us up to be more fulfilled moving forward. I learned this when I left my first employer, a community newspaper:

This is a major departure from traditional thinking around career advancement up the ladder, and it may take a few tries for you to find the map that feels right to you. Play around with it!

I’d love your feedback on this exercise. Please feel free to download and share your map with me at exploreyourriver@gmail.com.

When you feel like what’s on the page captures your lived experience, when the ups and downs match your excitement or disappointment at different transition points of your journey, you’ve successfully redefined how you look at progress in your career.

🥳 You did it! Congratulations, and welcome to your Career River.

🎁 Special offer: Get the full guide

This map is just the beginning. I’ve created a guide to mapping your Career River to help you uncover translatable skills, identify areas of flow and challenges, and reflect on what you’ve learned, with example maps from fellow navigators. Claim a free 30-day trial as a supporting subscriber to instantly receive the worksheet download:

Claim my download now

Happy navigating,
Bridget

Next Community Call: 🔥 Burnout 🔥

Supporting subscribers! Don’t miss our upcoming Career River Community Call, where we’ll discuss recognizing, responding to, and recovering from burnout. This call will be at noon ET/9 a.m. PT on Wednesday, July 16.

This is a subscriber benefit for paid supporters of Explore Your Career River: Register for this call series and join anytime you can. I’ll record my comments for registrants, but the Q&A discussion will not be recorded.

Let's get together!

I’ll let my mom explain:

What stands out to me about how my grandmother approached being the worst student at shorthand college is not that she ended up on top, but that she approached the problem as a process. If you keep working at it, you’ll improve and can become the best that you can be.

Which makes me wonder — when it comes to our careers, why do we lose our beginner’s mindset?

Last week I was at a workshop that cited a 1960s NASA study on creativity. The research found that 98% of four- and five-year-olds scored as “creative geniuses,” and then the percentage steadily declined until, by adulthood, only two percent reached the genius level.

We’re encouraged to dream big and use our imaginations — until we aren’t, and suddenly getting good grades and SAT scores, getting into good colleges and scoring good job offers becomes more important. No wonder our creativity declines. We’re trained to succeed in the system by following the path laid out for us.

I also blame the career ladder for creating unrealistic expectations about how long it takes to become comfortable in a new role. Climb a rung and boom, there you are. But in reality, it takes time to understand how you can best contribute in a new job. I asked Neil Golden, the former Chief Marketing Officer of McDonald’s USA, how long it took him to get used to being the CMO in our Q&A. Even in a company where he had worked for 18 years, where he knew people and had their trust, he said “there was an awful lot of growing into the role.” Starting a new career chapter is more like following the curve of the river bend — it opens up over time.

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Ladies and gentlemen, it’s quiz time. Answer the seven questions below to find out which of three groups you most identify with when it comes to moments of transition in your career, and then read on to learn more about handy Career River resources specifically for you.

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Take the Career Transitioner Quiz:

1. At this point in my career, what I most want out of a job is…

A. Financial security

B. Independence

C. Not to get completely burned out

2. What career stage best matches your current situation?

A. Mid-career

B. Early career

C. The stage where I mostly want to be left alone to do my work

3. How do you primarily feel about your current career path?

A. I’m proud of my achievements but it’s tough to see what I could do next while still meeting my obligations.

B. I'm eager to create something new or strike out on my own, but unsure how.

C. It's functional, but I'd like something that gives me a greater sense of purpose.

4. What's your biggest motivation for seeking a career change or new direction?

A. Finding meaningful work that aligns with my values, without sacrificing my financial security.

B. Gaining autonomy and direct impact by building my own venture or carving out a unique role.

C. Achieving a better work-life balance and fundamentally avoiding burnout, even if it means a "good enough" job.

5. What are your biggest concerns about making a career transition?

A. Losing my established reputation or identity.

B. The failure of my own creative venture.

C. Getting stuck in a dissatisfying, draining role.

6. When you think about making progress towards your goals, what's your preferred approach?

A. Strategically navigating complex systems, carefully balancing risks and potential rewards.

B. Iterative experimentation and hands-on building, learning as I go, even if it's messy.

C. Optimizing for efficiency and clearly defined value, seeking to achieve functional goals.

7. Assuming a job meets your basic needs, which of these types of progress is most important to you for your next transition?

A. Growing my satisfaction (greater alignment to my work)

B. Growing my skills (learning something new)

C. Growing my stability (reducing uncertainty)

🏁 Great job! Tally up your responses to learn your result, then read on to learn about resources for you at this moment:

• Mostly A’s: Mid-Career Recalculator

• Mostly B’s: Aspiring Explorer

• Mostly C’s: Practical Seeker

Mid-Career Recalculator

You’re a seasoned professional with a proven track record of achievement, looking to translate your past accomplishments into next steps. As a strategic thinker with experience navigating complex professional landscapes, you have taken on significant responsibilities and built a strong foundation of expertise. Even when you’re facing tough circumstances, you are resilient, turning to your network and skill set to find a way forward. Because you’re at a point in your life where you have significant responsibilities, you’re looking for concrete, actionable information to help you meet your personal and professional goals by moving toward a sustainable next chapter.

