Redirecting.work
Purpose: Key to Successful Pivots
Clarity of purpose is one of the strongest themes running through my research on successful redirection. Again and again, people describe wanting greater personal fulfillment and happiness, better alignment with their values, an opportunity to make a positive impact, and a life of meaning.
But purpose doesn't have to mean finding one grand calling. It can evolve as our lives change and can be found in work, relationships, service, learning, creativity, contribution, or small things that make life meaningful.
As we redirect, the important question may be less What is my purpose? and more: What matters to me now, and how do I want that to shape what comes next?
A Simple Place to Start: Give and Grow
If thinking about your “purpose” feels too big, try “give and grow”. I first heard this idea from Richard Leider during my own cocooning, and it gave me a much simpler way to think about purpose.
Ask yourself two questions: How do I want to grow? How do I want to give?
Growing might mean learning something new, developing a neglected interest, meeting different people, or experimenting with something you've always wanted to try. Giving might mean mentoring, volunteering, sharing your expertise, helping someone else, or contributing to a cause or community that matters to you.
You don't need to know where these experiments will lead. Purpose often reveals itself through what we do. Give, grow, pay attention to what feels meaningful, and let your sense of purpose evolve from there.
Identity Beyond Roles
Successful redirection isn't simply about figuring out what you're going to do next. It also asks us to consider who we are when a familiar role changes or disappears.
For much of our working lives, particularly in the U.S., we tend to answer “Who are you?” with what we do. I did. I was a researcher. I still am, but I've come to understand that researcher is only one part of my identity.
We have many identities. We are partners, parents and grandparents, friends, learners, creators, volunteers, athletes, gardeners, travelers, members of communities, and much more. Some parts become more important at different stages of our lives. When a job or another important role goes away, these other parts don't suddenly appear. They were there all along.
Look for what endures. For me, what endures most clearly are my values. I want to contribute, share what I learn, and be useful and of value to others. Research and communicating it was one way I lived those values during my career. Redirecting has allowed me to find different ways to express them.
That distinction matters. If our identity is tied entirely to a job or role, losing or leaving it can leave a very large hole. But if we can separate what we do from who we are, we may discover that many of the things that matter to us can travel with us into whatever comes next. They may simply take a different form.
A Simple Place to Start
Ask yourself:
Who am I now beyond my current or former role?
What parts of myself do I want to carry forward?
What values are constant even as my roles have changed?
And perhaps one more question. A chaplain friend once posed a beautifully simple way of thinking about a life and the impact of our identity:
Did I make things better or worse?
You don't have to create an entirely new identity when you redirect. Sometimes the work is rediscovering parts of yourself that were there all along and deciding which ones you want to give more room in your next chapter.
Financial Considerations
Financial considerations play a critical role in successful redirection. Having a strong financial foundation gives us something more important than money itself: the freedom to make choices without feeling desperate or trapped.
Again and again, people I've interviewed have talked about the importance of living below their means, saving, and creating enough financial flexibility to weather a transition. As Amy Wilson put it: “Solid financials is critical to have a sense of not being beholden nor ever feeling desperate. Live below your means, so that you can at any time depart confidently, with your identity and self-worth.”
How much financial flexibility we need depends on the redirection. Moving to another job in the same field may involve relatively little financial disruption. Changing careers may mean retraining, accepting lower income for a period of time, or taking longer to establish yourself. Starting a business introduces even more uncertainty. And moving from paid work into retirement raises a different question: how do you make your resources last for the life you want to live?
But my interviews have also raised another important question: What is enough?
Not everyone redirects to make more money. Many people I interviewed were willing to trade some income for a greater sense of purpose, flexibility, autonomy, time with family, achieving joy, or the opportunity to do work they found more meaningful. Financial preparation gave them the ability to make that choice.
A Simple Place to Start
Before making a major redirection, understand what your life actually costs, what resources you have, how much financial uncertainty you can comfortably tolerate, and what might change if your income decreases.
Then ask yourself: What does “enough” mean for the life I want next?
For significant career changes, entrepreneurship, or retirement, work with a qualified financial professional who can help you test different scenarios rather than relying on general rules or someone else's definition of financial security.
Get and Stay Healthy
Good health—physical, mental, and emotional—is foundational to successful redirection. Across my interviews, health has appeared both as a reason people redirect and as something that enables them to redirect successfully. Almost all I spoke with put new attention on getting and staying healthy while in transition, and thereafter.
For some, burnout, chronic stress, illness, or a health scare forced them to reconsider how they were living and working. Others changed direction to accommodate caregiving responsibilities or to create greater flexibility for their own health. Sometimes the realization was simply that the way they’d been working was no longer sustainable.
Health also provides the resilience needed to navigate change. People I've interviewed talked about exercise, sleep, nutrition, therapy, mindfulness, time outdoors, and other forms of self-care as ways of maintaining the physical energy and mental clarity needed during uncertain transitions.
As we get older, this becomes even more important. Maintaining strength, mobility, balance, and mental agility helps preserve not only health but agency—our ability to keep doing the things we value and choose how we want to live.
I've experienced this myself. Exercise is not something I fit in after everything else. I schedule it because staying physically strong and flexible helps me remain mentally engaged, continue my research and writing, travel, garden, golf, and participate fully in my life.
A Simple Place to Start
Ask yourself:
Is the way I'm living and working supporting my health or am I undermining it?
What do I need physically and mentally to have the energy and resilience for what comes next?
Then make those things part of the plan for your redirection rather than something you'll attend to once everything else is settled.
You don't need to become an athlete. But taking care of your body and mind gives you more choices about what you can do with the next stage of your life.
