When I started Women [In], I thought I was making a podcast about careers. One woman per episode, the field she works in, how she got there, what it cost.
What I didn't expect was the pattern. Thirteen conversations in, I can tell you the most common career plan in the room: the one that didn't happen.
The plan was usually someone else's
Lauren Fitzpatrick Shanks was told from fourth grade that she would be an attorney. Her father said it so often she now says, "My father basically manifested my life." She wanted to study math. She picked aerospace engineering from a department pamphlet.1
Dr. Gloria Esoimeme wanted to be a lawyer at age three. Her mother steered her to medicine. She became a hospitalist, then a medical director of palliative care. She failed her first year of medical school and repeated it.2
Two women. Two different plans. Neither one wrote the first draft herself.
That's not a complaint. Gloria says, "I have no regrets," and I believe her. But it's worth saying out loud: a lot of us start on a road someone else paved, because it looked safe and we were young.
The detours were the career
Danielle Allen wanted to be an astronaut. She became a firefighter instead. Then a paramedic. Then a commercial pilot and flight instructor. Today she recruits for nuclear and hosts Naked Nuclear. Nothing about that is a straight line, and all of it shows up in how she hires. "You can teach everything else later," she told me, "but teaching character and culture is really, really kind of tricky."3
Kait Steinbicker started in psychology research. She ended up a CFO. Tiffany Pellot started in the Army. She now teaches AI and calls herself the "Queen of Pivots."4
Dr. Connie Clary's first company went bankrupt. A software partner later told her she was good at explaining how to run a business better. That offhand comment became a consulting practice that has run 26 years, then a doctorate, then a classroom she calls the place she was supposed to be all along.5
Even the perfect plan can be the problem
Whitney Daniels wrote a numbered list of goals in law school. She worked it. It ran exactly as designed. And that, she told me, was the problem.6
She left corporate America for advocacy, helped move Arizona's protective orders online, ran for office, and now advises the Governor of Arizona. Her take: "I can have multiple passions and multiple purposes and multiple careers."
I hear that sentence and I feel it in my chest. After twenty years marketing in technical industries, it rings true for me too.
What I'm taking from it
If you are in a job you didn't plan, you are in very good company. Try three things. First, ask whose plan you are running. If it's a parent's, a professor's or a pamphlet's, that doesn't make it wrong. It makes it worth a second look. Second, count your detours as experience, not delay. Danielle's firefighting years are why she can spot character in a candidate. Third, stop waiting for the right moment. Danielle again: "If you make the decision now, it's not any harder or easier two years from now."
Next in the series: You can fall out of love with a good job.
Working on a pivot of your own, or a company that's mid-pivot? The Cheeky Rooster is here for it.