Recalculators may find these Career River resources especially helpful:

• Discover hidden themes by mapping your career river

• 🧭 Your values compass

• ‘Making the decision right’

Aspring Explorer

You are driven by a desire to build, create, and make a direct impact through your work. While others might cling to familiar structures, you can imagine new possibilities and you’re willing to put in the hard work to turn those visions into reality. You're not afraid of the “messy middle” of pursuing work that allows you to find fulfillment without burning yourself out, and you could use some actionable strategies to move toward the future you crave.

Explorers may find these Career River resources especially helpful:

• ❤️‍🩹 'Healing my burned-out self' and How to be EPIC

• What I got wrong about 🌊flow🌊

• 5 Career Questions: How do you avoid falling back into burnout?

Practical Seeker

You take a realistic approach to your career, prioritizing work that will meet your needs without grinding you down. You are a problem-solver, able to strategically position yourself for roles that offer genuine value in return for your energy. You're adept at managing expectations – both your own and others’ – and your focus on creating a functional work life allows you to preserve your energy for the people and passions that truly matter outside of work.

Seekers may find these Career River resources especially helpful:

• Taking a career break: 'I was just very tired'

• Life after layoff: 'It's amazing what starts to open up'

• Mr. Pickles and too many hats

What did you think of this exercise? Leave a comment or drop me a note to let me know!

Happy navigating,
Bridget

AI disclosure: Gemini assisted with the quiz creation and subject line, all content reviewed and reworked by me.

This was a phrase I found in a parenting book to help people remember that even when their kids are acting up and testing their very last nerve, there is no imminent danger. Even when our bodies might respond like there is — heart pumping, shallow breathing, sweaty palms — we’re not about to be mauled.

Uncertainty is its own kind of threat. When it comes to our careers, not knowing where to head next can feel just as scary as coming face-to-face with a grizzly. But it doesn’t have to feel this way.

This week for our Career River Community Call, I’ll be hosting a Q&A on the certainty cycle.

How can we move from fear to discovery? And how does that change the way we think about periods of uncertainty during our professional journeys?

Each month I host a webinar for newsletter supporting subscribers to share what I’ve been learning about exploring careers and invite your questions. We get together on the third Wednesday at noon ET/9 a.m. PT. This month’s call will be this Wednesday, June 18.

Supporting subscribers, register below for this week’s call. Join anytime you can! I’ll record my talking points for registrants, but the Q&A discussion will not be recorded.

(Psst: Not a supporting subscriber? Check out all the perks you get for $5 a month, plus a special subscription offer, here. Join today and get your Community Call invite!)

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I’ve been thinking about this ever since one of my 110 career chats, when someone pointed out that that the river metaphor didn’t really work for leaders. Rivers can’t go up, since gravity doesn’t work that way. Fair point.

It got me thinking about why we consider leadership a matter of going “up,” anyway.

When I asked Neil Golden, the former Chief Marketing Officer of McDonald’s USA, what advice he would give himself if he could travel back to an earlier point of his career, he said he’d tell himself to recognize the importance of leadership, not just to make a decision, but to inspire groups of people to align toward a vision.

Once, when he was promoted, his new boss pulled him aside and told him that he was technically very solid, but that “from this point forward in your career, your growth is going to be 100 percent dependent on how you’re able to lead.”

“What I didn’t fully prepare for as the CMO, was the depth of leadership development and talent management that I was going to want to do,” he said. “I was so focused on doing the job in terms of the marketing part of the job, that I didn’t realize with a team of 230 it was a nonstop, general management type of approach.”

“I could tell my younger self, ‘Get ready for that. If that’s you want to do, if that’s the type of role that you want, just understand what comes with it.’”

My first boss taught me about servant leadership when I became a manager. As I wrote last week for Big Shoes Network, I took that approach in all my future roles. Long after I left the newspaper where we worked together, I brought those lessons with me. And the people I managed carry them forward as well.

Leadership isn’t restricted to a certain title, level or even limited to a particular organization. It’s about

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All in all, I ended up speaking to 50 people over the last several weeks. That means I’ve now held 106 Career River chats, learning about how people have approached moments of uncertainty or the unexpected during their careers. In true journalist fashion, I crossed that finish line right ahead of my (self-imposed) deadline.

And guess what — I’m going to keep going. That’s right, I’m keeping the Career River Chat Giveaway open on an ongoing basis (though I will need to slow down the pace a bit). Feel free to sign up anytime for your chance to connect with me one-on-one.

Enter the chat giveaway

I’ve so appreciated these conversations because they’ve given me the chance to learn more about what questions people have faced when it comes to navigating their careers, and to understand better how the Career River can offer concrete guidance and inspiration for the journey. In each chat, I asked these three questions:

• What questions would you have about navigating changes in one’s career?

• Tell me about a moment in your career where you were unclear on what to do next. What did you ultimately try and why?

• How were you thinking about progress at that time? Has your understanding of the type of progress you want to make in your career shifted at all?

I now have about 50 more posts to write, since every call gives me at least one idea, but today I’m going to share some of my top takeaways.

