How to Transform Your Career: A 5-Stage Framework for Creative Professionals
How to Transform Your Career – for Designers and Creative Professionals
Hey everybody. So today we're gonna be talking about transforming your career, and I'm gonna be talking about it in terms of kind of a stage based framework. I'll focus most of my commentary and and presentation on creative professionals design professionals.
But this really goes for any kind of solopreneur, entrepreneur who's thinking about maybe shifting what they're doing or the focus of what they're doing. And so I wanted to tell you a little bit about my own story because that frames out this topic really well and we'll show you why I'm so passionate about it.
I've had over 30 years in the industry. I've spent 20 years in big corporate. I spent over five years in global branding agencies and I've had 10 years running my own branding consultancy and building my own personal brand, my own content library and a number of courses and communities. And I'll share a little bit more about that in a second.
So I've been through five major pivots in my career and the first one I did was I was actually trained as a fine artist. I had my master's in painting. And I actually taught for two or three years and then found out that career wasn't really going to gimme the kind of lifestyle I needed.
It was also very difficult to find work, consistent work as a as a fine art teacher. And so I started in fine art and then I found my way into the fashion industry through t-shirt design. And I worked for a number of different companies eventually ending up as at Old Navy, where I built Old Navy's global t-shirt product business, which was an $800 million a year business.
It was a huge business at the time. And then I moved from fashion over to the agency side and I went into brand identity, learned brand strategy, CPG, worked with a huge host of Fortune 50, big enterprise level clients. And then I pivoted back over to in-house over the client side again. And I took a leadership role, global creative role at PepsiCo.
And then. I burned out. I burned out big time. I was in a big global role. I had some family stuff going on and I just hit a wall. In my early fifties, I hit a wall and I just bailed. I bailed. From that career, I didn't even know what I wanted to do or if I wanted to keep going and branding and design.
I was really lost and very burned out and had to go through a lot of self-reflection. And eventually when I came out the other side of that I had gone from in-house, big house corporate again, and then I moved into a solo career. And what did that look like? I'll get to that in a second, but the point I wanna make is sometimes.
We go through career transformations or pivots by choice and sometimes that thereby circumstance. And I experienced both of those. I've been laid off or been the victim of global financial downturns or corporate restructurings and found myself out of work three times in my career. That was not by my choice and not something that I asked for, but I had to transform myself in order to deal with that.
And then there are times when I've done it by choice. When I went from the fine art world and teaching fine art and the time where I burned out and left my last big corporate job, that was a choice, even though it was one that was made under duress. And so sometimes it's by choice, sometimes it's by circumstance., It's a five stage process of transformation and change that I'm gonna talk about today.
Sometimes you go through those things in a planful way. Sometimes you can go through it thoughtfully. Other times, it's more traumatic and it's forced on you, and you have to process through these things and make these transformations and these changes and these pivots in a way that was unexpected.
And I've done both. But what I'm gonna talk about today in these kind of stages of change, this works for either one of those things. And they're applicable to both of those scenarios. In 2016, when I burned out and left my big last big corporate job, I had a four page website, black and white website, little portfolio blog that had nothing on it, A resume page, and this homepage, which was just like a biop page, that was it.
That was my entire digital presence. I'd been behind corporate and agency walls, working for clients, had a lot of experience, huge teams, et cetera. But I had no visibility, had built no personal brand.. And. Like I said, I had a lot of corporate experience.
I've been agency side, client side, built huge teams, et cetera. Had some recognition, works with a lot of really giant, awesome clients. Enjoyed it a lot, but I'd never done any content. I'd never done a digital conference. I had no podcasts, no videos, no blogs, no nothing out there.
I had no visibility to the larger world unless I showed up at a physical trade show or something like that. And when I hit that wall. My attention was turned right. I suddenly learned about this world of the consulting economy, solo entrepreneurship, building a personal brand, and I'd had it working from the man, to be honest with you.
I'd had a very long, very successful career, but I hit a wall, a big wall, and I really had to do things differently. And I realized that I didn't know anything about what I needed to know in order to be independent. And so this was not planful, and it wasn't a huge shock to the system, but my attention and my curiosity and my energy was really getting fed by this idea of being a solopreneur.
And so my attention was turning. In 2016, I joined a mastermind group, and this was absolutely pivotal for me in terms of accelerating my growth and learning what I needed to learn to be independent and to grow some career agency and some career longevity insurance for myself and upskill what I knew so I could survive in my own business.
And then also in 2016, I launched my newsletter, which has been running now for 10 years. I launched my YouTube channel and I think I'm getting my 10 year anniversary in June of this year. Got my silver play button on the wall over there, which I earned about two and a half, three years in. And by 2017, 80% of my clients, for my branding and consulting business, were coming directly from YouTube.
So that content engine, that inbound marketing engine of long form video on YouTube really performed for me. And it's it's a medium that really still performs.. Then in 2019, I started a podcast.
I started a series of my initial mastermind groups, which were 12 weeks long. It was called The Guild, and I ran four different instances of that. I launched my free Facebook group,. And I built my brand strategy one-on-one course, which is still available.
