The Pivot Is Not the Problem…

I have had more than twenty-five jobs in my working life. I know how that sounds. My husband certainly does — he reminds me of it with some regularity, usually with the particular brand of affectionate amusement that only someone who has watched you reinvent yourself repeatedly can deploy with any real accuracy. I started working at sixteen, part time, the way most of us do. I am now approaching fifty-two. And in the years between those two points, I have changed direction more times than most people would consider entirely sensible.

I am not embarrassed by that. Not anymore.

For a long time, I was. Not because I regretted any of it, but because of what other people did with it. The comments. The raised eyebrows. The particular tone people use when they say the word pivot — as though it were a polite way of saying you could not make up your mind, or worse, that you lacked the discipline to see something through. I heard versions of that narrative for years. From acquaintances, from peers, occasionally from people who knew me well enough to mean it kindly and still managed to make it sting. The message, however it was delivered, was broadly the same. That changing direction was something to explain. Something to justify. A pattern that needed accounting for.

It took me a long time to recognise that the problem was never the pivoting. The problem was the assumption that staying put is the default measure of seriousness.

We live in a world that rewards the appearance of consistency and treats reinvention with mild suspicion. There is a quiet cultural reverence for the person who chose a path early and never deviated — who built something in a straight line and stayed the course regardless of what changed around them. That story has a certain romance to it. It also, in my experience, describes very few people's actual lives. Most of us are feeling our way forward. Most of us are learning as we go, discovering what fits and what doesn't, accumulating experience that slowly narrows the gap between what we are doing and what we are genuinely meant to be doing. That process is not weakness. It is how most real growth actually works.

The pivot, when it is honest, is not a retreat. It is a recalibration.

I have always believed — and have said as much to friends who have found themselves in jobs they do not enjoy, or worse, jobs they genuinely dread — that you are rarely as stuck as you feel. Circumstances are real. Bills are real. Mortgages and responsibilities and the very practical weight of adult life are all real, and I do not dismiss any of that lightly. But there is a difference between being constrained by circumstance and choosing, quietly, to stay because movement feels too uncertain. One is a genuine limitation. The other is a decision dressed up as one. And I say that not to be harsh, but because I have been on both sides of it, and the distinction matters more than we usually admit to ourselves.

What I have come to believe, having lived through enough reinventions of my own, is that the pivot is often less about abandoning something and more about refining the understanding of what you are actually looking for. Each direction I took taught me something I could not have learned by staying where I was. Each change of course added a layer — of skill, of perspective, of self-knowledge — that would not exist had I remained comfortable. Comfort is not nothing. But comfort that quietly suffocates curiosity is not something I have ever been able to mistake for contentment.

The question I hear most often is some version of: when is it the right time to pivot? Too soon and you are accused of impatience. Too late and you have wasted years on the wrong thing. The honest answer is that there is rarely a clean moment where the timing is obviously right. There is usually just a point where the misalignment becomes louder than the fear of change. Where staying requires more daily effort than leaving. Where you find yourself performing enthusiasm for work that no longer holds any. That point is different for everyone, and it cannot be scheduled or predicted. But most people who have reached it know it when they feel it, even if they spend some time convincing themselves they are imagining it.

I would also push back on the idea that pivoting is inherently a sign of instability. Some of the most grounded, capable, and creatively alive people I know have changed direction multiple times. What they share is not a single unbroken path, but a thread — a consistent set of values and instincts that runs through everything they have done, regardless of how different each chapter looked from the outside. The pivot does not erase what came before. It builds on it, whether or not that is immediately visible.

There is also something to be said for what you discover about yourself through the act of trying things. You cannot find your real appetite by staying in the same restaurant your entire life. Some things you will try and discard. Some you will return to. A few will surprise you entirely. But that process of honest exploration — of being willing to say this is not it and mean it — is not something to be ashamed of. It is, arguably, one of the braver things a person can do in a world that places such enormous weight on the comfort of the known.

Pivoting has given me everything. Not despite the uncertainty it carried, but often because of it. The discomfort of change has, every single time, eventually given way to something more aligned, more interesting, and more genuinely mine than what I left behind. That is not luck. It is what happens when you refuse to let fear of judgement make decisions on your behalf.

So if you are in a season of questioning — wondering whether the direction you are in still fits, whether what you are building is truly what you want to be building, whether the discomfort you feel is a sign to push through or a sign to reconsider — know that neither answer makes you flaky, undisciplined, or difficult. It makes you honest. And honesty about what is and is not working is the beginning of every worthwhile next chapter.

Normalising the pivot does not mean celebrating aimlessness. It means acknowledging that growth is rarely linear, that people are allowed to evolve, and that changing your mind in the light of new experience is not a character flaw. It is, if anything, evidence of one.

The conversation around this — the permission to change direction without shame, to build something new without endlessly justifying what you left — is one we return to often inside our Skool community. If you have ever felt quietly judged for the path you have taken, or the paths you have left, you will find good company there, because a pivot, made with intention, is never a step backwards…

It is simply the moment you trusted yourself enough to choose differently.