Throughout my life many of the most challenging circumstances in my career also turned out to be the biggest opportunities.
Times where the path I was on wasn’t working out pushed me onto a route that was better suited for me.
This is a common career story.
Why is that?
It’s because common paths tend to be ones you fall into or routes that everyone else is following. They are rarely ideally suited to an individual.
Every person has a unique set of strengths and weaknesses.
But the common career paths we often find ourselves on are not built for our individual strengths.
If something blocks your way on one of these common paths, it requires you to get creative.
“Necessity is the Mother of Invention.”
What tends to happen with this spark of creativity – when you create an opportunity – you create something uniquely suited to you.
I’ve seen this again and again in my own life and in the lives of our iCadenza clients.
A career roadblock requires creativity to solve.
The solution turns out to be uniquely tailored to the person solving the problem.
Common Career Paths = Generic Templates
Common career paths like
- Touring soloist playing standard repertoire booked by a large agency or
- Member of an orchestra who plays what the music director wants and how they want it for their entire career.
These generic career templates are rarely suited to any one person.
Creative Career Solutions
Contrast this with some of the career solutions iCadenza clients have developed.
Here are a few examples from our last Idea to Impact group program.
Idea to Impact is a program with a group of mid-career professionals that are launching a new project to reach a new level in their career.
We spend 6 months developing their project and then they launch by the end of the program.
The Company Director
One Idea to Impact member was the director for an opera company who did this work for many years.
He loved this work but missed the creativity of singing.
Through Idea to Impact, he launched an ensemble – fully functioning, funded, and up-and-running.
Now he combines his skills as a company director with his love of singing.
This is uniquely suited to him.
If he stayed on the track he was on, he would never have developed this career where he gets to sing and run his ensemble.
The Opera Singer
This fun, creative client spent many years performing in opera houses around Europe.
When she came to the U.S. her career shifted. She didn’t have that existing booking system that she had in Europe.
She had to be the engine to book her own projects.
This gave her the opportunity to really pursue what she loved – Cabaret.
Cabaret is something she loved – and was uniquely suited to do. Stepping outside of that standard booking system offered her the opportunity to pursue this path.
And it turns out that her stage personality – which is so vibrant and fun – really translates to marketing.
Her way of being brings people in to support her in ways she never would have known about if she had stayed distant from her audience on the opera stage.
These are just two examples.
We had 12 members in each cohort of Idea to Impact and every single one has this story of taking a challenging career moment and transforming it into a career project that is tailor made for them.
Career Transformation
Whatever challenge the pandemic has put in your career pathway, you can use this time to recreate your career to one that is uniquely suited to you.
Start with these basic questions
- What are my strengths?
- What do I love doing?
- Who am I passionate about serving?
Then get to work on how you can bring those things together.