👂What I’ve heard from 100 Career River chats

1. The problem usually isn’t knowing what you want, but figuring out how to get there. I was surprised that most of the people I talked to could very clearly say what they wanted out of their next career move. The challenge, it turns out, was finding a way to work toward that future. There were a lot of questions about, “what should I do next?” Often we’re putting ourselves under pressure to solve all our problems with one “right” move, usually by finding a new full-time job. This is where I find the river delta idea helpful: not just one possible right move, but many possible routes to pursue. And you can always come back to the path you’re on now if needed. You can also work toward your possible future in small steps instead of immediately needing to take a big leap.
   

2. Once you’ve made a career switch, it’s easier to make other changes in the future. This doesn’t only mean changing fields, but also applies to learning new skills and trying out a different kind of job. Those I talked to who already had made a change were more confident that they’d be able to change their course again if needed. However, for those who were considering moving outside their chosen field for the first time, there were a lot of questions about both how it would be perceived by hiring managers (will my resume even get considered?) and what it would mean for their identity (who am I if I’m not insert job title here?). From what I heard, the only way to answer those questions is to try it out.
   

3. We don’t talk about our professional struggles enough. At least, not openly. Almost without exception, when I asked people what they wanted to ask me about what I’ve been learning, they wanted to know what others had been saying about their moments of uncertainty. Many people were relieved to know they weren’t alone in reaching a juncture where the next move wasn’t clear, and glad to hear that an emergent approach, figuring it out as you go, can still bring success.
   

4. Tributaries make a big impact. Whether it was finding out about a job opening over margaritas with a friend or getting together with a group of job-seekers on Zoom during the pandemic, connections came up time and time again as one of the most valuable avenues for finding new career possibilities to pursue. This was also one of the biggest generational differences I uncovered — people earlier in their careers tended to approach networking as a necessary evil, if at all, while mid- and late-career people turned to their networks first when needing help.
   

5. Redefining progress changes everything. Probably the biggest theme was that people were especially challenged by shifting circumstances. Whether it’s becoming a parent, getting a mortgage, taking care of a sick relative or making a big move, at some point work goals and personal needs can conflict. And at that moment, we’re left without a clear path. Do I set aside my career goals? If I do, will that set me back? How can I afford to be there for the people who need me? When we started examining different definitions of progress, many of these stresses melted away. It’s not only acceptable to reconsider your priorities as your circumstances shift, it’s adaptive. Add to that an experimental mindset for finding your next job, where the hiring manager’s response to what you offer is as much a test of their willingness to invest in an employee as it is a reflection of your hireability, and suddenly you feel more in control of the direction you want to take your career.

Thank you to everyone who generously shared their insights, experiences and questions with me. I’m leaving this chat sprint feeling energized and inspired to continue reporting on a more holistic framework for pursuing our careers. It’s OK not to have all the answers — it’s curiosity that allows us to explore around the next bend and see what’s possible.

Happy navigating, and thank you,
Bridget

AI disclosure: This post’s subject line was generated with input from Gemini.

P.S. Do you know anyone who’d want to contribute to my research? Feel free to send them the chat giveaway signup form!

People keep telling me they’re uncertain what the “right” next step is in their career. Understandably, this puts us under an enormous amount of pressure to make the right choice. And unfortunately, that stresses us out.

There are two main ways that people make decisions, according to personality psychology: by trying to make the perfect choice, or by just choosing and moving on. Researchers found people focused on making the “right” choice were “more prone to distress.” The Psychology Today article on the research says we should use the distress-inducing style only for “high-stakes decisions.”

Well, shoot. Making a career choice is definitely high-stakes. Isn’t it?

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That same article defines high-stakes decisions as:

• “Having a single & defined yes/no answer

• “Having a clear line between right and wrong

• “Having immediate consequences to the self and others if made incorrect”

Do our career choices have just one single option? We often think so. Clearly when climbing a ladder there’s only one next rung. But that approach puts us under pressure to find the best possible action. I’d argue we can be less paralyzed by perfectionism and more open to exploration.

One ecosystem, many pathways

Long before the Career River concept sparked to life for me, I was trying to explain my professional journey to a group of college students.

“Working in engagement journalism isn’t really a ladder, or even a path,” I said. “It’s more like a fertile river delta. There are many possible areas of the ecosystem to explore.”

This explanation for my twisty turny career worked so well that I offered it as part of a thread on advice for job-seekers. From there, once I’d had my Kitchen Floor Moment, it was a small step to realize that my entire career has felt more like riding a river than climbing a ladder — and the Career River was born.

If we view our professional options as varied instead of focused on the “right” choice, we can reduce our anxiety and feel more secure in our choices. On an episode of If/Then: Business, Leadership, Society, Stanford Professor Baba Shiv explains how important emotions are to decision-making. Having the confidence that you have made a good decision will help you commit to it. (He actually called the problems that can arise from doubts “downstream effects,” which of course made my Career River heart happy.)

“You need to emerge from the decision feeling absolutely confident. It’s not making the ‘right decision’ but making the decision right,” he says.

Although Shiv notes rational thought is important to remove bias from decision-making, emotion is key to sticking with that choice. When someone is considering a job offer, he says, they tell themselves two stories: one where they keep the job they have, and one where they make the switch.

