HOW TO PIVOT YOUR CAREER
Death to Stock
By Grace Cook
7 Minute Read
Carefree summers spent outdoors can also make us reflect on our professional path. A former Wall Street executive shares her tips for starting over.
If the boomer generation were the first cohort of women to be functionally in the workplace, Gen X women were the first to truly and ambitiously embrace it. By now, Gen X women have decades of lived professional experience, with each career era filled with stories and moments, good and bad. The artful dance between a professional and a personal life that so many of us are familiar with involves trade-offs and diplomacy. Often, our negotiations are with our own creative passions. Summer makes us reckon with the question: do we want to go back to work?
Around 50 percent of American women are considering a career pivot today, while 50 percent in leadership and managerial roles report chronic exhaustion. Career pivots are increasingly fashionable: the average career pivot is aged 39, the average female entrepreneur starts at 42, and the average female millionaire is aged 49. Spurred on by the pandemic, some 20 percent of the entire US workforce has completely changed occupations; the personal zeal for renewal is an addictive summer quality that can make us question everything about our lives. In fact, mid-career women now make up the biggest segment of professional reinvention.
Melisa Gonzales is one such woman. After experiencing severe burnout, she left her career on Wall Street and became a multi-hyphenate entrepreneur. As the founder of The Purpose Pivot podcast and author of the book The Purpose Pivot: How Dynamic Leaders Put Vulnerability and Intuition Into Action, she combines her business insight with deep knowledge of human behavior to help today’s entrepreneurs become tomorrow’s leaders.
In this exclusive interview with Danimás, she encourages us to see the summer inflection point as an opportunity for action.
HOW TO PIVOT YOUR PROFESSIONAL LIFE
By Melissa Gonzales
HOW TO: RECOGNIZE YOU’RE READY
For me, it was realizing I wasn’t excited to get up in the morning to do it any more. I’m not saying you should quit your job if you feel like this, but it’s an important signal. Are you still feeling passion and drive? Are you feeling energetic? It also came down to me taking space to recover [from burnout] and realizing I had ideas.
HOW TO: NAVIGATE FINANCIAL SECURITY
For many women, financial obligations—to themselves, their families, or others—are real, and they deserve to be part of the decision. I don't believe it's responsible to encourage people to make dramatic career changes without thinking through the practical realities.
A purpose pivot is an evolution, not an escape. Many people assume a pivot means quitting their job or starting over. More often, it begins long before that—via testing a new idea, building new skills, expanding your network, taking on advisory work, or exploring a different direction while maintaining financial stability. Don't confuse urgency with readiness.
Traditional guidance suggests having six to twelve months of living expenses, but the more important question is whether you're making intentional decisions that expand your options over time. A successful pivot is rarely one leap—it's usually a series of thoughtful decisions that reduce risk while increasing clarity and opportunity.
HOW TO: START
Write down your idea. Use the time to give yourself a runway to pressure-test it: is this a hobby, or is this a career interest? They are not the same, and we can get sucked into our hobbies and passions sometimes, but that doesn’t mean it’s what your work is going to evolve into.
Example: just because you love cooking, that doesn’t mean you should open a restaurant. The business of it is very different from the craft of it.
Also, interrogate whether it is your strength, your talent or your superpower. Know what your strengths and weaknesses are. Know what you’re bringing to the table, and learn what you need to know. Do some market research. That’s how AI has become so powerful: you can really scrape the internet and find clarity.
HOW TO: BE REALISTIC
Try shadowing someone. Make sure you’re following someone else who is achieving it in the way you wish to achieve it; that’s how you’re going to be able to study those aspects and learn what that life looks like, to ask yourself if you are being real about wanting it.
HOW TO: IDENTIFY STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES
There are things you have a natural affinity for, and there’s only so much you can do with heroics. Heroics is an ability that is a superpower, but that’s different from your skillset.
