- Hi, I'm Emma Gannon,
and I've just launched a Skillshare class
on creative pivots,
which is something that I have recently done myself.
I'm excited to share a sneak peek with you,
so check it out here.
(upbeat music)
When we pivot, it can be choice-led and it can be something
that comes from a place of wanting to follow up
on a passion,
but sometimes it's because something has happened
in the world, which means we have to shake things up.
And it is almost a truth in life
that we can't control everything that we do.
Even if we love our job,
something might come along and change it for us.
So even during COVID, people have had to pivot,
they've had to change up their businesses,
offer new things, change their skills.
And actually, if anything, pivoting is a lifelong skill
that we will have no matter what happens externally.
The first step here is really looking at where we're at
and what we might want to change.
And it's so easy for time to pass, for years to go by,
and to look up and not really notice that the time has gone.
So it's really important to notice
that we are living in a world of distractions,
we're living in a world of social media updates,
and it's very noisy, and we can get very confused
with what we want.
It's important to ask yourself whether you want to progress
in the job you're currently in.
Maybe you've hit a ceiling,
maybe every year, it's quite repetitive,
and you want to change.
Maybe it's that it's not really fulfilling
what you want your life to look like in the future.
And I think it's important to reflect
on whether it really is matching up with the idea
of what you wanted your life to look like.
One thing I found was really tricky when I made a change
was losing a part of my identity.
You can't really just walk into a room anymore
and know exactly where you work and what you do,
and you don't have this label or this go-to bio
that you're so used to.
So it is really scary to make a change
because you're shaking things up,
you're going in a new direction,
and you've made that decision by yourself.
The good thing about making a pivot
is it doesn't have to be something
that you go and tell everyone immediately.
For me personally, that really adds pressure,
and then people start asking you how it's going,
and it can feel really weighty.
Something that I find really useful
is working in secret on your pivot.
So for me, I wrote my blog in the evenings years ago,
and I didn't share on social media for awhile.
I started writing my novel "Olive" in secret
for a few months, and also with my podcast,
I started recording the audio in the evenings,
just for fun, just to practice.
So take the pressure off, start small,
and you don't have to tell anyone just yet.
It's really helpful
to realize what skills you might be missing from your job
or things that you wish you were doing
or you used to be doing and you're not doing anymore.
For me personally,
I remember working in a role where my job was to write
for a certain brand at an agency,
and then I got promoted and I wasn't writing anymore.
I realized that I was really missing that
and I was missing that skill and that part of the job.
Sometimes that can happen,
you can kind of pivot out of the thing that you love doing.
So this exercise is going to be getting back
to what you are missing, what you want more of
and how we can kind of pinpoint that
and really zone in on it.
When we're talking about pivoting,
sometimes you might be wanting to pivot
into a completely new area,
and that might feel really daunting at first.
But you have to remember
that you have so many skills already.
You won't be starting from scratch,
you have so many soft skills.
These are the skills to concentrate on.
These are the skills that will be transferable.
Things like public speaking, or networking,
or your organization skills, or your visual skills.
You might be watching this
and thinking you're not sure what your pivot might be
or what you even enjoy or what you want to move towards,
it's really important to pick up on really small clues.
And the feeling of enthusiasm
is actually one of the most powerful feelings we have
towards being attracted to something we want.
So it might be that you light up
when you see a certain TV show or a certain book
or a certain color or a certain place when you go traveling,
these are all clues.
So make a note of the things that light you up,
and they will serve as clues later down the line.
For me, I think it was starting to become quite obvious.
I was reading more novels,
I was reading more articles with my favorite authors
about how they wrote their novels.
I think people around you can sometimes see it too.
So for my birthday, a few years ago,
someone in my family bought me this novel writing class.
So sometimes the clues are from other people around you.
Sometimes your friends can see you
better than you can see yourself.
So the clues can come from anywhere,
but just make sure that you're taking note of them
because when you have them all laid out,
they can make sense.
One of the challenges of making a pivot
isn't necessarily doing it, even though that is very hard,
it's sometimes admitting it in the first place.
So it's very normal if you feel afraid,
but the very first step really
is to just admit it to yourself
that you're ready for a change.
It's important to prepare yourself
that you won't have this neat identity anymore.
