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Why So Many Smart Professionals Feel Stuck Right Now · Beyond Expertise

• 0:01
  Eric Dickmann: Welcome to Beyond Expertise, a podcast about identity reinvention for professionals ready to explore who they are beyond their titles and careers.
• 0:11
  Eric Dickmann: I'm your host, Eric Dickmann.
• 0:13
  Eric Dickmann: Let's get ready to go beyond expertise Today I wanna talk a little bit about why so many professionals feel stuck right now.
• 0:23
  Eric Dickmann: As I talk with my peers, as I talk with guests on this podcast, it's a reoccurring theme that people feel stuck.
• 0:32
  Eric Dickmann: They genuinely feel like they don't know what is the next step in their career, and they're highly anxious about it.
• 0:41
  Eric Dickmann: Look, we're living in a time of tremendous change.
• 0:45
  Eric Dickmann: We've got political upheaval, we've got tribalism, and of course we've got this huge looming, change coming with artificial intelligence.
• 0:56
  Eric Dickmann: And while it's incredibly exciting, and I'm sure we're all having fun experimenting with it in our jobs and our day-to-day lives, there's also an incredible amount of uncertainty about what it means for the future of work, and what it means for our professions, our skill set, our expertise, and how that is gonna be utilized in the years to come.
• 1:22
  Eric Dickmann: And I think a lot of people are reaching this point where they feel incredibly stuck because they don't know what the next move should be.
• 1:33
  Eric Dickmann: I think anybody who has tried to apply for a job on LinkedIn will tell you it's almost a fruitless exercise.
• 1:39
  Eric Dickmann: There are so many hundreds and thousands of people who apply to some of these jobs that the chance of you even getting a response is next to nothing.
• 1:51
  Eric Dickmann: And so why would you wanna subject yourself to the effort of going through the process of applying to one job after another knowing that you are just gonna be greeted by nonstop disappointment as you don't hear from these companies?
• 2:06
  Eric Dickmann: So then how do you go out and find that next career opportunity?
• 2:09
  Eric Dickmann: It's very hard.
• 2:11
  Eric Dickmann: Obviously leveraging your network, hearing about opportunities that might not be public, getting an opportunity from a network colleague that says,"Hey, we'd love to have you come work for our company." Those are ideal situations, but those are hard, and those don't come up very often.
• 2:27
  Eric Dickmann: So I think there's a tremendous amount of anxiety that people have trying to figure out what is the next move, what is the next thing that they should be focused on because right now they're feeling a little bit stuck and anxious about the future And look, I'm gonna be perfectly candid.
• 2:46
  Eric Dickmann: I don't have any magical answers to this.
• 2:48
  Eric Dickmann: I left the corporate world in 2019.
• 2:51
  Eric Dickmann: At that time, there was a pretty good opportunity for what I do as a fractional chief marketing officer.
• 2:59
  Eric Dickmann: I was able to come in and help companies on a part-time basis who really needed my expertise but didn't really wanna pay for it on a full-time basis.
• 3:07
  Eric Dickmann: That was a nice niche that was fairly well-defined.
• 3:12
  Eric Dickmann: But then the pandemic hit, and a lot of people all of a sudden were forced from their jobs.
• 3:18
  Eric Dickmann: And all of a sudden, everybody's working remotely, and a lot of people decided that they really liked it.
• 3:25
  Eric Dickmann: And so this profession that I had gotten into went from being kind of a niche profession to all of a sudden thousands of people wanting to call themselves fractional executives because they liked the ability to work remotely.
• 3:39
  Eric Dickmann: Maybe they had lost their job as we came out of the pandemic and companies, didn't bring people back.
• 3:47
  Eric Dickmann: Or they just looked at it and said,"Hey, this is an opportunity that I want to explore." And so that moment in time where there was a real opportunity, all of a sudden it became a very crowded field where lots of people were trying to offer the same kinds of services that I was.
• 4:05
  Eric Dickmann: And to a large extent, that exists today.
• 4:09
  Eric Dickmann: But now there's a different problem.
• 4:11
  Eric Dickmann: AI is coming in, and a lot of companies are saying,"Hey, we don't need people at all.
• 4:17
  Eric Dickmann: We can just use tools and processes to be able to do a lot of the work that marketers used to do, and we don't need people who've got these years of experience, who've got this strategic expertise.
• 4:29
  Eric Dickmann: We can just ask ChatGPT.
• 4:31
  Eric Dickmann: We can ask Claude." And while I will tell you that that's a fallacy, that that doesn't really work that way, that's the mindset that a lot of companies have.
• 4:43
  Eric Dickmann: They're looking at the world through the lens of expense reduction and saying,"How can I get the same value while spending a lot less?" And I think a lot of them will regret it in the end because these tools, as great as they are, they still have some significant limitations.
• 5:01
  Eric Dickmann: They're a productivity enhancer, not a people replacer, especially when it comes to strategic inputs But this is the era that we're in.
• 5:13
  Eric Dickmann: All of this is still shaking out.
• 5:15
  Eric Dickmann: And so when you're feeling this stuckness that you wanna make a change, that you know you need to make a change, but the path isn't very clear, that's the time I think you need to start focusing on little experiments.
• 5:30
  Eric Dickmann: One of the things that I see so often, and I hear from many people, is that some event happened, they got laid off, they suddenly found themselves without a job, they're trying to figure out what they wanna do next, and they decide to go independent.
• 5:47
  Eric Dickmann: They decide to start up their own business, but they have zero experience running a business.