And then in 2013, just a few years ago, I launched Bonfire. Over two years ago, and it's been running successfully since. So Bonfire is a proven entity, and you're gonna hear from some of the people who've been in Bonfire and had their careers transformed by this experience.
And my solo career was built on the foundation of being in a mastermind group. But, so now I have this, I have a successful brand consultancy. I'm doing all this content, my mastermind group, my courses, my newsletter, all this sort of stuff, speaking at digital conferences, being a guest on podcasts.
All of this I built as a solo person. And the beautiful thing about having this kind career agency is that no one can fire me. No financial downturn is gonna put me out of a job. No. Corporate restructuring is gonna put me out of a job if I can lose a client. Sure. But there's a whole bunch of other clients that wanna work with me after that.
So there's nothing that can affect my livelihood because I have built professional agency and I want that for you too. And you can have that kind of professional agency and that kind of insulation from the forces that be, even if you are continuing to work in a full-time job, you can build insulation from things happening by circumstance that aren't expected.
So you don't end up like I did in 2016 with a three page website and absolutely no idea what to do. I don't want that for you. Let's talk about how to transform your career. This is why career transformations feel really different right now, or the idea of transforming your career.
We are definitely having a moment. Our industry, the creative industry right now is seriously having a moment. Like there's tremendous economic insecurity going on geopolitical level. Economic insecurity and tumultuous things happening in the global climate. And you know what I'm talking about? The creative industry itself is going through huge disruption in the last five to 10 years, the gig economy, right?
The consulting economy, the content creation industry that's been built up. And now AI in the last couple years has just completely blown things up. And everyone's head is spinning around AI burnout is rising. There was this huge rise coming out of c of remote work and the isolation that, the continuation of that remote work, the feeling of isolation and loneliness, that's been permeating our industry is just really significant. And I see it a lot in the people that I coach and that I work with. A lot of folks are also really questioning, is AI gonna take my job? There's definitely a kind of chicken, little skies falling feeling out there around ai and I totally get it.
And that's something we're gonna talk a little bit about too. Developing some professional agency and career insurance around what AI is doing in our industry. But here's the thing, you have to understand. That's why career transformation is a really important topic right now for just about everyone to consider.
So even the people who were employed in agencies and in-house in corporations and stuff with job jobs, right? They are going to be affected by all of these things and they're a little more insulated and, head down doing their work. But even folks who have full-time jobs, and you may be one of them this is the sort of stuff that's really important to have your, kind of spidey sense and your antenna up around.
The thing you have to understand is that these sorts of transformations and these sorts of moments in time these moments that we have in our careers are normal. Career pivots happen all the time. The thing is that they are no longer rare. And a lot of times for creatives anyway, they're no longer linear.
Meaning, it's not like a career ladder, a, a straight line. Sometimes there are side jogs and circuitous pathways that happen in our careers. I've had five. I just outlined them for you. It happens. And being prepared for it. And understanding these kind of stages of change that you need to pass through in order to have a transformation that makes sense is important.
And the thing I wanna impress upon you, especially for the folks who've been in the industry a while,, is that these mid to late career transformations are different from the ones that were earlier in your career. We are faced with ageism.
Ageism is rife in the creative industry. So if you're over 40, I hate to tell you, but you gotta target on your back and it's something you really gotta start thinking about and paying attention to. I don't mean to be a doomsayer here. I just want you to be prepared. And I coach people and I have, people reaching out to me every day who have been blindsided by ageism.
There's family responsibilities that we have. There's financial responsibilities, mortgages, rent to pay, people to support, parents to support. So later in your career, these sorts of transformations have a lot more moving parts to them than they did when you were younger. We have financial needs, and so these sorts of transformations, if you're thinking about one or being faced by one by circumstance, they take a little more preparation, a little more thought.
And so there's a little bit of a mental reframe that I want you to go through, and that is that you're not starting over. This is not that. This is not the beginning of your career where you're completely starting fresh. You're not throwing away your experience, and in fact, your experience is going to inform everything that you do in this transformation.
It's an evolution and it's gaining agency over your future. This is the time to build that career longevity insurance policy, and I'm gonna help you do that, today. Now, career transformations follow a predictable series of steps, and they're set steps. I'm gonna walk you through them today.
And if you can recognize where you are in these stages of change, in these stages of transformation, you can make better decisions around what to do next. Okay? So that's why I am walking you through them. So here are the five stages of change of transformation. There's number one, pre-contemplation number two. Contemplation. Number three is preparation. Number four is action, and number five is maintenance.
people move through these very distinct stages of change and no one skips a step. You may not actually start at step number one if you are coming at it from having this. Foisted on you by events. you also have to remember that it's okay to move backward or to pull back and re-look at a previous step at some point.
The goal in this whole process is awareness. It's not urgency, it's awareness. We're gonna go through these five stages in detail, and the first stage, as I said, is pre-contemplation.
Pre-contemplation is when you're thinking to yourself something feels off. But I'm not gonna call it a problem yet. And I would venture to say that probably 60% of the people in our industry are feeling this right now. And at this stage, you might be still functioning in your career, you might be still employed, possibly, you might even be still very capable, even possibly advancing in your career right now.