“Which of these two narratives are resonating with me at a gut level? And that’s what I would go with because the emotion is telling me that that’s the direction I want to go,” he says. “If I adopt that course of action, I’m bound to be more confident about the course of action adopted.”

After the decision is made, chances are we’ll keep wondering “what if” for some time. A survey found that most workers continue thinking about other paths they could have pursued, even years later, with 21% reporting they wondered about alternate choices often or almost always. And this “longing for forgone professional identities often kept them from being fully invested and effective in their current jobs…we found that workers who felt somewhat stuck in the past were more likely to be distracted and to daydream while at work, took more breaks and days off, were less engaged with their colleagues, and were more likely to search for other jobs.”

The study authors recommend two strategies to avoid dissatisfaction with the past and focus on what’s ahead:

1. Practice job crafting to make your work more fulfilling. This involves finding ways to incorporate the work you want to do into the job you have.

   
   I’m reminded of the midwife who told me about another woman who wanted to attend births, but wasn’t interested in being a medical professional. She became a birth photographer.
   
   “You don't always have to do the exact thing that you're looking at, but you can do your version of it,” Kristine Lauria said.

2. Take ownership of your choices. People who view what happens to them as the result of their actions instead of being outside their control “are more likely to respond productively to longing for a forgone career path, by adapting their current jobs, rather than destructively, by withdrawing and becoming disengaged,” the researchers wrote.

   
   That’s why I feel so strongly that we are the center of our career stories — we may respond to external currents along the way, but ultimately we’re navigating our way forward.

I turned to the river delta to make sense of the years I had spent following my interests and discovering new opportunities. It turns out, the delta doesn’t only feed a larger ecosystem. It also feeds our sense of possibility.

Happy navigating,
Bridget

Sources

Nick Hobson, Leandra McIntosh, and Maryam Marashi, “The Stress of Making the Right Choice,” Psychology Today, July 8, 2019, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ritual-and-the-brain/201907/the-stress-making-the-right-choice/.

Kevin Cool, interview with Baba Shiv, If/Then: Business, Leadership, Society, podcast audio, March 20, 2024, https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/more-feeling-keys-making-right-choice.

Rachel Burgess, “Are You Hung Up on That Career Path You Didn’t Choose?”, Harvard Business Review, March 24, 2023, https://hbr.org/2023/03/are-you-hung-up-on-that-career-path-you-didnt-choose.

Welcome to our May Navigator Q&A chat and our first-ever podcast episode! 🎉

This week I’m very excited to share my conversation with Samantha Ragland, the American Press Institute’s Vice President of Journalism Programs. We are joined by veteran digital leader Clay Clifton, who hired Ragland at the Palm Beach Post. As longtime subscribers know, tributaries, or people who contribute to our work in some way, are an essential component of our professional journey. That’s why I was so glad to have both Ragland and Clifton in conversation about what they learned from their work together.

Their connection really shines through as we discuss their partnership at the Palm Beach Post, how to be an ally in the workplace and the importance of community for addressing trauma and burnout.

Here are the 5 career questions we tackle in today’s episode:

1. 3:54: Can you talk with us about the importance of partnership, co-conspirators, and collaborators in the newsroom? Tell us a little more about how this partnership came to be, and how might others begin to find partners like this for themselves?

“I learned under Clay and a couple of other leaders at the Palm Beach Post that there is no monopoly on good ideas. And I also learned what that looks like in daily practice.”

2. 9:25: I’d love to hear about a moment in your career where you were unclear on what to do next. What are some of the questions you had at the time, and then how did you go about answering them?

“I know I’m going to tell him that there is going to be a time, it's not today, but there will be a time when I leave the Palm Beach Post because leadership is not diverse enough. I don't see myself in this organization. How can I be who I am if I'm not reflected?”

3. 16:52: How do you have hard conversations with a senior leader who you see not only as your boss, but your partner?

“I remember coming back and telling Clay, ‘For as much as I love you, I'm so grateful you're my boss, you're the best boss I ever had. You're just not a Black woman in America. And I need a Black mentor.’”

4. 24:00: What topline takeaways would you want to share about burnout, trauma and resiliency in the workplace?

Burnout “is really about your relationship with work. It’s not just about the stress, right? It’s specifically about chronic stress that goes unmanaged.”

5. 30:15: After that burnout recovery that you described, what strategies helped you stay grounded and avoid falling back into burnout in a new role?

“When I was burned out, I just remember disengaging. And I think that that is the default for most people. They get burned out and they think ‘If I could just rest, if I could just rest I would feel better.’ But that’s not true because burnout hits us all differently. And so I needed to know that my burnout existed across a few different parameters, that it wasn’t just exhaustion. And that meant that I needed to prioritize the things that got me closer to who I was and refilled me on a regular basis.”

Thank you to our guests for this episode and thanks to all of you for listening, reading, and submitting your Q&A questions!

Career River Chat update: 83% to goal

As of today, I’ve talked with 83 professionals about their Career River questions! If you’d like to enter or share the chat giveaway, you can do so here!

