Something to listen toChanging jobs
Your working identity
A 38-minute podcast conversation with Herminia Ibarra on changing careers by trying things first
Why it’s worth your time
When you know you want something different but can't say what, this conversation with Herminia Ibarra offers a way forward that doesn't depend on more thinking on your own. A London Business School professor who studies career change, she argues you learn who you might become by trying things and meeting people, then adjusting as you go. A side project or a new contact can start to feel like progress.
How to change careers by trying things first
- Listen to the episode.
After the introductions, Ibarra sketches her idea of a working identity from about the 6-minute mark, and the host's own family story follows. He walks through the book's strategies from roughly the 13-minute mark: learning by doing rather than introspection, then possible selves around 20 minutes, small wins near 27, and seeking out people already doing what draws you near the end.
- Write a list of ten possible selves.
Include the half-baked ones and the ones you'd dread becoming. Circle one and choose a small way to try it in the next month: an adjacent project at work, a class, or a conversation with someone who already does it.
Good moments for this: when a recruiter's pitch suddenly looks temptingin the messy middle of a changeon a long walk
Keep going with Truest
Small actions add up. Truest helps you find the next thing worth doing, make the space to do it, and keep a record of your progress. It’s a private place to work on your career, and it’s yours, not your employer’s.
- It actually happensWe’ll put it on your calendar and remind you before it starts.
- The longer sessionCareer Compass is the guided session for working out what you want next.
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Ibarra suggests looking for an adjacent project or a different skill set within your organization before leaving. A manager who knows what you're curious about is sometimes the person who can open that door, and they can't if you haven't said it.
What might make this harder
Ibarra's suggestion for this case is to buy time with a side gig or part-time consulting while you explore, instead of grabbing the first full-time role that comes along.
Questions people ask
What is Herminia Ibarra's Working Identity about?
It's her book on how people reinvent their careers. In this episode she explains its main idea: you find out what you want next by trying things, meeting new people and testing possible selves, more than by planning it all out first.
What are possible selves?
A term Ibarra borrows from Stanford psychologist Hazel Markus for the range of people we imagine we might become, including the ones we hope for and the ones we fear. Ibarra asks her students to list at least ten.
How do I change careers without quitting my job?
Ibarra suggests exploring on the side: an adjacent project at work, a nonprofit board, helping a friend who's starting something, taking or teaching a class. Each can build skills and contacts while you learn what you like.
Is a career change an event or a process?
Ibarra describes it as leaving one thing behind while heading toward another that isn't defined yet, which is why the middle often feels messy.
What it says, and how it holds up
You can know what you don't want long before you know what you do. That gap is where Herminia Ibarra's work lives. In her account, people rarely think their way into a new career; they find it by acting, meeting people and noticing what fits. She uses an image worth keeping: jobs are Lego blocks and a career is what you build from them, so changing jobs inside the same structure is common, while switching to a different structure needs explaining, to employers and to the people who love you.
Ibarra is a career academic, a professor at Harvard Business School from 1989, then INSEAD for fifteen years, now London Business School, and she notes, as an interesting fact, that she has never changed careers herself. Her ideas here come from interviewing people mid-change. A few stick. There's no single true self to dig up, only possible selves. People who've made a big change tend to forget how confused they were in the middle. And the people worth finding are those already doing what you're drawn to, for inspiration as much as for job leads.
The show is FranklinCovey's leadership podcast, and it carries that: the host, Scott Miller, spends a couple of minutes on his own family story and mentions his own book, and the episode notes promote a FranklinCovey guide. The substance is in the twenty or so minutes in the middle. Her approach also assumes some slack, time or savings or a network to test with, and she touches only briefly on the harder case of someone who has just been laid off.
Miller offers the counterexample himself: someone whose boss is a jerk quitting the whole company or industry. If the trouble is one person rather than the work, possible selves may be more than you need; a move to another team, or one honest conversation, may be enough.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.