You’ve admitted the career no longer fits. Now what?In Part Two, Helen Hanison, former global PR executive turned executive career coach, walks us through what real change takes—beyond pep talks and pivot memes. She unpacks her three-act framework (Alignment, Redesign, and Transformation), explains why people cling to jobs they secretly loathe, and warns against the “anchor bias” that keeps us chasing the same dream long after it’s stopped making sense.From spotting your outdated success scripts to mapping out future obstacles, Helen makes the case that career reinvention isn’t linear—it’s a zigzag of bold choices, mindset shifts, and quiet resilience. If you’re ready to do the inner work instead of just tweaking your LinkedIn title, this episode is your field guide.Key Highlights of Our Interview:Alignment Before Action“If you skip alignment, you’re just kicking the wrong can down the road.”Why getting unstuck starts with strengths, values, and purpose—not a job board scroll.Beware the Anchoring Trap“The first idea you fall in love with? It’s probably not the right one.”How to test-drive multiple versions of your future instead of clinging to the shiny one.Redesign as a Contact Sport“Agile career design means you keep moving, even when the path gets messy.”Helen shares how mini-experiments and pilot tests beat fantasy-level planning.The Psychology of Not Quitting“Hitting the wall isn’t failure. It’s a push-off point.”Hope Mapping, resilience habits, and the real mindset work behind meaningful transformation.Outgrowing the Old Career Narrative“Perseverance is not always noble—it can be your trap.”Letting go of the stories, scripts, and social prescriptions that no longer serve you.________________________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.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: What foundational step is crucial before career redesign?
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.
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.
Chapter 2: How can I identify my strengths and values for career alignment?
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?
Chapter 3: What is the process of agile career redesign?
Now it's a verb. What are you doing to achieve that feeling, that alive and aligned feeling? Now Act Two is really like the meat in the sandwich, is career redesign. And it's a completely different gear again. It's all about action. How do we convert that radical self-awareness, that incredible career clarity we've got in Act One
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 it's 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, I can't say that today, 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 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. Yeah, 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: How does hope mapping assist 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 what happens is you've got away literally on the map. It's a math of grids, if you like. 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, you can, you 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 changes and. If you get wobbled off as you go through, what you find is you're
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 it
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Chapter 5: What mindset shifts are essential for career resilience?
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.
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 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.
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Chapter 6: Why is career redesign not a linear journey?
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 comma. I often say hitting, sometimes we need to hit the wall. If you think of a wall in terms of a swimming pool, your 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...
If you are stuck in work that's wrong and struggling or overwhelmed and disconnected, then it's worth tracking what stories are holding you there. Is there a story of, I can only do what I've always done? Is there a story of, it would be such a waste to just look away from everything I've achieved? Is there a story of, it's too long way down at this point of
being successful to try something new is too late for me. What are the stories? Where have they come from? Are they social prescriptions? Are they things that your family brought you up on or maybe didn't mean to, but inadvertently that's what you saw model. What are they?
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