How to Explain Your Career Change to People
Saying your new identity out loud is harder than it sounds. Here is the three-part story I use to explain a career change, and the simple two-line introduction that makes people remember it.
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How to Decide on a Career Change When You're Stuck Between Options
You have a shortlist of careers and a spreadsheet full of pros and cons, and you still can't choose. Here is how I got unstuck between consulting and coaching, and a one-page exercise to find your obvious choice.
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How to Try a New Career Before You Quit Your Job
You don't have to quit to find out if a new career is right for you. Here's the Dress Rehearsal, a six-step way to test a new path on evenings and weekends.
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Is It Really True? How to Challenge Limiting Beliefs About Changing Your Career
"I'm not creative." "I'm too old to start over." Here is how to test the stories that keep you in the wrong career, with a simple courtroom exercise from the book.
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What Is a Micro-Retirement, and Should You Take a Career Break?
A micro-retirement is a planned break in the middle of your career, taken to rest and look at your life from the outside. I spent six months in a van, but you don't need a van, or even to quit your job, to take one.
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Who Am I Without My Job Title? How to Find Yourself Again
When the job title goes, many of us no longer know who we are. Here's why that happens, and a simple exercise to find the person you were before the titles.
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What Is the Dark Night of the Soul? Why Life Feels Worse Before a Big Change
The dark night of the soul is the hard stretch of loss, emptiness and doubt that often comes during a big life change. Here's what it looked like for me and for Paige, and what helps you get through it.
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Why Am I Unhappy at Work When I Can't Say Why?
You can feel that something is wrong at work long before you can say what it is. Here is a simple writing exercise to find the exact problem behind the feeling.
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Why Do I Feel "Is This It?" About My Life and Career in My 40s?
You have a good job, people who love you and big goals behind you, and still a voice asks: is this it? Here is what that feeling usually means, and a five-minute exercise to see what feels off.
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What Type of Reinvention Do I Need? New Career or Just a New Job
Not every change means quitting and starting over. Here are the four types of reinvention, from a new career to keeping your job and changing the life around it, and how to tell which one you need.
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How to Reinvent Without Blowing Up Your Life
Most reinvention advice tells you to be brave and quit. That advice is useless if you have a mortgage and kids. Here is how to take enough risk to make the change real, without betting the house on it.
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Applying for a Job Is a Black Hole. I Know, I Built One.
Every remote role we posted got 2,000 to 3,000 applications in a few days. Then AI arrived and made it worse. Here is what actually works instead, especially if you're changing direction.
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Before You Work for Yourself, Do the Math
Working for yourself is more work than a job, and potentially a lot more upside. Here is the arithmetic, the first customer problem, and the thing nobody tells you about how lonely it gets.
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How to Do Your Own 50 Lunches
You don't need six more months of thinking it over. You need one real conversation with someone whose life makes you curious. All four exercises: build the list, reach out, have the conversation, and find the pattern.
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I'm Officially an Author
I'm officially an author. This is the first part of my book, The Art of Reinvention. It starts on the 23rd floor of a Tokyo apartment, the morning after my biggest childhood dream finally came true, and I could not get out of bed.
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I Failed at My Own Advice
I built a cooking company in the one city full of people who do not want to cook. Then I quietly did the same thing again with my coaching business. A story about falling in love with your idea instead of the problem.
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The Five Stages of Reinvention: How to Rebuild Your Life
From the outside, reinvention looks like one brave leap. Up close, it's five ordinary steps you can name. A walk through ARISE: Acknowledge, Rediscover, Get Inspired, Sense, Embrace.
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You Own Your Own Narrative
My CV would give a recruiter nightmares. For years I told that story as "Ken can't make up his mind." Then I noticed the facts hadn't changed, but the story could. On reinvention and who's holding the pen.
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I Use Vulnerability as a Sledgehammer
Sledgehammers are for demolition. Vulnerability is supposed to be soft and careful. But sharing the hard thing first, and fully, is the fastest way I know to build real trust. Here's how it works.
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Six Weeks That Felt Like a Year: Manuel's Story
Manuel is a lawyer in Malaga. On paper he was doing fine. Inside, he was lost. Here is what changed in six weeks of coaching, the exercises we ran, and his story in his own words on camera.
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The Top Ten Benefits of Life Reinvention
That's me at a barbecue on a normal workday. A few years ago it would have made me nervous. Here are the ten things I got out of rebuilding my working life from scratch.
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Seven Years, One Notebook: Why I Still Use a Bullet Journal
I've never found a productivity app that fits my brain. Then a mentor at Google showed me a notebook with a few small symbols in it. Seven years and a shelf full of journals later, here's how it works, and why I put one in my clients' hands.
6 min read →
You Haven't Peaked. You've Just Outgrown a Stage.
There's a moment a lot of people in their 40s describe, and it's hard to put into words. Things are going well. And yet something feels flat. There's actually a map for that feeling. Three thinkers have been drawing it from very different angles.
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Freedom Is Not Fulfillment
A friend left his corporate job nine months ago. Then his niece sat him down to watch Ratatouille and a scene about a lost rat in a sewer turned out to be the most honest thing he'd seen about his transition. The reason identity change is harder than career change.