• 5:53
  Eric Dickmann: Now all of a sudden, they have to create a company name, they have to buy a company domain, they have to build a company website, they have to figure out who their customers are, what their messaging is gonna be.
• 6:07
  Eric Dickmann: They have to do sales outreach.
• 6:09
  Eric Dickmann: They have to put on the hat of a salesperson to be able to contact and, and sell their products and services.
• 6:16
  Eric Dickmann: They have to become an accountant to understand how to manage their books and, and pay their quarterly taxes.
• 6:23
  Eric Dickmann: They have to look at marketing and what it's gonna take to stand out amongst all the other people who are selling similar products and services.
• 6:31
  Eric Dickmann: All of a sudden, all of these roles that they may be used to having somebody inside the larger corporation or business do falls on them.
• 6:40
  Eric Dickmann: And I will tell you, it's a learning experience.
• 6:44
  Eric Dickmann: And when you're independent, when you're in a solo business or a small business, you're learning all of this stuff yourself.
• 6:51
  Eric Dickmann: You usually don't have the money to outsource all of this from day one.
• 6:56
  Eric Dickmann: You can't hire a bunch of people to do all these functions unless you're independently wealthy and want to invest a lot of money in those kinds of things right off the bat These are things that you have to learn on your own.
• 7:11
  Eric Dickmann: And so what I always tell people is start that process of experimentation early, even if it's not ultimately a business that you think is gonna be your next thing.
• 7:22
  Eric Dickmann: You know, maybe it's a, it's a small store where you sell some kind of wares on Etsy.
• 7:29
  Eric Dickmann: Maybe it's some side consulting service where you're engaged in your community offering, some small consulting services after hours.
• 7:41
  Eric Dickmann: Whatever it might be, you get the opportunity to go through the process of s- establishing that business, of picking that company name, buying that domain, building that website, starting to figure out how to write messaging and sales materials, getting the tools that you need, the infrastructure pieces that you need to run a business.
• 8:02
  Eric Dickmann: And again, even if that business doesn't amount to much, you're building the muscles.
• 8:07
  Eric Dickmann: You're going through the exercise of figuring out what it might actually take to run an independent business.
• 8:15
  Eric Dickmann: And then if you decide to pivot, whether you use the same company name or not, you have the experience, you have the tools, you have the basic infrastructure that you need to be able to then transition it into something else.
• 8:29
  Eric Dickmann: And it's not unusual for small business owners to have multiple businesses, and I think that's part of the reason why.
• 8:39
  Eric Dickmann: Once they've gone through that exercise of building one and setting one up, it's not that hard then to layer on another And so that's what I would encourage a lot of people to do.
• 8:50
  Eric Dickmann: If you're at that point in your career where you're feeling the heaviness of this uncertainty of this moment that we're in and not knowing what your future is, now is the time to begin those little experiments.
• 9:03
  Eric Dickmann: Now is the time to start testing the waters of what it is that you like and don't like.
• 9:08
  Eric Dickmann: And maybe you go through this experimental process and you determine that you hate it, that you hate doing all this stuff on your own, that you really can't stand running all of these various aspects of your business.
• 9:22
  Eric Dickmann: Well, right there, that tells you that that's gonna be really tough for you if you decide that that's your future.
• 9:28
  Eric Dickmann: Maybe what you need to do is you need to aggressively start looking for that next career move inside the next company.
• 9:37
  Eric Dickmann: But I think for a lot of people, what they will decide is that, sure, there are some things they might not like.
• 9:42
  Eric Dickmann: Maybe you don't like doing accounting, maybe you don't like doing marketing, maybe you don't like doing sales, but the other parts of the business you do enjoy.
• 9:49
  Eric Dickmann: And so maybe one of the goals will be when you officially start up the real business, that you will seek to hire somebody, at least on a part-time basis, to help you with those things that you really can't stand.
• 10:01
  Eric Dickmann: But you don't know that until you get a chance to experiment, until you get a chance to really see the inner workings of a solo business.
• 10:12
  Eric Dickmann: So I hope you find that helpful.
• 10:13
  Eric Dickmann: It certainly would've been helpful for me.
• 10:16
  Eric Dickmann: I was thrust, because of a layoff, into making that determination whether I wanted to go into another corporate job or start my own business, and I had six months of downtime as I tried to figure all that out and get that infrastructure in place.
• 10:32
  Eric Dickmann: And I tell you, I would be so grateful if somebody had given me that advice that I should've been looking, because the writing was on the wall.
• 10:40
  Eric Dickmann: I knew that a layoff was probably inevitable, and I should've done more to experiment, to prepare, to see what that next phase was gonna look like, because it cost me at least six months of time.
• 10:52
  Eric Dickmann: So I hope you take this as, actionable advice.
• 10:56
  Eric Dickmann: In either case, I would love to hear from you.
• 10:59
  Eric Dickmann: In the show notes, there's a link if you'd like to reach out.
• 11:02
  Eric Dickmann: If you're interested in being a guest on this show to talk about these kinds of topics, I'd love to hear from you.
• 11:07
  Eric Dickmann: Or if you have any questions or comments, please leave those as well.
• 11:11
  Eric Dickmann: Thanks for listening to Beyond Expertise.
• 11:14
  Eric Dickmann: You can find show notes, resources, and links mentioned during this episode at podcast.ericdickman.com.
• 11:22
  Eric Dickmann: If this conversation resonated with you, I hope you'll join me again next time as we continue exploring what it means to reinvent ourselves beyond our careers, titles, and expertise.