What are the things you could outperform others in? For me, I am good at seeing the big picture, at cutting through the noise. I could look at the financial metrics of it, but that’s not where I geek out or gravitate to so it’s not where my highest power is. That’s where I should compliment myself with somebody. Take an honest assessment about where you thrive.
Know your own personality index. What is your work style? Are you a big picture thinker or are you more of an analyst who needs to get into the weeds with a theory and a formula? The latter will probably struggle more as an entrepreneur. It’s not a bad thing, but maybe they need to partner with a big picture thinker.
Death to Stock
HOW TO: BECOME THE BUSINESS
This is good in the beginning but it’s harder to scale. Ideally you build a framework, so they’re buying into that, not just a person. Whether it’s a product or a service, you always need to bring a clear value proposition. There’s a lot of podcasters, services, speakers: why you? What’s your elevator pitch? Deliver that with clarity. If you engage with me, you are going to get X, Y and Z.
Study your proof points. What have you done with other comparable businesses, individuals and organizations where you have had a real, tangible ROI?
HOW TO: FORM A PLAN
When you do your research, it doesn’t always have to be, ‘is this idea new’. It has to be, ‘what are you going to do differently, or better, or unique? Then, what do you need to make it successful? Craft a business plan to think through these things; do some hours on the side while you are still working; sacrifice weekends for the next six months. Have a foundation to know what it’s going to take.
HOW TO: HAVE A WORK-LIFE BALANCE
Think about the lifestyle you want. Doing it totally by yourself means you will fall short at some point, depending on how much you want to scale. If you’re okay staying comfortable, you could probably do that with an assistant. If you want to scale to seven-figures and beyond, it’s going to take other people.
Get clear on what is the most important thing that you’re bringing to the table that no-one else can, and then how are you filling in around that to free yourself up to optimize yourself the most. You have to think about the low laying fruit, and delegate.
HOW TO: DEFINE SUCCESS
Your answer is different from the next person’s answer. Be honest with yourself about what it looks like for you. Some people might be completely content making $200,000 a year feeling fulfilled. Someone else wants to be a seven-figure business. Life stages have different chapters. Success in your 20s looks different to your 50s.
HOW TO: BE BRAVE ENOUGH TO GROW
Decouple your identity from your career. Your job is not your identity. We can get trapped thinking we’ve invested so much in creating that identity, if we abandon it, we abandon everything we’ve built. Remember: people have zig zags along the way. It’s hard to go from being a high achiever to zero; high achievers need to be stimulated. I’d suggest people get onto a board—do different things beyond work.
Remember: not everyone understands what having a growth mindset is, and those that do excel. The most successful people arenever the loudest, they're the ones that are listening the most. They're trying to understand the opportunity in a conversation more so than trying to point out all the reasons it won't work; they challenge themselves by taking on different kinds of roles in order to bring their core skill set to the table. Growth mindset can manifest in having a diversity in the boards they sit on; they're looking for opportunities that bring a different point of view.
HOW I DID IT, WITH MELISSA GONZALES
I have a very hard time half-assing things, and I got to a point [on Wall Street] where I wasn’t feeling passionate any more. I was also badly burnt out to the point that I had physical ailments. I had an Algernon disc in my neck, I was always clenching my jaw, I thought I had TMJ. I had to rest for three months, and I could feel all the tension leaving my body. I was no longer living in fight or flight mode.
Having financial security was a big help. I had scored a rent stabilized studio in the West Village; when I signed the lease, I was on the fence (about leaving) and I knew that it would give me the freedom to worry less about my rent. I turned down a promotion to resign. My boss gave me a package, which was a little bump in my nest. I brought down my expenses, and gave myself six months to really allow myself to be open and explore, and to see if it would make money.
Back then, I was in a very different life phase: I lived by myself, my child was a Jack Russell and my car was a Vespa. If I was to do it now, I would want to have a more concrete plan.
The Purpose Pivot is available to buy from Amazon. The podcast is available on Spotify.
