Chief Change Officer
#278 Helen Hanison: Outgrowing the Career Everyone Else Envies — Part Two
Sun, 6 Apr 2025
So you’ve figured out your career isn’t working—now what? In Part Two, Helen brings in the big guns: her framework for getting unstuck, redesigning with purpose, and navigating the messy middle of change.We unpack the real reasons people stay stuck, why perseverance isn’t always a virtue, and how to redesign a career that fits who you are now—not who you were five years ago. It’s part psychology, part strategy, and 100% relatable.Key Highlights of Our Interview:Three Acts of Career Redesign“You cannot skip alignment. That’s the inner work—and it’s where most people rush or skip entirely.”Helen breaks down the phases of Alignment, Redesign, and Transformation—and why each one matters.Why Strengths Aren’t Enough“If you only build around your strengths, you’re just building on sand.”Strengths are great—but without alignment, they won’t carry you through a real change.Hope Maps and the Myth of the Linear Path“We confuse a hard day with the wrong direction. That’s where Hope Mapping comes in.”How visualizing obstacles in advance helps you stick to the right path, not bail on it too soon.Letting Go of the Career Lie“We’ve been told perseverance is always noble—but sometimes, quitting is the smarter move.”A fresh take on what it really means to be “resilient” in your career.________________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Helen HanisonHelen's website: https://www.helenhanison.com --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.12 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>140,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: What is the focus of Helen Hanison's career transformation framework?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. What happens when your shiny successful career starts to feel like a trap? Helen Henderson has the answer. She went from board level PR executive to career coach.
after realizing that the ladder she was climbing was leaning on the wrong wall. In this two-part series, Helen shares how she hit pause, got unstuck, and built a career that actually fits. We'll talk about career detour, tough choices, and why midlife isn't a crisis. is a chance to redesign. If your job looks great on paper, but feels like sandpaper, this one is for you. Let's get into it.
Let's dig into the boat now. You structure it into three X. Act 1 Alignment Act 2 Career Redesign Act 3 Transformation First, why did you choose these three as the core structure? Why start with Alignment? Why follow that with Career Redesign and then end with Transformation? And second, for each of these acts, what are the key takeaways or core messages you would want readers to walk away with?
Chapter 2: Why is alignment the first step in career redesign?
Let's start with act one, the act of alignment. To me, the act of alignment is an important foundational step for everyone in career redesign. And... I'm pretty insistent actually that we give this proper time and attention at the beginning of working with somebody because otherwise if we don't
hesitate there on purpose and take inventory, what happens is I'm helping somebody kick the can down the road of what they think or assume the right problem to solve is. Now, maybe I'm supporting them, but I'm just supporting their own thought process that they would have had without me. What I'm trying to do very deliberately here is say, let's go back to basics and
We build a career compass, a very personal, highly bespoke, and it's made up of three components. One is strengths. And I find the professionals I work with tend to be pretty fluent at talking to their own strengths. They build careers on them. They've heard them in appraisals. They're aware of what other people give value to about them and their work.
However, if you're feeling very disconnected from what you do, you might not be owning them as much as you used to, or you might feel very disconnected from them. You might be discounting them altogether, assuming everybody has them. So there's something there and that's important because for any
career redesigned to be robust it needs to be strengths based or else we're in fantasy land what we can do so it's important but it isn't as important as values so we very quickly move on to the value of values because they're directional we need to utilize our strengths in order to express our values so values are less easy for people to access they operate under the consciousness
But very simply for time now, it's what do you want to stand for? What are the most important drivers for you in life? Because that's what we need to your career to have synergy with. We need to have some kind of logic link between what you do and what you feel is most meaningful. And then we wrap it all up with a sense of purpose.
So we start to get a bit more action-oriented about living into those values, if you like. What is going to feel purposeful? Now it's a verb. What are you doing to achieve that feeling, that alive and aligned feeling? Now, Act 2 is really like the meat in the sandwich, is career redesign. And it's a completely different gear again. It's all about action.
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Chapter 3: How can you effectively redesign your career with pilot tests?
How do we convert that radical self-awareness, that incredible career clarity we've got in Act 1 into our real world now? And we translate that into a series of pilot tests. We start thinking about a number of different career designs that that have merit, that feel resonant for you.