But you may have this inkling in the back of your mind, you may be feeling increasingly nervous, restless, or drained. Starting to feel like you don't have that energy that you used to have some of the common signals. Of this or that you've lost your excitement or your creative energy.
You may be feeling boxed in by your role or by your title. Maybe you sit hit some sort of promotional ceiling. Maybe there's someone above you who's not gonna be moving, or maybe there's some sort of, ceiling that you, you don't want to cross. Like you don't want to move from being an individual contributor to going into management.
For instance, you may be increasingly irritated by your work, or irritated by the fact that it used to feel more manageable, and now it may not anymore. You could be telling yourself also, and this is an important one, you could be telling yourself, I should be grateful, right? I should be grateful that I have a job.
There's so many people who don't have jobs, but that's one of those ones that you have to be careful about because it can keep you stuck. another thing that some people do is that they stay busy. To avoid any kind of reflection. They frenetically keep moving so they don't have to sit, think, reflect, and take stock of where they really are.
So that's one of those signals that happens in that pre-contemplation phase. And the thing that you have to remember is that discomfort or pain shows up before clarity shows up. You don't need to have a plan yet. You don't need to have it all figured out. You just have to start noticing patterns.
You have to slow down and think, take some stock, and start noticing patterns of behaviors or feelings within yourself so you can start to pre cognate the fact that some sort of pivot, transformation is coming down the pike. There's this great quote that says, discomfort is not a weakness.
It's the first signal that something wants to change. I'd put another way is that growth is painful and if you're going to grow or if you're starting to have a growth spurt, right? You may be feeling some pain, you may be feeling some discomfort. It's a signal that you want to pay attention to in yourself.
Stage number two is contemplation.. And this is a stage where you say, I know something needs to change. Like you're starting to realize that this is probably a thing, right?
And this is where a whole lot of people get stuck. You might be feeling that you're aware of the problem, but you're torn between this idea of stability and the desire for change. And that is completely normal because stability, means predictability. It means kind of safety, right? And change can be scary.
It mean doing things in a different way. There's this level of fear mixed with curiosity. So you have curiosity about what could be next, what it could look like. How could I be more fulfilled? How can I have a deeper, meaningful, energy driven level of a career.
But it's there's this ball and chain of fear that's attached to it at the time. you could just call an analysis paralysis, really, when it comes down to it. I always say that if perfectionism and fear of failure had a baby. It would be analysis paralysis, right? Analysis paralysis is really rooted in perfectionism, having it figured out, having the answer, and then this level of fear of failure.
And so as you're thinking and in this stage of contemplation, these are the sorts of things that come into mind. And so here's what I encourage you to do. Do a self-assessment. You have to think of your career not as a ladder. You have to think of it more as a web. This is a quote that a guy named Paul Presler, who used to be the CEO of Gap, Inc.
I was working with him. And he said, Phil. Great careers, a lot of times are more like webs than they are ladders,. It was an amazing quote because especially with creative professionals, a lot of the times when we progress or make changes or transformations in our careers, they're not entirely linear.
A lot of the times they're an associated jog to the right or to the left, where we're taking a skill set that we had or that we've been using in a small way, in something that we've been doing or we've been developing as a side hustle, and that informs our change, our transformation to something else.
You want to take inventory of your skills, and this is both functional skills. What can you do? What apps do you know? What, capabilities do you have, and also, this is an important one, a lot of people forget, which is your soft skills. What are your people skills, your presentation skills, your management skills, your, client skills those communication skills, writing skills, what are those soft skills?
Not necessarily just the functional skills, like what do I do? Soft skills are more like, how do I act? How do I interact? You want to take a, an assessment of your experience, right? So your past jobs, your past roles, your past titles, you wanna assess your interests, I was on Chris Do's podcast a number of years ago, and I was talking about.
How when you graduate from school, the career guidance counselor always asks you, what are you passionate about? What are you passionate about? And you should make that your career. The problem with that is that passion carries all this amazingly huge amount of weight, and it's very scary to think about defining what your passion is and putting a pin in that, right?
What's easier to do is to think about it in terms of curiosity. What am I curious about? What are the things that have been drawing me? What have I been putting in my inspiration folder, what are the things that I'm, reading about in content or drawn to that are slightly outside of what I'm doing, but something that's drawing me or feeding my energy?
Think about it in terms of what am I curious about? So assess that. Start to capture that and think about it in a different way. You also wanna assess your values. What is it that you value? What kind of a culture do you want to be in? If you're starting to go out on your own, what kind of culture do you want to build?
For your own company. And then the other thing I try to encourage people to do is think about it in terms of energy. You either have an activity or a career or a vocation that feeds your energy and energizes you, or it drains you. And so what are the things in what you've been doing or the experiences that you've had that have really fed that energy?
And then what are the things that have been draining that energy? You want to capture those and assess that because those are the sorts of things that you're gonna be using in order to make the decisions in these transformations or in these pivots that you're thinking about. Now, I want to share with you a couple tools that I have around self-assessment.