Happy navigating,
Bridget

👐 Resources:

• What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey

• Imagine what better mental health in news looks like by Samantha Ragland

I was recently accepted into a months-long training cohort, and the organizers were very clear that if you couldn’t commit to attending every session, your spot would be given to someone on the waiting list. And as it turned out, one of those sessions landed on my daughter’s birthday, while we would all be on vacation together.

Technically, I could have made the session. Instead, I gave up my spot. There will be other professional development opportunities, but this birthday’s only going to happen once.

As I’ve been talking to people about their careers, I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on how we develop and pursue our values. We use our values compass all the time when making decisions about where to put our time, what opportunities to pursue, and how we show up, for ourselves and others.

Subscribe now

Chat update:

As of this week, I’ve talked with 75 professionals about their Career River questions! Thank you to everyone who shared my invitation to connect. I’m on track to reach my goal of 100 chats by the end of the month, and there are still a few slots left on my calendar — if you’d like to enter or share the chat giveaway, you can do so here!

One question that keeps coming up is whether our values can change over time. Do we still follow the same compass as when we were starting out?

This week, I was giving a talk to a group of college students and one of them asked me whether I was still doing the work I had wanted to do when I started out. I said yes, even though my job now looks nothing like the reporter job I landed after college. I said yes because the work I’m doing goes much deeper than just reporting or even journalism.

“At its core,” I told her, “my work is about connecting people to information.”

I could do that work in any number of ways, in any number of jobs. At this moment, it looks like supporting newsrooms in engagement and this Career River project. In 10 years, it will probably look completely different. But I’d be willing to bet the heart of it will remain the same.

A big theme that has been coming up over my conversations about navigating uncertainty or the unexpected in our careers is the influence of our responsibilities outside of work on our career choices. When I was starting out, my choices only affected me. Now they impact my family of five. I talked to one person this week who just got a mortgage; another who took care of an ailing relative. These experiences shaped their career choices.

What might be the right career move can feel like the wrong life choice (and vice versa). How do we balance the two? We combine them to find the direction that will get us closest to where we want to go.

Finding True North

Connecting people to information may be the guiding direction for my work, but it’s only part of my compass. Because I am more than my work, and the decisions I make about my work overlap with my personal life.

At the conclusion of his book How to Win in a Winner-Take-All World, journalist Neil Irwin points out that “winning” can have many different definitions in today’s economy. It might mean clambering to the top of the organizational chart, but he notes that professional success comes at the expense of other life goals (as so many “stepping back to spend more time with my family” announcements remind us). He estimates we each have about 250,000 waking hours during our working years for everything – work, family, fun – we want our lives to contain.

As Irwin writes, “What really counts as winning in the winner-take-all world? It is being thoughtful and making a series of choices that ensure that after your quarter-million hours are done, you can look back at the trade-offs you’ve made – between work versus leisure, money versus personal satisfaction, and so on – and be comfortable with your choices.”

When I look at who I want to be outside of work, and add that to the direction I’m pursuing in my career, that’s when my True North becomes clear. I want to show up and support the people in my life. That’s why it felt so great to say no to the cohort so I could say yes to my daughter.

It’s not always easy to align what we want out of our work and our personal lives. This same daughter is the one who I left for a weeklong leadership course when she was a baby. It was the first time I was away from her and she cried for hours every night until she wore herself out. I felt awful. But I had a reason for taking that course, and not just for myself. It was part of the master’s degree that landed me my first newsroom consulting job. That job offered my family more support, more stability, and allowed me to be more present in their lives. It was a tough week, but it’s been worth it for every school event, “how was your day” pickup and weekday library visit it made possible. Even though it was hard, I was still following my values compass. I was showing up for her that week, just in a different way.

As she would advise me years later, I put my feelings into the future.

A compass will point you in the right direction, but it’s up to you to choose the path that will bring you closer to aligning with where you want to go. For me, I try to choose ways I can work connecting people to information while being able to show up for the people I care about. If I’m heading in that direction, even if it’s not always perfect, then I know I’m doing what I can to follow where my values lead.

💭 Reflection: What’s Your True North?

• For your work, what are you hoping to accomplish — for yourself, for those your work touches, and even for the world? What would you like your work to make possible?

• In your life, how do you want to be remembered? What will people say about where you put your time and energy?

• Combine your work and life values into a values compass statement:

  I want to work ________________________________ while being able to ________________________________.

Happy navigating,
Bridget

Before joining API, Ragland was a faculty member at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies and served as director of the Leadership Academy for Women in Media. She has 14 years of news industry experience, including roles at the USA Today Network and The Palm Beach Post. She’s developed workshops and trainings on:

• trauma and resiliency

• overcoming imposter syndrome

• increasing creativity and collaboration

• building a resilient team culture

This month, I’ll be sharing the Q&A as a podcast in the newsletter instead of a webinar. Submit your questions by next Monday, and selected questions will be included in our recorded conversation. Got a question for Ragland? Send it my way!

The long game: Working toward a new challenge

Kristine Lauria wanted challenge, and she got it.