It is a change,
and when we're in limbo or we're making a change,
we're in the middle of making a pivot,
things can feel a bit messy, but that's completely normal.
You might even feel like you're going backwards slightly.
You might feel like you're unpicking
some of your work you've done to move forwards.
But actually, it's a good sign,
and it's a good sign that you're making change.
I've definitely noticed a shift
in this becoming more normalized.
I think it's a really good time to be multi-skilled
and to be adaptable.
I think there was a time where you had one job
and you stuck to it, but I think the world is changing.
So this exercise really
is about bringing out those core values
that you want to have
and that need to be involved in your next pivot.
So for this exercise,
it's all about picking around three to five words
that really encompass what you feel is currently missing
and what you might want to pivot towards.
For me, when I made a pivot into writing fiction
and changing my career quite a bit,
the first thing I felt like I was missing was a challenge.
Things were going okay,
and I felt like I was in a bit of a safe place,
which was going well.
But I just felt like I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.
And that is something personally for me
that I really enjoy doing.
I like to be a little bit scared, I like to push myself.
And so for me, this was a challenge,
and I didn't know if it was going to happen
or if it was going to work,
but I kind of made peace with it may be not working out
in order to feel
like I was having a bit more of a challenge.
The second one would be creativity.
I felt like I was writing my nonfiction books,
which I really enjoyed, but they were quite limiting
in terms of writing about a topic that I knew about.
But with fiction,
it just opened this whole new world of creativity
because you can talk
about topics you don't know a lot about,
you can create characters
to say things that you would never say,
and you can create a world that you don't live in.
And for me, that was a huge part of wanting to do it.
The third one was adventure.
And this was to do with the fact
that in order to make the pivot happen,
I had to, again, get out of my comfort zone,
but more physically, I had to take myself away.
I went to cafes, I went and stayed by the sea,
I took some time away at the weekends,
and this was outside of work time.
But I wanted to make the space to have an adventure.
And not only did I write the book or start writing it,
but I took myself away and saw a bit more of the world
or I saw more experiences.
So I kind of got more out of it than just the work itself.
One word that I have decided not to use anymore
with myself or other people is the word should
because it sort of insinuates
that we should be doing things in our lives
when actually who made that rule in the first place.
Should is a bit of a society pressure thing.
So if you feel like you should be making more money
or you should be doing a certain type of job,
then that's not really what this exercise is about,
it's more about going inside
and thinking what do you actually want to do.
Aside from all of the confusing messages of social media
outside of your family's expectations.
This is really just about focusing
on those really simple things that will bring you in joy.
So when you have your words,
you might have two, three, four, five,
take them and then go a little bit deeper
and kind of unpack them
and work out what that actually means in practical terms.
So for me, challenge meant sending a scary email to someone,
reaching out to someone maybe for advice
or someone in your network who might be able to help you.
This is something that is scary.
People don't really like reaching out to people
and asking for things, it's hard.
It was also learning a new skill.
It was going and taking classes.
And it was saying no to a social thing on a weekend,
and it was sacrificing my time.
Again, scary and a challenge.
With creativity, it meant opening myself up
to following new people online.
It meant getting out of my comfort zone
in terms of reading new books
and reading books that I hadn't read before
or buying new novels online
that I felt like would help me with my craft.
So it was sort of branching out of my comfort zone
in terms of creativity.
And with adventure, that man booking a staycation,
so going and saying in a little house on my own,
which goes back to the challenge thing,
so I'm not great at getting out of my own house sometimes.
And it also meant an adventure
in terms of creating a new world for myself
and creating an adventure inside the book,
which meant coming up with new characters.
When you take these three words
and kind of dig underneath of what that actually looks like,
that can make up a bit of a base for your next steps.
So this is an exercise that you can do
just with a notepad and a pen, but take yourself away.
This isn't something to do with someone else,
this is something to do by yourself.
And maybe it's just one weekend,
you turn your phone off and you sit
with yourself and your feelings and your journal
and you write it down.
And that, in itself, can be tricky
when there's so much going on,
but I really recommend taking the time
to make this first step.
(upbeat music)
I hope you enjoyed that preview of this class on Skillshare,
all about creative pivots.
If you're interested, then take it one step further,
take the whole class just by clicking the link below.