One is the personal brand wheel. This is a framework tool that I developed for building and getting a 360 degree view, a 30,000 foot view, however you wanna describe it. Of your personal brand. And when you start going through a a career transformation, a career pivot, using this tool, the personal brand wheel, can be really helpful in assessing where you are, what you have, and what you may need to pay attention to, or what you may need to build a little bit more.
I wish I had this tool and I came out of my last corporate thing in burnout in 2016 and didn't know what the hell I was doing. I didn't even know what all the moving parts of a personal brand were. This is the kind of tool that's super helpful and if you go to philip van dusen.com/p BW for Personal Brand Wheel, you can download this tool to PDF.
It's got a number of pages of kind of prompt questions and descriptions of how you use the tool. It's very handy. Another thing that you can do is you can journal. Journal and writing for me anyway, has always been a really great way to process my thoughts and to undergo, reflective self-assessment.
So writing and journaling can be really helpful, especially for creative people. It seems to work really well. There's also passive reflection, and this is one that not a lot of people think about. And because we live in such a fast-paced world, and at any moment we just we pick up the phone and we're bored for two seconds and like suddenly we're scrolling.
Sometimes it's good just to sits, still sit, still, think, feel, don't do anything. Go sit out in nature, go to a park, sit on a bench for a half an hour and don't do anything. Don't pick up your phone, just see what comes up. Self-assessment doesn't have to be action. Sometimes it can be completely passive and just based in reflection.
That's one of the ones that people don't talk about a lot. It doesn't make for great content, but it's one that sometimes, I've found can give you more answers than any kind of active assessment tools or actions. Another thing you can do in terms of a tactic or a tool for self-assessment, and that is get some coaching, get some outside perspectives on what it is that you're doing.
Another way you can get outside perspectives is to leverage your network, your peer network. Kinda share with them where you are and where you're going. reach out to your network make use of the observations of others. Share with people where you are, what you're thinking about, what your curiosity is, and see if you can get people to reflect on what they know about you, how they experience you, where they seen your strengths are, where they see maybe some of your opportunities or challenges are.
We have blind spots. This is the biggest reason why most creative professionals can't for the life of themselves, design their own websites or write their own website copy. Because we don't have perspective on ourselves. We can't assess. We can do this for clients day in and day out, right? because we have an outside perspective on what our clients are doing and how they're positioning themselves and communicating what it is that they do and what they offer.
We can't do that for ourselves.. So you really have to have an outside perspective and leveraging your network, your peer network is one of those things That's a great tactic for self-assessment in this stage of change. And then as I said before, pattern recognition. So you want to think about what patterns you've been seeing across your past roles and what you're doing and your experience of those roles.
Because you're not choosing a direction just yet. You're just clarifying what's going to inform your direction. Okay, I'm gonna say that again. You're not choosing a job yet. You're just clarifying your direction in this process.
So stage number three is called preparation.
You're not jumping in yet, like I said, but you're getting ready. This is a stage that separates thoughtful transitions from reactive transitions. Now, like I said, sometimes circumstance forces upon us. Actions and preparations that we have to have that we weren't expecting. Those outside events force us to be reactive.
But in the preparation stage of change and transformation, you really want to be more thoughtful about it. And the mindset here is that this preparation stage is progress. You don't have to jump right to action and say, what am I doing? How am I changing? What am I applying for? How am I, building my next thing?
Preparation is progress, and you have to give yourself credit for that. And again, stillness and reflection can be really strategic and yield real truths about. Where you're going to go next. Here are some examples of what preparation looks like in mid-career. It could look like I just mentioned, a self-assessment.
It could also be a risk assessment. So this is real, and like I said, necessary in mid to late career transitions or transformations is you have to assess risk. Do you have financial runway? So sometimes making pivots or transformations take months, not weeks of financial runway. In order to make that change, I suggest that people have nine months to a year of financial runway if you are making a major career transformation.
I know that's a lot and it's a lot to ask and there are people who've done it with less, but Sometimes the changes that you make take a while to take effect and to have people understand that you've made this change and that you're operating in a different way. And also to, gather attention, visibility to what it is that you're doing.
Having that financial runway is important. Also, one of the things that, preparation looks like in mid-career is starting to do side experiments. instead of making huge leaps or huge decisions, sometimes side hustles. Are the way to go, meaning maybe you're starting to moonlight or freelance from your full-time gig.
If you're self-employed, maybe you're starting to do smaller self-directed side projects that are exploring that secondary skill set or that other skill or direction that you're looking to develop or remove into. Into. You could be doing strategic partnerships, so that's collaborations with peers in your network, working projects that are maybe outside of your normal skillset or getting involved in something that's gonna inform what your next change or your transformation is gonna be.
It could be education, you could be taking some courses, things like my brand strategy 1 0 1 course, where you're starting to uplevel your skillset so you're thinking in a more strategic way rather than a tactical, deliverable sort of way. It also could be, a side experiment or a a movement or attention to your V-shaped skill sets.