Last week, I spoke with Lauria for our April Navigator Q&A. She’s a midwife who has attended over 5,000 births over her 37 years in the field, and the subject of the upcoming documentary “Allowed to Birth: The Journey of a Global Midwife.” Her story is an example of what I’ve called the Provisioning phase of the Career River, when you take the time to stock up on the skills and supplies you’ll need to move forward. Because Lauria wanted to make a change, but it took her years to make it a reality.

In this conversation, you’ll find:

• Tips for sticking with a job until conditions are right for your next move

• Insight on responding to unexpected opportunities

• Advice on keeping your identity separate from your career

When Lauria started working as a midwife, she thought she had found her life’s work. But over time she grew bored with the low-risk home births she was attending. This was during the 2008 financial crisis, and in her Colorado community people with PhDs were waiting tables. There were no jobs to be had, so she had to stay in her field.

She decided she wanted to work with Doctors Without Borders, which provides humanitarian medical aid to people in crisis across the world. However, with the first assignment requiring 9 months away from her son, she knew she couldn’t start until her son turned 18 — in eight years.

During that time, her midwifery work was a means to an end, Lauria said, allowing her to make money to support her son, who she was raising on her own. But she took every opportunity to take courses or certifications, volunteering in sub-Saharan African countries, building up her resume for her eventual application.

“I did what I could to continue to develop any skills that I would need in the field that I don't necessarily need as a home birth midwife,” she said. “That is absolutely what got me through.”

Fortunate to help

When the time finally came, she sent in her application over the weekend. They called her right away on Monday.

She’s been on seven assignments with Doctors Without Borders, to places including Sierra Leone, Bolivia, the largest refugee camp in the world in Bangladesh, a search and rescue ship in the Mediterranean, Mozambique, and South Sudan.

“It was definitely very challenging, in the best possible way. It was exhausting, but I got to see things that even most obstetricians in the U.S. would never get to see,” she said. “The bottom line is, there are two lives that are at stake there.”

Note: The next two paragraphs refer to the loss of an infant.

On one of these assignments, Lauria treated a pregnant woman with excessive amniotic fluid that gave her an enormous and painful belly, making it difficult for her to breathe. Lauria was able to drain the fluid and start labor. The baby, which would not have been able to survive even if brought to term due to severe anomalies, was stillborn. Although she didn’t speak the woman’s language, Lauria told her how sorry she was about her baby.

“This woman looked at me, and she grabbed my hands, and she's like, ‘Thank you. Thank you so much.’ She was just so grateful that she could just breathe again,” Lauria said. “I feel so fortunate that I could help her, and that I could get her through this and in the safest and most compassionate way.”

An unexpected opportunity

Although Lauria realized her longtime goal of working for Doctors Without Borders, she’s also been surprised by opportunities that she didn’t plan for, as when an organization called Breech Without Borders contacted her. She now travels the world teaching about breech births. If you’d told her she’d be teaching in hospitals 10 years ago, she said, “I would have just laughed.”

“I never saw it coming. It was nothing I ever thought I would be doing. And I'm thrilled to be doing it, because it's making a huge impact in the birth world,” she said.

Whether it’s stockpiling skills for a job change far in the future, or saying yes when unforeseen opportunities arise, Lauria recommended embracing creativity to find the career that works for you. For any number of reasons, as life throws curveballs your way, there may come a time when you can’t do what you have been doing so far, Lauria said.

“I made a concerted effort very early on to not define myself by my career,” she said. “I saw people who had to leave because of one reason or another. And it just crushed them, and it's because their whole identity is wrapped up in it.”

“Don't define yourself by what you do,” she said, “just by who you are.”

See the full webinar recording here (Passcode: U6LDqD?R)

Happy navigating,
Bridget

Read more Navigator Q&As from the archives:

Enter the giveaway

I recently shared on LinkedIn that I’ve needed to take a break from work travel for health reasons:

After I posted, I was surprised at how many people reached out to share similar stories of white-knuckling their way through work. And I was also a bit surprised at how many people thanked me for my courage in opening up about this decision.

It shouldn’t be considered courageous to stand up for our needs as people. But that’s the reality of our success-obsessed culture of work.

The Career River isn’t just a new way to look at navigating through change. It’s a more holistic way of approaching our work lives, as pathways toward fulfillment instead of an excruciating, extractive climb.

Caring, not carrots 🥕

I kicked off last week’s Career River Community Call (here’s the recording passcode: 97.Mvj2A) with a pop quiz about the career ladder: just how far back does it go?

Read more

Of course, there were a number of reasons beyond that one phone call. I was tired of the long hours, tired of seeing my newsroom shrink while the work to be done grew and grew, tired of always being on call. I had a young son and I kept getting pulled away from our time…

Read more

Let's get together

Last week I shared how my understanding of career progress has changed, and now I’m curious to learn about what it’s looked like for you.

That’s right, I’m holding a…

From now until the end of May, I’m giving away 25 one-on-one Career River chats. Enter the giveaway by April 28 for your chance to connect on a call with me.

Enter the giveaway!

This is an opportunity for you to apply the Career River to understand how you’ve approached transitions in the past, and how that might inform future choices, with the chance to discuss what you learn with me directly.

All entrants will instantly receive the Progress Mapping Worksheet to consider how your definition of progress may have shifted over your career. It’s quick, you get to draw, and it may spark some new ideas.