Don’t Go It Alone: Relationships, Networking and Community
Successful redirecting may be a personal decision, but it’s rarely a solitary process. Across my interviews, relationships, networks, and communities repeatedly provide support, perspective, opportunity, and sometimes the spark for a new direction.
The people who navigate transitions most successfully often have strong relationships already in place. Partners, friends, colleagues, mentors, advisors, professional networks, and communities can help us see possibilities we might not see ourselves, steady us through the uncertainty of the “messy middle,” and support what we build next.
The lesson from the research is simple: Don’t go it alone. Build and nurture your relationships before you need them, and treat relational resilience as an important part of preparing for whatever comes next.
A Simple Place to Start
Think about the people already around you.
Who are the people you trust to tell you the truth?
Who might help you see possibilities you don't yet see yourself?
Where are the communities in which you feel supported, challenged, connected, or useful?
And don't wait until you need something to reach out. Nurture relationships over time, all the time. Be curious about others, offer help as well as ask for it, reconnect with people you've lost touch with, and keep expanding your circles.
Successful redirecting ultimately requires making your own choices, but you don't have to figure them out alone.
Continuous Learning
Continuous learning is one of the most consistent success factors in my redirecting research. It appears across age, gender, and Pivot Type, taking many different forms.
Sometimes learning becomes formal: getting a degree, completing a certification, taking a course, or developing an entirely new skill. But just as often it happens through reflection, experimentation, conversation, writing, joining a new community, trying something unfamiliar, or simply remaining curious and open to new possibilities.
Across the stories, learning seems to serve four important purposes: Relevance: helping us stay current and useful. Resilience: giving us something constructive to do when the way forward is uncertain. Reinvention: helping us reinterpret what we already know and applying it in new ways. Renewal: perhaps most importantly, learning can restore energy, confidence, curiosity, and joy.
Learning isn't only preparation for a redirection. It's often how redirection happens. We reflect, experiment, reframe what we know, and stay curious long enough for something new to take shape.
And learning doesn't stop as we get older. Some of the most compelling examples in my research come from people in their 70s and 80s who continue learning for joy, contribution, adaptation, community, and sheer vitality.
A Simple Place to Start
Ask yourself:
What am I curious about right now? Or what has been something I've been curious about a long time?
What would I like to know or know how to do that I don't know today?
Could I learn something by trying rather than studying or planning?
Learning doesn't have to lead to a credential or even have an obvious purpose. Take a class. Read something outside your usual interests. Experiment with a new technology. Try something creative. Talk with someone whose experience is different from yours.
Follow your curiosity and pay attention to where it takes you. The people who keep learning are often the people who keep contributing and are most satisfied.
Spirituality: A Quiet Undercurrent of Meaning
Spirituality has remained a quiet theme in my research on successful redirection. I suspected early on that it might play a role, not necessarily in the religious sense, but as an orientation toward meaning. Over time, I began to see that spirituality is often less declared than lived.
Looking across all these pivots, I see spirituality as a quiet, continuous current. It’s rarely named, always present. It’s not tied to religion or ritual, though it may include both. It's the stillness before a decision, the trust after letting go, the gratitude in hindsight.
For some, spirituality is faith; for others, mindfulness. For some, it’s the drive to serve; for others, the ability to surrender, for others sheer awareness of something larger than themselves. But for all, it's the pulse of purpose that animates change. It’s what steadies us when identities dissolve and what calls us toward what’s next.
Spirituality also seems to invite something that can be difficult during a redirection: stillness. Rather than continually pushing to figure out what comes next, sometimes we need to stop long enough to listen—to ourselves, to others, to our faith, or simply to what life may be telling us. In this aspect, it lives alongside cocooning.
In the stories I've collected, that inward listening can lead outward. Spirituality often finds expression through purpose, service, compassion, community, creativity, and contribution. It can help us move from asking What should I do next? toward the deeper question, What matters to me now?
A Simple Place to Start
You don't need to define yourself as spiritual or religious. Instead, consider:
What helps me become quiet enough to listen to myself?
Where do I find meaning, gratitude, connection, or a sense of something larger than myself?
What practices help me stay grounded when I don't know what comes next?
It might be prayer or meditation. It might be walking in nature, journaling, creating something, participating in a faith or other community, serving others, or simply making time for stillness.
You don't have to name it. Just pay attention to what grounds you and gives your life meaning. That quiet undercurrent may help guide you toward what comes next.
Practice Stewardship of Time
A redirection changes not only what we do, but how we choose to spend our time. Time is finite, and a successful next chapter requires being intentional about what and who deserves it.
That means making room for what sustains us: our health, important relationships, learning, contribution, rest, and the work or activities that give our lives meaning. It also means recognizing that not everything we can do still deserves our time and energy.
Stewardship of time is different from time management. It isn't about squeezing more into the day or becoming more efficient. It's about making thoughtful choices about how we use one of our most precious resources in creating the life we want.
Redirection can also change our relationship with time. Leaving a demanding job, starting something new, caring for someone, or entering retirement can disrupt the structure that once organized our days. Suddenly, we may have more control over our time. Or we may discover that other demands quickly fill it. The opportunity is to become more deliberate, and even ruthless, about what we allow back in.
A Simple Place to Start
Ask yourself:
What deserves more of my time now?
What am I spending time on that no longer matters as much to me?
Am I leaving enough time for the people, activities, and experiences that give my life meaning and joy?
And perhaps the most important question:
You don't need to account for every hour. Start by noticing where your time actually goes and whether that reflects what matters most to you. Then give yourself permission to make different choices.
Stewardship of time isn't about doing more with the time you have. It's about using your time for what matters.