One of the things I talk about a lot in bonfire and coaching is T-shaped versus V-shaped skill sets. T-shaped skill sets are great when you're employed. Your employer loves the fact that you do one thing, you do it really well, you know everything about it. You deliver that thing. That's what agencies and corporations want from their employees.
They want t-shaped skill sets. When you're self-employed or you have your own agency, or you're, solopreneur or you're moving into consulting or coaching or something that you're transforming your career into, you really need to start and develop v-shaped skillset.
So that's the one thing that you're super great at. And that you're transforming into and now focusing on. But you also need to learn a little bit of finance, a little bit of communication, a little bit of business development, a little bit of client management, project management. There's a lot of things that go into being independent and having that level of professional agency that go beyond a regular T-shaped skillset.
And then the goal of all this is to test these ideas before committing, and that is one of the major aspects of this stage of preparation. Some of the practical areas in this to focus on are, this idea of the career web side jog, right? So how do you explore related job categories? If you're a designer, how do you explore copywriting? If you're a graphics person, how do you explore product design or ux ui what is that kind of secondary related skillset that you have that could inform this career transition or this career web side jog?
If you're looking for other full-time employment, this could be using consulting or freelancing as a bridge to that. Or maybe you're doing strategic partnerships or collaborations with others as you moonlight that is going to, inform or act as a bridge to another sort of full-time employment.
There's also an aspect of internal repositioning before external change. So you have to think about it in terms of how am I writing my own personal brand positioning statement in a different way? How am I gonna re-architect what that looks like and have it inform this change that's down the road, but doing it before that, Do you have any gaps in your skills that need to be closed? Do you need to learn more about writing or possibly speaking or presenting? Do you need more financial skills or marketing skills? Maybe you need to develop some kind of understanding of video or audio production.
We're editing. It could be AI for a lot of us. For all of us is ai because the tsunami of AI that we're living through right now, there's no one who knows everything or can even purport to know everything. I guarantee you that we're all learning. We're all trying to catch up on that. It could be team management.
Think about those gaps that you need to be closing. You wanna remember that this is not that early career hustle. It's a very different kind of mindset of how you're going about it. You're taking stock of your experience and your credibility and your positioning yourself in a different way.
One of the things that I've always done in my career, I've gone through, like I said, a whole lot of different pivots and transformations and side jogs in my career, is that a lot of my career pivots were not planned. Meaning they were foisted on me, they were circumstantial. I was laid off, or there was a reorg and I found myself out of work, or there was a relocation or a family event.
A lot of those things were not planned, but the pivots, the transformations that I made, those career side jogs that I made were always strategic, meaning I had prepared for them. I thought them through and I really made an informed decision about which direction I was gonna go and how I was gonna react to that circumstance.
So again, I want you to think about it this way. Career pivots or transformations aren't always planned, but they can be strategic if you go through these assessments and really think about how that. Next thing is going to further your movement in your career web.
Okay. Now stage number four is a big one. This is action.
So this is where you're saying to yourself, I'm actively changing how my career works at this point.
This is where visible change starts to happen and where it begins. One of the things you want to focus on is upskilling and staying relevant. So this is that continuous learning stage. Continuous learning in creative professional careers these days is complete non-negotiable. If you want career longevity insurance, you have to continuously learn.
And the best place to do that right now, and we all know the answer to this is AI literacy. You have to focus on skills that enable leverage and agency in your career. AI is that thing right now. Here's a quote I want you to take in. AI won't take your job if you make it your job to learn ai. AI is not gonna take your job, but you have to make it your job to learn AI because here's the thing, we're creative professionals.
When, the computers came around, desktop publishing, is a thing. Decades ago, everyone, the sky was falling just like it is today. This is the pers, this is the benefit of being as old as I am, is that I have perspective decades old perspective of how these events happen in in our industry and the zeitgeist that goes around them and this zeitgeist that we're living through with ai and the fear and the trepidation that we're going through with this was exactly what happened with the design printing, publication industries, creative industries.
When the computer came around, cork Express, right? Cork, illustrator, freehand, all of these things that made desktop publishing a thing and everyone thought, oh, No one's gonna need designers. Guess what happened? It actually made us more important.
But what was important was that we learned the tools. We have to learn the tools to survive in our career. And that's exactly what's happening with ai. If you want to survive and flourish in your career, learn how your career and what you do is affected by and made better by using ai. This right now it falls into a few categories, the Ask Engines, right Chat, GPT, perplexity, clawed, Gemini.
Learn how to write prompts, learn how to get out of those engines, what you really need to get out of them. This is something that takes a lot of experimentation study and thought these tools are incredibly powerful, but I guarantee you, you are not using more than 20% of what they can do right now as it relates to your industry.
And so think about that, really dive into that and embrace that. I would recommend that you. In whatever tool that you think is the best for you, like Chachi PT or whatever, buy a premium subscription. Not like the super expensive ones, but like the 20, $25 a month ones. So you don't have any limitations on what it's that you do.
You also get increased functionality in the fact that you can enter in your personal brand ethos, your background, all that sort of stuff, and it remembers it and you can build custom gpt, et cetera. Get in there and embrace it. The next kind of category is generative engines. So this is things like Notebook LM or Adobe Firefly, or Mid Journey or stable diffusion.