After April 28, I’ll send calendar invites to selected entrants until the 25 call slots are filled.

On our call, you can ask me your questions about the Career River framework and how to apply it to your own career. If you don’t have a particular topic in mind, we’ll work through the progress mapping exercise together to see what insights we can find.

🌟 Bonus: Earn full subscriber access for a month for *every* friend you refer. 🌟 For every friend you refer who fills out the entry form, I’ll give you 30 days *full access* to Explore Your Career River.

• Supporting subscribers, you’ll be comped.

• Free subscribers, you’ll enjoy the archives, weekly posts, and be able to submit questions for our upcoming Navigator Q&A.

Just make sure your friend knows to put your name on the referral question on their entry form so I can comp you.

**I could especially use referrals for people working outside journalism. 🙏**

Giveaway Q&A:

Is this call an interview for publication? No. These one-on-one chats will be our opportunity to talk through what you learned from the Progress Mapping worksheet or any other career-related topics you want to discuss. The conversation will just be between you and me.

How will you choose people to invite to calls? If I have more entries than available slots, I’ll prioritize people who demonstrate the greatest need, and try to find variety among the applicants. People who aren’t selected this time around will be first in line for future opportunities to connect.

Why are you scheduling all these calls? These chats help me understand common questions about career progress and successfully navigating change. It’s also wonderful to see in real time how my research and reporting supports people in figuring out their way forward. Some of these connections could lead to future interviews for publication, to share insights from your experiences to help other professionals interested in the Career River approach.

tl;dr: Fill out this form by April 28 to get a Progress Mapping worksheet and a chance to connect with me one-on-one. 😊

Enter the giveaway!

🎤 Extra credit: You interview me 🎤

Who says I get to be the only one asking questions? If you would like to interview me for publication about my own experience and what I’ve learned from researching nonlinear careers, or if your organization would be interested in bringing Career River insights to a webinar or an event, let’s talk.

Happy navigating, and I can’t wait to connect,
Bridget

Supporting subscribers, don’t forget…

What happens when you’re ready to make a career change, but the conditions aren’t right? Supporting subscribers, check out our April Q&A guest for next Monday:

Midwife Kristine Lauria wanted to leave the field. She had her own son and she was tired of being called away at all hours. But it was 2008, and the financial crisis meant it was hard to find a job. Then, she tried something new. She applied to Doctors Without Borders.

“Starting out, I never thought that I would be going to some of the most remote places in the world and practicing midwifery,” she said. Join me April 28 to ask your questions of Lauria about how to move forward when you’re seeking a change.

Register for our next chat

I know, I know. Captain Obvious here. But as I’ve been digging into research on flow, I’ve realized that I previously missed a crucial component to finding satisfaction at work.

First, a definition. The flow experience, writes psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, happens when “attention can be freely invested to achieve a person’s goals.” People who reach this state “develop a stronger, more confident self, because more of their psychic energy has been invested successfully in goals they themselves had chosen to pursue.”

Flow helps us grow. It captures those moments when our attention is so completely engrossed by pursuing our goals that the rest of the world melts away. I’ve included flow in the Map Your Career River exercise as a way to evaluate how well our job choices let us feel positive momentum. When people are in flow, according to Csikszentmihalyi, they’re more likely to feel:

• Strong

• Active

• Creative

• Concentrated

• Motivated

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But here’s the part I didn’t realize until reading Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Just reaching flow at work isn’t enough.

In research studies, Csikszentmihalyi and his colleagues found that people reported some of their most positive experiences while working. But “even when they feel good, people generally say that they would prefer not to be working.” The opposite is also the case: “when supposedly enjoying their hard-earned leisure, people generally report surprisingly low moods; yet they keep on wishing for more leisure.”

People felt they were in flow about half of the time at work, but only 18 percent of the time they were off the clock doing things like watching TV or hanging out with friends. The reverse was also true —people felt apathy, the opposite of flow, much more often when supposedly enjoying their free time compared to when they were on the job.

So even when we’re having positive experiences at work, we wish we weren’t working. And although our free time is also largely free from flow, we want more of it.

Perhaps Catherine O’Hara can shed some light on the missing ingredient here.

‘Good forever’

What’s the equivalent of buyer’s remorse when you get a much-desired job only to find it’s not all you thought it would be? Let’s call it corporate climber’s remorse.

In the first episode of The Studio, Seth Rogen’s character is explaining to his mentor, whose job he took, how miserable he is now that he’s in charge. Playing the displaced Hollywood studio head, Catherine O’Hara explains:

“The job is a meat grinder. It makes you stressed, and panicked, and miserable. One week you’re looking your idol in the eye and breaking his heart, and the next week you’re writing a blank check for some entitled nepo baby in a beanie. But when it all comes together, and you make a good movie, it’s good forever.”

What helps people put up with the meat grinder of work? The possibility of reaching the goal that matters to them. Making something good. And we get to decide what’s good for us to create.

