You’re in “The Pre-Strategy Gap”.

The question isn’t how to do this yet. It’s “what are you actually aiming for?”

What this score means

You've taken the step many people never take — you've admitted something needs to change. That admission almost always arrives long before clarity about what the change looks like, and the gap between the two is where almost everyone gets stuck.

It's exhausting. And the exhaustion usually gets mis-read as "I'm not ready." Far more often, it means the opposite: you're very ready. The direction just hasn't been named yet and so the early steps become overwhelming.

If you're here, there's a reasonable chance you've spent months — maybe years — turning this over.

Trying to define what you actually want. Researching roles you're not sure you'd even like. Talking yourself out of it, then back into it, then out again. That isn't a sign of being behind, it's the sign of doing the hardest part of the whole transition on your own.

Where people in your position usually get stuck

These patterns aren't character flaws. They're definable problems — and because they're definable, they're solvable.

  • The Push and Pull Factors. Most of the momentum you're feeling right now is probably push — pressure to escape the current situation — with the pull still blurry. (“I want to make an impact”. - but you’re not exactly sure how) That's normal at the start. But push alone fades the moment the current situation stops hurting. What sustains a real move is a specific, concrete pull toward something. Making that pull clear is where the actual work begins.

  • The Demand Mirror. Without a defined target, demand can't be tested — and every hour of research ends up partly fictional. It isn't a flaw in your thinking; it's the mathematical consequence of trying to solve the problem in the wrong order.

  • The Runway Equation. Running a transition without runway — time, energy, and financial — is the single most reliable way to end up cutting corners on the work that actually determines whether the move lands. Thinking about runway before the move is one of the highest-leverage things you can do.

Suggested focus

The work that matters most now isn't applying, networking, or another course. It's upstream — figuring out the criteria you can use to help determining what you actually want to move toward, pressure-testing whether that target is viable, and planning the runway to pursue it properly. This is the work that most career-transition advice skips over, which is precisely why so many people in this position spend so long circling.

You don't have to do that work alone. The pattern we see repeatedly is that people who try to think their way to clarity in isolation spend six to twelve months stuck in the same loop. The ones who externalise it — with someone who has seen the pattern before — move through it in weeks.

And whilst that might sound like a clever sales line, it is true. If you want to understand whether the work I do can help you, let’s talk.

A 30-minute call to talk through where you actually are, what the pull might be, and whether there's a clear next step worth taking.

No pitch. Whether or not my work is the right fit, you'll leave with a clearer picture of what the right sequence of moves looks like from here.

⬆︎⬆︎SCREEN GRAB YOUR SCORE CARD⬆︎⬆︎

FIND A TIME THAT WORKS

If this doesn’t feel like quite the answer you were expecting don’t ignore it. Get in touch for a more nuanced assessment and plan. Book a call HERE

Your Score Card - Explained

  • How sharply you've defined your target: the sector, the role, and the archetype of the person who'd be hiring you. Without this, every other dimension has nothing to test against — you can't measure credibility against a target you haven't named.

  • How testable your criteria are for "this is the right opportunity." The difference between "I'll know it when I see it" and a written list you could hand to a friend and ask them to filter roles on your behalf.

  • Whether you're changing what you do (content — role, function, skillset), where you do it (context — sector, organisation type, stage), or both at once. Dual shifts aren't impossible, but they need a different playbook and usually take longer.

  • The distance between the credibility you actually have and what's visible to an employer in the first 30 seconds of reading your CV or LinkedIn. This isn't about what you can do — it's about what they can see that you can do.

  • Your transferability across three axes: client type, organisation stage, and product-service type. Most people assume they lack relatable experience. This map shows you were you might find more overlap than you expect

  • Whether the market actually wants what you're offering, in the quantities and at the rates you need. Plenty of valid pivots stall here because the target role exists in smaller numbers — or at lower salary — than assumed.

  • How close you are to the people who make hiring decisions in your target space. Roles at this level rarely come from cold applications — they come through one or two degrees of separation, which means your community is load-bearing.

  • The relationship between your financial runway (how long you can afford the search) and realistic time-to-land at the pace you can work at it. Underestimating the second half of this equation is the single most common mistake in mid-career pivots.

  • How much you actually care about where you're heading. Pivots take nine to eighteen months of real, sustained effort. The motivation has to be more durable than "I'm unhappy here" — it has to be positive pull, not just negative push.