The list goes on and on, right? Tons and tons of generative engines, and they all have their own strengths and their own, best use cases. And so getting and experimenting with those is also important. And then there's also the AI influence on all sorts of other SaaS products and apps.
For instance, I pay for the script, which I use to transcribe my YouTube videos and to transcribe my podcasts and to transcribe my coaching sessions and turn them into summaries of coaching sessions and action plans and all this sort of stuff. I use it to edit video, of course. 'cause you can edit text and it just edits the video for you.
Script has incredibly strong capabilities that are informed by ai. That didn't exist two years ago. Adobe Creative Suite, right? Every single aspect of the Adobe Creative Suite has AI that's now being built into it. Web development, email automations through kit, all sorts of funnels.
AI is permeating every single SaaS and app, and so learning how to use those in an effective way is one of those things that's going to build career insurance for you and fill a skill gap that everyone is struggling with right now. There's also learning strategy focusing more on a higher level of deliverable, a thinking deliverable, an intellectual deliverable.
And this is where things like brand strategy 1 0 1, which is my signature brand strategy course, which takes your skills as a creative professional and upskills them dramatically. So you are moving what I like to call to the tip of the spear and getting to where all the true decisions are made in a business that can affect getting you more work.
learning brand strategy or some sort of more intellectual deliverable as opposed to a product deliverable, an edit, a graphic design, a website, all that sort of stuff is one of those things that you can really upskill and build some level of agency for yourself.
Also marketing skills. This is a place where a lot creative professionals work for themselves, learning them in a more formal way can give you leverage in your career because they're applicable in so many different places.
And that is marketing skills and growth skills. Because if you upskill yourself in these areas, not only will it help you grow your own business and your own career, but then you can also use 'em with your clients. And that again, gives you this level of agency and career insurance and helps you in that transformation by making you stronger through it.
Email marketing. Paid advertising.
New business development, how to get new clients, sales funnels, et cetera. Account management. How do you manage accounts and projects for clients? Also your, financial acumen feeds right into marketing and growth skills, learning budgets, learning software, learning how to read a financial sheet, learn how to do financial planning, how to do project planning for more complex projects with a lot of moving parts.
Those sorts of skills are. Transportable skills from one vertical of a career web to another. Also thinking about fractional roles. So could you act as freelancer, consultant, coach, or fractional? role for a company that doesn't have either the need for a full-time person or the budget for a full-time person is one of those things that if you learn how to do that, learn how to establish consulting or retainer relationships.
That's another thing that can really insulate you from any kind of tumultuous events. And then you have to remember that pivoting is evolution. You're not erasing anything. You're taking your skills. You are repositioning them, and you're upskilling because it's an evolution.
It's not like a light switch. You and the process of doing those things is progress.
The next thing I wanna talk about is leveraging your network, because career change and career transformation does not happen well alone. Your network is always going to be the most underutilized asset that you have.
Developing a peer network and using that peer network in a really effective way is one of the things that I would say 95% of creative professionals do not do well. Highly recommend if you're thinking about and going through the process of a career transformation or approaching it, is to reconnect with former colleagues, former clients, former bosses, former mentors, or establishing a mentor relationship or a coaching relationship.
The next thing is strategic partnerships, and that is, collaborating with and maybe engaging in low risk entry points to what it is that you want to do in your career transformation. Start playing with it the side hustle approach. Now the next thing that I want to talk about is personal brand.
Positioning if you've ever worked with clients and talked about brand positioning, it's essentially What is it that you offer? Who do you offer it to? Why are you better and why are you different? And I like to think about it or talk about it in terms of building a personal brand through this kind of visualization of pillars that I have, which is credibility building to visibility, value and authority.
If you think about building your own personal brand and positioning your personal brand this way, it helps You want to establish your credibility and that is documenting what it is that you know your history, where you've come from, what is the experience that you're bringing to the table.
The next is visibility. How are you going to show up? How are you going to become visible to the people in your industry, whether that's people who wanna hire you full-time job, or it's clients that you want to get, or it's peers that you want to collaborate with? How are you gonna raise that level of visibility for yourself?
How do you get seen? Because people can't work with you. They can't hire you unless they know that you exist and that you're showing up in their feed regularly.
The next one is value. Value is what is it that you offer? What is that product? What is that service? What is that transformation that you're offering others that's going to change their business, change their life?
And then as you create those transformations, that builds to a level of authority what it is that you're known for, what it is that is the halo around you that people recognize as your superpower. I think about personal brand positioning this way, capturing and documenting your credibility, bringing that to the market and making it visible.
Building that value by creating those transformations in people and building to a level of authority. And the key actions that you need to take in order to start making that sort of thing happen are updating your website. These are tactical things to prepare yourself or take action within a career transformation or a career change, update that website.
And like I said, it's really hard to get perspective on your own website. Creatives struggle with this and it takes them forever and they put it off and they hem and haw and they noodle and it doesn't change much. Gets some outside perspective, some pure eyes on your website. And update that website, especially the copywriting, to start to tell that story of your career transformation and that career journey that you're going through.