So here’s the mindset shift. It’s not enough to have work that challenges us to grow, but it also has to connect to our own personal goals — whatever the equivalent of making a good movie means for us. Even though people experience flow more at work, Csikszentmihalyi writes, they consider work “an imposition, a constraint, an infringement of their freedom, and therefore something to be avoided as much as possible.” The problem, he concludes, “seems to lie more in the modern worker’s relation to his job, with the way he perceives his goals in relation to it.” When we see our work as being in service of someone else’s goals rather than our own, he writes, we tend to discount the positive aspects of the experience.

I originally thought getting into flow through one’s work was enough. But just developing skills to meet a challenge won’t make us more fulfilled. We need to find ways to pursue our interests.

Purpose, momentum, meaning — it’s not just about moving forward, but moving toward. O’Hara’s studio head knew it, and now I do too. When it all comes together, you can make something that’s good forever.

Happy navigating,
Bridget

💡Resource: How to write three resume bullets telling the story of 𝗬𝗢𝗨𝗥 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗰𝘁 via Nikki Anderson on LinkedIn

I was four, and my mother was working on her first book. She’d play back her interview tapes in the basement, and I’d stand at the basement door, listening to the muffled voices. Now, she was listening to cops talk about their work — homicide, theft, drugs — so I was banned from going near enough to hear what was actually said. But I would still stand there, thinking, “There’s a job where you get to listen to people tell stories? And then tell other people those stories? I love stories!”

I still do.

When I feel worn down, I try to remember that feeling of wonder at the basement door. I didn’t know then where my desire to find and tell stories would lead me. I just knew I wanted to do it. And knowing what I wanted to do was good enough.

As I’ve been researching and reporting on nonlinear career paths for the past several years, one theme keeps resurfacing. Instead of waiting for perfect conditions, we can take control by doing what’s possible in this moment. Like the curious eavesdropper at the basement door, it starts with a willingness to learn.

It’s all too easy to get pulled into the pursuit of perfection for our professional journeys. But perfection can be paralyzing. We get stuck wondering if a new opportunity is the right job. Instead, we should be asking if it could be right for right now.

🛶 You’re invited: Career River Community Call 🛶

Curious to hear what I’m planning for Explore Your Career River and how you could get involved? Register for our first-ever, absolutely free Community Call on April 23:

• Learn what’s coming up for Career River + my latest research findings on nonlinear career paths

• Feedback fun: What would you like to see moving forward?

• Meet fellow navigators!

Let's get together

As it turns out, there’s a framework that’s designed to stop us overthinking what we should do next. As explained in Adam Thomas’ excellent Theory of Change newsletter, it’s called GESET: Good Enough for Now, Safe Enough to Try.

Careers can be a process of perpetual discovery. Commit to following your internal compass, and give yourself permission to try something new, and you’ll be amazed at where you can go. I’ve seen the difference this mindset makes as I am making my own major career turn, toward writing a book (on the Career River, of course).

Messy, but effective

When I first decided to set out on this book project, I was at dinner with friends. We were answering the question, “What do you want to do in the next 10 years?” And, surprising myself a bit, I said: “I want to have written a book.”

I have never, however, uttered these words: “I want to write a book.” What I really want is to skip ahead to the part where I’m done and it’s out in the world. Because writing a book sucks. In fact, the whole start of Amy Poehler’s book Yes Please is about how much writing a book sucks. It’s very reassuring when you’re in the thick of cobbling together your first few chapters.

So why put myself through all this extra work? Because I love telling stories, and I believe the Career River story offers a more holistic and realistic approach to making career choices. I’m writing this book for the woman who told me she wished she had this book when she was going through a career transition a few years back. If it can help just one person feel empowered about their career choices, it’ll all be worth it.

I’ve never been enthused about the craft of writing. But I’ll admit when I say “I’m writing a book,” there’s a dream scenario in my head: a warmly lit room lined with bookshelves, the morning sun streaming in the window, catching the steam rising from a fresh cup of coffee. Hours of time stretching ahead to be filled with focused work, everything I could need at my fingertips.

Yeah, that would be great. I could wait for that day to come, and I’d be waiting a long time. Or, I could make progress where I can, how I can. Because ultimately I don’t need the process to be perfect — just good enough to get me where I want to go.

This week I created a brief overview of what I’ve learned for someone else going down Book-Writing Road. There’s quite a bit of “Good Enough for Now” in there, for example:

• To get through books for research, I take a photo of the page on my phone, quickly highlight the text, and put them in folders on my Drive. Usually I snag a chapter or two throughout the evening/weekend between momming/other stuff.

• The newsletter has been really helpful to have a weekly deadline. I’m working ahead on certain chapters with chunks of research for the newsletter (for example, this post when I finished reading a book for the chapter on becoming).

• I committed to book time: four hours during the work week, and at least 25 minutes every night after the kids are asleep … book time is sacred.

I’m actually pleased with my messy approach, because I’m making progress. If I had frittered away my precious time on setting up a beautiful research archive system, for example, by now I’d probably have … a mostly completed research archive system. Instead, I’ve gotten through seven books for my research, and I expect to finish the eighth this weekend.

Come to think of it, looking back on my mom and her work, it probably wasn’t her perfect writing situation to be sitting in our windowless basement while her young daughter lurked at the door. But she was getting it done — and inspiring me while she was at it.

Good enough.

Happy navigating,
Bridget