So that starts to dispel the myth that there's one true pathway you should be on or used to be on or wish you were on. There's a number of ideas. And once you can start to see that, you can start collecting experiences or collecting conversations or both and just testing the... I suppose it's like stress testing your own ideation because there's no risk that way.
You've already put yourself in the environments in some way or given yourself exposure to different ideas before you make any dramatic moves or big leaps. And so it's an agile, career design is very agile. You keep attracting incoming information, you keep testing, you keep tweaking. And so you're always iterating, always moving though.
And that's the fastest route to transformation, which is the third act. The act of transformation is really because even the best of career designs are aren't enough all on their own. We need the mindset mastery to strive long enough to actually succeed, to understand how to encounter the inevitable obstacles and barriers and not get thrown off the track.
And that takes a certain amount of learning to interrupt our inner critics and anticipating practical barriers and obstacles and having the resilience and the tools to keep moving forwards anyway. Yep, that's all three.
Yes, for this podcast, I always say it's about walk the walk, talk the talk leadership. I like to talk to guests who have gone through real change themselves, not just sharing advice, but lived experience. That's the kind of value I want to bring here. Now, when I skimmed through your book, one word really stood out, which is hope map. What is it? Can you walk us through the idea?
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Chapter 4: What role does mindset play in career transformation?
Yeah, sure. Hope mapping is in the act of transformation and it's an important part of protecting your plans. Because if we can anticipate obstacles and do the cognitive heavy lifting to decide how we would navigate them if they show up, it's not as hard when they do. Hope mapping is actually a psychology tool.
I wish I could claim it as my own, but it's actually from a psychologist called William Schneider. And there's seven steps to it. And this is explained in depth. And in fact, I think the QR code in that chapter leads through to your own hope map. So you really get the chance to use all the tools that my one-to-one clients get to use in coaching, having had the explainer in the book.
What it does is really help you
think about worst case scenarios and then what would you do if i make implementation plans so the happens is you've got away literally on the map it's a math of grids if you like when yes i wish i could have i had one quick enough to hold up but you'll see it's a math of grids it's a bit like one of those compete your own stories where if something happens you go to that box on the right and if the other thing happens you go to the box on the left what you don't do is stop
You don't need to get stuck again. You can have the answers already down. And I think that is really such an important part of getting into that final stage of action with career redesign, because it is challenging. It is disruptive. Inevitably, any change is. And If you get wobbled off as you go through, what you find is you're
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Chapter 5: How can hope mapping help protect your career plans?
lose track of where you are you'll lose hope you'll have doubts that settle in and start getting louder and that might seem like a reasonable valid signpost to abort mission and it's the thing you can do i think what i always say to people who are feeling at that point the problems are coming at them they're close but now there's this obstacle that threatens the entire thing the
You are that close. And the growth you actually want for yourself and the hope that you've held close for yourself is just the other side of navigating this. So don't stop now. The only short way to fail is to give up trying. So that's why the hope map is so important. It's actually a very practical tool and psychology backed. You asked about protecting hope. And I think...
That to me is actually all about the resilience involved. And that's a bit more self-talk. It's understanding. how to nurture yourself through what might become hard. And that can be about interrupting inner critics whose voice is almost indiscernible from your own thoughts about, this plan isn't good enough, this is too risky, it's not responsible to keep trying.
Whatever it is that comes up for you, It's important to acknowledge it. A lot of people want to avoid those thoughts and squash them, or they feel like they're actionable instructions to stop trying. And that is somehow valid, but what's important to know is those somewhat negative sort of dialogues that pop up for us probably stem from something that was valid in the past.
We don't need to carry them. They're outdated stories for today. So it's about looking at them and thinking, so hang on, what's the anxiety here? If that's the message from my inner critic, fear of failure or... fear of success sometimes. What can I do about that? How would I dilute that? So we're not ignoring or avoiding the message.
We're actually embracing it and using it to spark some kind of action. So it's a bit like the hint map, although that tends to be practical. But it's the same idea again. Let's embrace the things that threaten to hold us stuck again, albeit down the line, and do something actionable to make sure that doesn't happen. And then call time. That's enough from the inner critics. And that's enough doubt.
So you back yourself. You've done the thinking by this point, really. quite in-depth thinking and you deserve to carry that through to its eventuality.
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Chapter 6: How do you deal with inner critics during career change?