LinkedIn. You wanna make sure that you're editing your LinkedIn profile. There has been a massive shift in the citations that LLMs are returning. Meaning the answers that chat GPT, Gemini perplexity are putting out when someone asks that a question, when someone asks those engines a question,
it's spitting out citations from a whole range of sources, right? The web, Google, YouTube, all that. The number one citation source is Reddit. The number two, and this is brand new because it's moved up a number of places, is LinkedIn. And so you have to edit your LinkedIn profile for SEO or. A EO Ask engine optimization.
So it shows up in citations in chat GPT perplexity, because that is the new Google search. These AI engines are the new Google search, so you have to make sure that you're editing your LinkedIn profile for a EO for SEO, and it's a very different way of approaching a LinkedIn profile. It's not a resume.
You're basically doing it for search. Another key action that you can take is your portfolio. How are you highlighting your past competencies? Are your case studies? Are your portfolio pieces up to date? I bet 75% of you, the answer is no. And the other piece of it is how are you showcasing what your other competencies are, where you're moving to, or what are you transforming into?
How are you illustrating that in terms of your portfolio? What are you putting out there? To become visible, that's going to signal to the world that you're moving in this new direction.
And then there's content. So if you're not doing content, number one start, people are talking about have we met peak content?
Yes, we have. But the problem is that over 50% of it on the web now is produced by bots. It's produced by ai. So really human content that showcases you as a person and your personality is more important than ever because the web is being taken over by AI bots and it's very recognizable.
So developing a level of content or visibility around you as a human, as a personal brand is more important than ever. And so if you haven't done it, don't be discouraged, but start. And if you are doing it, focus more on the human side of you. notice this on LinkedIn. If you go on LinkedIn a lot, you'll notice that more and more people are actually posting things that look more like Facebook posts on LinkedIn, and there's a reason for that.
They are establishing themselves as human beings with feelings, with insights, putting a face to this LinkedIn profile, not an avatar, a true face, a personality, a journey. And they're doing that because so much of what we're seeing and scrolling through and being, hit with these days, this really generic AI bot generated slop.
And so try to bring that personality side to it. And then you want to keep in mind your storytelling. So how are you telling that story about yourself? You're not explaining the gap. You are not explaining the gap between where you were and where you're going. You're not saying, oh, this ended. What you're doing is you're starting to narrate your evolution.
You're starting to share and articulate your journey of transformation for people. Again, it brings that human side to it. the one thing I wanna say about this, is that this is actually the hardest thing to do. It's very hard to be transparent and open yourself up and be as visible in a human way on more business-like social media platforms, but it has huge benefits.
Okay, now we're moving on.
Number five. The last stage of change in transformation is maintenance, and this is how do I make this whole thing sustainable, How do I make these changes stick?
Most people completely underestimate this stage. There's a thing called identity lag, and that is that. When folks go through career transformations, a lot of times we have defined ourselves, by our business card or by the company that we work for, or by our title or by our salary, or the number of people report to us.
We have established a level of identity within a construct, and when you start to transform your career, you're stuck in the old identity construct. You have identity lag as you are moving into the new thing. This sometimes manifests itself as imposter syndrome. Like, how can I say that?
I'm this thing. I feel like a complete fraud. everyone will see through the mask. I don't have the credibility that I need to be this new thing or to move into this new thing. There's a crisis of self-image. But this is where the maintenance of this change comes in, is that you really have to fight that.
And sometimes, again, getting peer feedback or getting coaching around this can really help. The more senior you are in your career, the more advanced you are in your career. The tougher imposter syndrome gets I've coached a number of senior executives and senior executives suffer from imposter syndrome.
more than people who are much more junior than them. So mid to late career, making these sorts of pivots or transformations is tough because you have established a level of identity in what you used to do. And when you're trying to think of yourself and act in a different way and transform your career, it's hard sometimes to look at yourself and really internalize you're being different in a genuine way.
And because of that, you may develop a level of inconsistent momentum in what it is that you're doing or what it is you're trying. Doubt starts creeping back in. And another thing you may get hit with is decision fatigue. And this is another thing that getting a peer network can really help with, is that there are so many decisions that you need to make when you're pivoting or transitioning in your career.
There's so many things to build. There's so many options, different directions that you can go and getting outside perspective and advice and, experience from other people can be really helpful in minimizing this level of decision fatigue or Lack of clarity or lack of confidence in your decisions And so maintenance requires continued goal setting. And also accountability. So the goals that you have in your setting for yourself in your transformation and accountability to those goals. It really requires peer support, and those sorts of feedback loops and perspectives that you need confidence and decision making, And then also that ongoing continuous learning to discover new tactics and new resources and new ways of going about things. The thing to remember, is that no one transforms alone. You have to find the peers at similar stages of transformation. You have to find coaches or mentors.
You have to, continue your education. because transformation does not have to be, nor is it easiest when it's a solo endeavor. And now I want to share with you just a little bit about a community that I've built called Bonfire, which is a mastermind community for mid to late career creative professionals and entrepreneurs.
