ViewPoint: Career Pivot Mindset Shifts
Published as a LinkedIn Newsletter on October 14, 2025
ViewPoint: Career Pivot Mindset Shifts
ViewPoint: Life, Career, & Leadership Reflections & Experiments
Welcome to ViewPoint, a newsletter designed to improve your ViewPoint on your life, career, & leadership through reflections and experiments. Each publication will include a reflection or experiment for a related life, career, or leadership topic. Choose one or choose all three to reflect on or experiment with – the choice is yours! My hope is that it empowers you to be your best self – in your life, in your career, and as a leader! Enjoy!
Today’s theme: What mindset shifts do you need to make with your career pivot?
When you pivot your career to a new focus, a new function, or a new organization, it’s important to shift your mindset around identity, failure, and leadership. It can help to ease the transition and create the desired life that you want.
As I’ve shifted from a Chief of Staff in the tech industry to Neurodivergent Tech Career Coach, I’ve had to address all three of these areas repeatedly.
LIFE Reflections & Experiments
A career pivot often leads to an identity shift. Who you work for, what you do, and how you feel about it, can shape how you feel about who you are in life. Your identity. You may find yourself feeling “unsettled” until you pause and reflect on who you’re becoming in your new career and what this means for your life.
It helps to reflect on the following:
What are your values? Have they shifted? Or are they the same? How do they show up in your new career and in your life?
What are your strengths and how are you building on those in your new career?
Who do you want to be in this new career? Are there a few key characteristics that you want to be known as? Do you have a desired personal brand?
How do you feel about introducing yourself while networking now? Are you proud of your new career? Are there beliefs that would be helpful to assess whether they’re true or not?
When I shifted from Chief of Staff at Microsoft to a Neurodivergent Tech Career Coach, I felt a shift in identity.
My values of leadership, connection, and impact were the same, but they are applied differently. Rather than leading teams, I’m coaching individuals. Rather than connecting with a team daily, I’m reaching out to coaches in my network. Rather than impacting thousands of people at a time with one project, I’m impacting one person at a time, which has a ripple effect on thousands over time.
My strengths of strategic planning are redirected towards my business. My communication is now directed towards these newsletters. My coaching grows with each client. My organization and drive for results are applied to coaching clients.
In my new career, I want to be known as present, inspiring, and innovative, always present with each client in our coaching, inspiring others to be their best selves, and always coming up with innovative approaches to helping people be their best selves through coaching and reflective workshops.
When introducing myself, I now feel the need to explain what I do and how I help people. I believe that each individual I meet has a different perception of what a Neurodivergent Tech Career Coach is and that I need to level set, how I define it. This has been a big shift.
What’s your identity shift?
CAREER Reflections & Experiments
Career pivots come with risk. You might fear rejection, being behind, or making the wrong move. But fear is often a sign that you’re stretching into something meaningful.
In your career pivot, it’s important to shift your mindset from fearing failure to embracing failure, to asking “what can I learn?” which is also known as a growth mindset. There are always experiments that fail. Mistakes are made. Information that’s not known. In a new career, it’s not possible to know everything. It’s not possible to be “perfect.” We get to be imperfect and learn. We get to grow and develop along the way.
Pause and reflect on your career pivot and where a growth mindset can help you.
Where might you be afraid of messing up? Can you gather a little more intel and take the first step?
Where might you be criticizing yourself too harshly and not allowing yourself to show up fully? Send the email? Speak up in the meeting? Present the content? Know that being imperfect and a little messy can lead to new learning and growth.
Where might you be holding back? If you move forward, what are the possibilities of what you can learn, what you can achieve? Tell yourself, “I have something to learn,” and then move forward with your first, next step, and see what you can learn and achieve!
I have a glass ornament that hangs by my desk that says, “You don’t grow when you are comfortable.” It’s a reminder that with my own career pivot, comes a lot of discomfort. Each day, I’m afraid of spending my time on the wrong priority. I’m afraid that I will waste my time and have nothing to show for it. When, in reality, each day I learn from the next. I prioritize differently and I learn what works overtime. One of the biggest things I’m learning is that, as a friend said, we plant seeds every day and it takes a long time for them to germinate, so I’m building patience. A growth mindset helps me daily.
How can a growth mindset help you with your career pivot?
LEADERSHIP Reflections & Experiments
As a leader, career pivots are an opportunity to re-brand your leadership style and to come more in alignment with the authentic leader that you are. Your mindset shift can be focused on how you lead yourself, first, before you lead others. How to trust yourself, how to direct yourself, and how to give yourself compassion.
To start, reflect on:
What leadership style aligns with your strengths and will result in an effective team and organizational results?
What skills, behaviors, and habits do you want to reinforce in your new career that help you lead authentically?
Where do you need to trust yourself more?
What boundaries, mentally and habitually, do you need to put in place to have the balance that you desire?
What self-care practices do you need to institute? Exercise? Eating? Sleep? Hobbies? Friendships? Self-compassion?
Starting to lead yourself can create the foundation to lead others. Take this career pivot, to redefine your style, trust yourself, direct yourself, and give yourself compassion.
In my new career, I now have a coaching leadership style, and I’ve built on my communication, organization, strategic planning, and organization skills. I’ve built habits around prioritization, weekly KPIs, time management, and systems for managing my business. I’ve set mental boundaries about how I think about work and when to shut off. I’ve established practices around exercise, eating, sleep, friendships, self-compassion, and hobbies that keep me well balanced and refreshed, and I'm still learning new ways to trust myself, guide myself, and have self-compassion.
How do you want to lead yourself through this career pivot?
When you shift your mindset, you shift your momentum. Shift your mindset around your identity, your mindset around failure to growth, and how to lead yourself, to gain momentum on your career pivot journey!
Each day we have an opportunity to reflect and experiment on our lives, careers, and leadership so we can be our best selves. Take the time today to reflect on and experiment to help you create your new ViewPoint and be your best self!
Here to help you thrive,
Coach Brieanne
ViewPoint Coaching & Consulting: Clarity for Complex Minds
1:1 coaching to find your next career step, unlock your peak career performance, and emerge as a leader. To learn more, visit: https://www.coachbrieanne.com