Last month, my husband and I embarked on the trip of a lifetime. We dropped into the Grand Canyon to raft 220 miles of the Colorado River.

For 14 days, we loaded, floated, braced, paddled, splashed, and crashed through more than 80 whitewater rapids under the tutelage of five remarkable guides and their two assistants - most of whom were as strong in body as they were in character.

For ambitious, mid-career professionals, career transitions are complex, and over time, they can become quite disorienting and destabilizing. While we may do our best to make the optimal choice, our minds are often littered with questions and unknowns. We vacillate justifications around money, time, family, well-being, security, autonomy, etc. This messy mental state is related to what psychologists ‘cognitive dissonance’ - when your mind tries to reconcile two or more thoughts (or behaviors) that are inconsistent with your beliefs or values. So why does your smart brain launch into these mental gymnastics? And how can you outsmart it to minimize exhaustion?

I spent decades collecting some pretty strong beliefs about work, money, and professionalism.

My beliefs carried me (and a lot of people I know) pretty far, but at a certain point they stopped being helpful and they started complicating my career transitions.

In 2019, I finally figured out what it actually takes to make a successful career transition: getting really clear on your own definition of success.

Every month, I have the privilege of engaging in wide-ranging conversations with ambitious professionals - bankers, attorneys, physicians, start-up founders, non-profit executives, and small business owners.

Every week, I take a front row seat to their busy schedules, their remarkably complex responsibilities, their tenuous relationships, and their bold visions.

I know how exhausting it is to be a human at work these days, and how much you long to feel seen, heard, understood, and respected by your colleagues, clients, or customers. (Because we all do!)

I don’t know a single professional who hasn’t been confronted by heightened emotions at work, or tried to suppress heightened emotions in the midst of work. This is because we’ve been told for decades that emotions don’t belong in the workplace, and they are bad for decision-making, but this broad advice couldn’t be further from the truth, especially as we march forward into an AI-supported “relationship economy.” Knowing how to gather emotional data and work with it is an extremely valuable competency - especially if you aspire to lead yourself, your clients, and colleagues toward more creative and innovative solutions.

As we step forward into the “relationship economy” - an new era of work supported by adaptive AI technologies - it's increasingly clear that human skills like interpersonal communication, customer engagement, and collaborative leadership will be needed to help us all stay engaged and collaborating on increasingly complex challenges.

Have you heard the old adage, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”? It sounds cheesy, but it’s actually a valuable reminder that in a battle between established norms and new ways of working, the norms usually have the upper hand. Similarly, in a battle between relationships and rules, relationships usually have the upper hand!

A client’s willingness to re-group and start over is all that really matters to me, and it’s all that should really matter to YOU because it's a integral part of the adult learning process…and it’s usually tethered to a whole bunch of other valuable information like…

There’s a performative security we’ve gained from setting S.M.A.R.T goals year after year, and for those of us who’ve bounced around the corporate world, drafting those specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals has become an increasingly meaningless ritual.