Yeah, as you were explaining, it reminded me of something a career coach asked me years ago. He said, Vince, what would you do if you couldn't fail? I remember being younger and and not really knowing how to answer that question. But it stuck with me. Change is always hard. It comes with risk, uncertainty, setbacks. And like you said, once you've made the decision, don't stop. Think ahead.
Map out the possible risks. Anticipate the bumps. I study finance, so I tend to look at everything through that lens. In finance, we calculate risks, reprice them, we build models to manage them. But in life, most risks cannot be measured on a spreadsheet. So yeah, sometimes you have to take a step forward even when you are unsure. And if one path doesn't work out, it's not the end.
You still got options. Hitting a wall doesn't mean full stop. That's one of the biggest takeaways I've gotten from our conversation today.
Yeah, no, I love that, actually. It's not a full stop, it's a comment. I often say hitting, sometimes we need to hit the wall. If you think of a wall in terms of a swimming pool, you swim lengths, you do hit the wall, but it also gives you the impetus and the momentum you need to push up again in a different direction. And I do think career redesign, it is not linear.
I don't think anybody's career or life for that matter is linear. It's more like zigzags. And so long as we understand, we keep, we're motivated to keep on point because we know our why. We uncovered that in the value of values and unpacked our purpose. And I think if you have that motivation behind you, you never want to stop figuring it out.
And maybe career redesign is the problem you never stop solving and never want to. It's an agile, I think we're talking about career rigidity and it's that agile mindset of thinking about your career as if it's a series of projects rather than one ladder or one linear journey. That really helps people keep going.
I really like the swimming pool analogy because I enjoy swimming myself. I get it. Sometimes you just need to pause, catch your breath. You're tired and you need a break. But after the rest, you get your energy back. You keep moving. You keep breathing. Even when your head underwater, there's a rhythm to it.
We've overran a bit, but I have one or two more quick questions because they tie right into this idea of transformation. You mentioned earlier something that stuck with me, which is don't get stuck in the past or the present. Could you say more about what you mean by that?
So, I think we've talked a little bit about inner critics. Getting stuck in the past really, to me, means what stories are you telling yourself? What stories have you carried with you from your past? And it might not be your past career chapters. It might be way further back. But they are beliefs. They will appear as if they're beliefs you feel are as solid as truth. However...
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Chapter 7: What does a non-linear career path look like?
Because if you can make their origins, the origin story visible, then you start to give yourself permission to unpack them and really question. is that serving me to make my choices through the lens of these stories? So that's the past. The present is, again, this idea of persevering.
And if you think, I'm feeling like I want to hold the book up again, but if you're that person in the circle and, you know, you're probably excellent at persevering in your profession because we have been absolutely weaned on this idea that perseverance is a virtue, but... It isn't if it's holding you stuck, violating your values, and has you loathing what you do, even if it used to make sense.
So it's again, just giving yourself permission to meet yourself where you are today. not where your past self put you. And just question what serves, what is actually going to get you closer to the hopes and vision that you hold for yourself, because that isn't often the same as staying where you feel stuck. It's time, it's a call to action, isn't it?
It's time to at least open up about what career redesign might mean for your next chapter.
I really like the circle metaphor. I think that captures the main idea of your book as well. So this is really my last question for our interview. Your book is called Unstuck, A Smart Guide to a Purposeful Career. What are some of the unsmart things people tend to do when they feel stuck
Yeah, easily. I think if I go through the apps, if I do it in order, then what I would say is the first thing that would not be smart would be not to take the time to get all that career clarity. Because really, I think for anyone, unless you can understand what you are strongest at, but also enjoy most that lights you up.
and feels purposeful to you, then there is no career design that you know will be aligned with that. You haven't taken the time to understand what it needs to align with if you're going to feel fulfilled. So that would be the first big red flag for me. The second one would be to have an idea that you're very married to.
People who have a singular idea that they're very married to often find it very hard. In psychology, they call it anchoring. And you've probably heard of this through the financial sort of side of life. But it's the same in this lane. Whatever idea you come up with first, you're not ever so prepared or flexible about moving too far from it.
So that is why in career redesign, we start ideating and we come up with a minimum of three career life designs that you find attractive and appealing. You don't have to do them all. We're only one person. But we do have to come up with them and think about them and move into them in quite a bit of depth. So that would be the other unsmart thing, to be married to one hope or idea.
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