And if you don't know anything about Mastermind groups, lemme tell you just a little bit about them. So this is Mark who's in Bonfire right now. Bonfire's been going on for a little over two years at this point. He said the industry has changed so much and my career has plateaued. And then a lightning bolt hit me and I came across Bonfire and I suddenly realized I had to change things to get different results.
You can keep doing what you've always been doing and get the same results you've always been getting, or you can change things. And Bonfire is a Mastermind community. We meet on Zoom four times a month. Two of them are mastermind sessions and one of them is an open office hours conversation session.
And the next one is either a visiting expert or, 'cause I bring in all sorts of experts to talk to the group or it's a inspiration session called Pasture. And you get mentorship and coaching from me. You get an instant overnight peer network who's gonna help you in your career transition and transformation.
And you get goal setting and accountability, a trusted peer feedback loop. Your confidence will be raised in the decisions that you're making and you may be exposed to decisions that you didn't even know that you had to make. And then there's also opportunity for partnerships and making a greater level of progress that way.
A guy named Zach, who was in bonfire. It said that Bonfire helped me build my personal brand online and gave me the kick I needed to start putting myself out there without fear of failure or judgment. And before I knew it, I landed a full-time teaching role of designers at the university level. Zach was a individual contributor in a corporation and he wanted to make a transformation.
And by coming into bonfire within a matter of months, actually, he had landed a full-time teaching role at the university level. And that's the sort of transformation that can be facilitated by participating in a mastermind group. This is Anne, who also had a similar experience. She said, after being laid off, I was at a crossroads.
After joining Bonfire within months, I landed an incredible role as a creative director. If you're a creative pro navigating a career transition, I cannot recommend bonfire enough. So these are just a few of the testimonials of people who have actually been in bonfire and experienced real transformations for themselves.
It includes group coaching from me, two times a month. Their mastermind sessions where you can get individualized help and group coaching on your challenges, your goals, where you want to get in your career. One time a month, you have office hours, one time a month you're visiting experts or inspiration session.
And then you have access to all the session recordings of everything that we do. So if you ever miss one or you want to go back and rehear what was presented, then those are available to you. There's also a private online community, so this is on the circle platform, if you're familiar with that.
It's like a private Facebook group on steroids, but it's behind a firewall, so only the people from Bonfire can get in there, and only the people from Bonfire can access all the tools and resources and recordings within it. There's a Fire Milestone success map, which gives you an idea of what the process and stages are for your growth that are recommended.
There's also a huge resource library with hundreds of videos, playlists, tools, downloads, templates, checklists. It just goes on and on. It gives you basically everything that you need to make this sort of a career transition. And then you also get super hyper discounted access to brand strategy 1 0 1, which is my, signature brand strategy course.
you get this level of peer feedback and accountability, which as you heard is so critical to making a career transformation. It's just amazingly critical. Joselle was in Bonfire still is, and she said I came in with three clients and in 12 weeks. I did. One of them is even coming from inside the group itself.
It's really amazing. Laura had another experience. She said I was recently promoted. She had actually just made a transformation promoted to associate art director and bonfire was a huge part of making that happen. It happened while she was in bonfire and the feedback that she got when she made that transition was super helpful.
And Philip's mentorship gave me the confidence I needed to tackle some tough decisions.
. Sonya longtime member of Bonfire said I had goals of building and communicating my brand, but I was struggling with how to do it.
Now I've got more confidence because I bounce ideas off of peers. I trust the peer aspect of giving you confidence and faster forward momentum when you're considering, or in the preparation stage or in the action stage of going through a career. Transformation cannot be understated. The membership for Bonfire for four sessions access to all the resources, access to me is $97 a month
super affordable and I highly recommend you take advantage of it. If you go to philip van deusen.com/bonfire, you can learn more about membership in Bonfire and the different levels of membership that are available to you. It's a private community and there are forums, there are chat rooms, there are, resource centers that are all organized, vary logically so you can access and find things easily checklists, tutorials, playlist, so if you go to philip van deusen.com/bonfire, you can learn more about it. And if you have any questions and you're serious about joining, I'd be happy to do a Zoom with you one-on-one and talk about your membership in Bonfire.
Just hit me up, connect with me on LinkedIn, shoot me a DM on LinkedIn and say, I'm serious about joining Bonfire. I'd like to have, 20 minutes of your time and we can discuss whether it's a good fit for you.
And the thing I want to leave you with now is that this sort of transformation is a process. It's not a single decision. It takes time. You need to get help sooner than you think you actually need it, because once you get stuck, it's a lot harder to get unstuck.
What you want to have is the help and the peer feedback and the support that you need as you start to go through this process and recognizing where you are, where you fitting in these five stages. number one is precontemplation.
Number two is contemplation. Number three is preparation. Four is action, and five is maintenance. Wherever you find yourself in these stages of change, knowing where you are gives you power, and it gives you the ability to understand the steps that you need to take and what you need to focus on.
And there is no need to rush unless circumstances have made this more critical and you're more in a stage of reacting than. processing and going through it at your own pace. So you wanna assess where you are and then you want to choose and focus on those next steps that you need to take.
