3 Practical Steps to Shift Your Career Without Burning Bridges (A Coach's Guide)
Maybe a Gary V post convinced you it's time to quit your job, or maybe you listened to Simon Sinek and Arthur Brooks on how your career should align with your purpose. You're a believer, okay? But you have no practical idea of how to take the next step.
Don't worry, you're not alone. Rage quitting isn't the only move.
Today, I want to share three concrete, maybe a little less dramatic, steps you can take right now to start shifting your career towards something you actually care about without burning the bridges.
So, let me walk you through a process that you can own.
Step 1: Pinpoint What Actually Gives You Life
This is not about kind of vague dreams; it's about what are you really into right now?
Discover Your Energy Sources
Ask yourself in the past few weeks:
When did you feel really energized? Even if it was just for a moment, what conversation or task made you lose track of time?
How do you play? What was consistent in childhood and maybe in your 20s, maybe now in your 30s or 40s, that keeps showing up as being life-giving for you?
Create Your Themes List
Jot down five to 10 themes: mentoring, or designing, or building a system, or fixing something, or storytelling, or helping people.
If you need something to get you unstuck here, check your content consumption - books, podcasts, or social media - for clues. What are you really drawn to right now?
The Self-Awareness Foundation
Gary Vee says you have to figure yourself out as a mental shift. Self-awareness is really foundational to this. And in a recent "Tea with Gary Vee," he unpacks how aligning your work with your passions allows you to stop settling for good enough.
Don't overthink this. Your initial list will be a little bit messy; that is fine. It's a good place to start with. So that's step one: what are your interests?
Step 2: Map Your Wiring and Your Natural Strengths
Where does your aptitude show up? What do you find easier or more natural than most people do? What gives you flow instead of friction?
Identify Your Dismissed Strengths
A good cue is if people say things like, "How do you do that?" or "How does that come so easily to you?" And it's the thing that you actually disregard. You're like, "What are you talking about? I don't even know, like, that's unusual to you? I don't know, I just do it," or "I don't know, it just comes natural."
Those are your strengths. You dismiss them because they come so naturally. When people mention it, you think, "I don't know, I just...do it. It's not a big deal."
Three Ways to Uncover Your Aptitude
1. Solicit feedback from three to five trusted people. Ask them what they see you do exceptionally well.
2. Reflect on past roles. What tasks did you volunteer for or consistently perform really well?
3. Use validated psychometric assessments. These are a step deeper, maybe, than a survey, but you can use one that your familiar with if you’ve found it helpful. StrengthsFinder, DISC, Myers-Briggs, Birkman, Leadership Circle, Pro-D… there are a number of valuable tools to help you discover your unique wiring.
Look at this data. It's not absolutely necessarily the whole truth, but if it's a validated psychometric assessment, it's going to be closer to the truth. Validate your findings through meaningful conversations with people you know and trust.
This is going to give you insight into your aptitude. Your unique wiring. This helps you begin to see the overlap of your interests and your aptitude to point toward what's actually viable. And that overlap gives us clues about the next right career steps.
Step 3: Clarify Your Non-Negotiable Values
Then there's a third point, and this one gets missed. I've seen a lot of programs that look at interests and aptitude and the overlap, but what about your values?
The Peaks and Valleys Exercise
I'll run clients through what we call “a peaks or valleys” exercise. These moments of stress or frustration or really, really high points. At those highs and lows certain values tend to emerge over and over again. Values like: autonomy, respect, impact, growth, stability, faith, family.
Write Your Value Statements And Look For Misalignment
Write five to seven value statements like:
"I need creative ownership."
"I won't tolerate micromanagement."
"I need to contribute meaningfully."
Maybe impact is one of yours, right? And you can kind of rank these if you want in terms of their non-negotiability, but notice which ones you're currently violating every week in your job. That signals some misalignment.
Build Your Career Decision Rubric
Now you have all three key elements: your values, your passions or interests, and your unique wiring or aptitude.
Move Beyond Pros and Cons Lists
Instead of creating a simple pros and cons list, build a weighted rubric using these three dimensions. Assign different levels of importance to each dimension based on what matters most to you. Then rate each career option you're considering against this rubric. As an option aligns more closely with what you've defined, its score increases and that higher score reveals what your next right step might look like.
Calibrate Using Past Experience
If you're not sure how to weight these, calibrate it on past experience, on known experience. Think of roles where you were really happy and fulfilled, or roles that were really terrible, and you can use those to calibrate the weighting on this rubric. Try out several options.
Take Micro Steps, Not Just Moonshots
You don't have to quit tomorrow. You can take kind of a micro-step as opposed to a moonshot. You can start shifting inside of your current context.
Now, some of you might need to make a big jump, but what about:
Volunteering for a cross-team project that trends toward more of your interests.
Building a side portfolio of proof work. Maybe an internal presentation or a little consulting gig on the side.
Asking for small changes in your role that give you life.
Networking intentionally in the direction that you'd like to go.
Documenting your results in your rubric and reviewing those quarterly.
You can take the next right step forward instead of needing to make a jump. There's just a little bit more intentionality and direction to this process.
The Slingshot Strategy: When a Pause Propels You Forward
Simon Sinek warns against the delusion that movement must always be forward.
If you're not familiar with this idea, he proposes this slingshot strategy that suggests that a short detour or a pause can actually ultimately propel you further forward.
Sometimes what you perceive to be a detour or a pause is actually a step in the right direction. There might be a component of that, maybe title or maybe compensation or something like that, that feel like a detour or a pause, but it might be directionally accurate or get you closer to the next right step.
Know When It's Time to Quit
Sinek also reminds us in his article, “Simon's Red Flags for Knowing When It's Time to Quit Your Job” that true toxicity, like crossing these non-negotiable values lines or environments that are blocking growth, those kinds of things are legitimate reasons to plan an exit, but only when you've built enough runway.
So, you can use something like this rubric to guide you as opposed to using feelings alone or emotions alone or a flat, stale pros and cons list.
Ready to Move from Believing to Doing?
If this feels like too much to do alone, that's exactly why I built the Career Clarity Collective at Bolton Co.
In the Collective, we work together to:
Build your rubric
Interpret your wiring
Map these next steps
Keep you accountable so you don't default back to staying stuck
So, if you're ready to move from just believing that something needs to happen to actually doing something, I want to invite you to join us.
Go to boltonco.net/career to learn more and to apply.
You deserve a career that you don't dread, and this is how you start doing something real about it step by step.
Key Takeaways: Your Career Clarity Action Plan
Identify your interests by tracking what energizes you and analyzing your content consumption patterns.
Map your natural strengths through feedback, reflection, and validated assessments to find the viable overlap.
Clarify your core values and create value statements that define your non-negotiables.
Build a weighted rubric using these three dimensions to evaluate career options objectively.
Take micro steps within your current role while building toward meaningful change.
Remember: You don't need to rage quit to find career alignment. Strategic, incremental moves guided by self-awareness create sustainable career transformation.