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You Cannot Think Yourself to the Answer
The career questions that matter aren't the kind your brain solves at a desk. They yield to evidence, and evidence only comes from doing. A short post about action, run-club serendipity, and the experiment that changed my year.
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How 50 Lunches Started
When I left corporate fifteen years ago I had no plan. So I made a list of fifty people I wanted to talk to and invited them all to lunch. The rule that made the conversations work, and the flip nobody talks about.
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The True Self Archetypes
There's a pattern to who you are. It was visible before you were ten, and it hasn't changed. These 13 archetypes are a framework for naming it, and for understanding why certain kinds of work feel like you, and others never quite do.
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What Does It Mean to Reinvent Your Life?
Most people think reinvention means burning something down. A new country, a new job, a van and an open road. It doesn't have to be any of those things. And even when it is, that's still not what reinvention actually is.
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Don't Just Write Your Ikigai. Read It Out Loud.
Most people fill in the four Ikigai circles, look at the page, and think they're done. But the diagram on its own rarely moves anything. The work starts when you read what you wrote out loud, in front of someone who can watch your face.
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Why Knowing What You Don't Want Is More Useful Than Knowing What You Do
Most people stuck in 'I just need to figure out what I want' are quietly clear on something else... what they don't want anymore. That's the more honest place to start.
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Your Best Skill Might Be the One Quietly Draining You
Nobody warns you about this. The skill you're best at... the one that built your career, the one you get praised for... might be the exact thing that's wearing you down.
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Your Resistance Is the Map
What clients say in a session tells me something. What they avoid, skip, and sidestep tells me more. The resistance is never random. Here's what it actually points to.
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What's Your Dharma Archetype? This Is the Quiz I Keep Sending People.
One of my favorite books on purpose made Dharma feel approachable for the first time. The quiz that goes with it? Fun, a little leading, and still worth five minutes of your time.
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What Do You Actually Value? An Exercise That Cuts Through the Noise
Most people think they know their values. Then they try this exercise and find out otherwise. Here's how to go from 100 words to three that actually tell the truth.
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Sit With People Who See You
I gathered 10 podcast guests for a rooftop BBQ. The gratitude round that followed changed how I see myself.
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Feeling Stuck in Your Career Doesn't Mean You're Broken
You're not lazy. You're not ungrateful. You might just be in the wrong story. Here's what I've learned about career stuckness from the inside.
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Career Reinvention After 40: It's Not Too Late (It Might Be the Perfect Time)
You've got 25+ working years left. That's a whole career. Here's why your 40s might be the best time to change direction.
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How to Find Your Purpose (Without the Guru Nonsense)
Purpose isn't something you find in a weekend retreat. It's something you build, test, and refine. Here's a more honest approach.
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The Life Report: A Simple Tool That Shows You What's Actually Going On
My version of the classic coaching exercise commonly known as the Wheel of Life. Here's how it works, why it works, and how to actually use the results.
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5 Practical Tips for Discovering Your Ikigai
The Ikigai framework is powerful but knowing where to start is half the battle. Here are five things that actually helped me (and my clients).
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Ikigai: How to Re-Discover Your Purpose
In 2017 I got fired and drew four overlapping circles in a notebook. That messy sketch changed my life. Here's the framework behind it.
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What Does a Life Coach Actually Do? (Honest Answer From Someone Who Is One)
Most people have a vague idea that involves sitting cross-legged and saying 'tell me how that makes you feel.' The reality is quite different.
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Tiny Experiments: Why Passion Follows Action (Not the Other Way Around)
I used to think passion was something you found. Then I read Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff and started questioning everything I thought I knew about goals, direction, and how we actually figure out what we want.
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3 Hacks for Your End of Year Reflection
Most year-end reviews happen in your head and evaporate by January 3rd. Here are the three things I actually do to make the year stick before it disappears.
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How to Find Your Presence
I've tried meditation for years and never cracked it. Then I went scuba diving. What happened 20 metres underwater taught me more about presence than any app ever did.
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Why Most of Your Life Disappears Without You Noticing
Your brain is designed to delete routine. That's why the years vanish. Three things actually help, and journalling is one of them.
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Stop Searching for Purpose. Your Dharma Already Knows.
Most of us approach purpose like a treasure hunt. We switch jobs, chase new goals, move to new cities. But your Dharma, what you're naturally built to do, has been showing you the answer the whole time.
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Lost Your Direction? Draw Four Circles.
In 2017 I lost my job and had no idea what came next. So I grabbed a pencil and drew four overlapping circles. That sketch gave me direction again, and eventually got me to Google.
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What I Learned From Actually Working in a TEAL Company
In April 2016 I closed my company, merged it with a seven-person team I'd known for three months, and started showing up to their office every morning. I'd spent six months talking about TEAL organisations. This was the chance to actually try one.
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Reinventing Organisations: Why 69% of Us Are Still Miserable at Work
In 2016, Gallup reported that 70% of people felt disengaged at work. The 2024 figure is 69%. It has barely moved. The problem might not be the tools or the policies. It might be the model.
7 min read →