From working with hundreds of successful career changers, I've developed a five stage framework to guide your work for designing your next step. These are:

The idea of shifting directions is powerful, but the work is intimidating. It's imperative to treat your career change project like a project. The Career Reinvent framework plus your coach and cohort ensure you do just that.

We kick-off for three hours on a Saturday and jump-start the work of identifying your next. You've worked on the pre-assignments and together with your cohort members you learn about the Career Reinvent Framework and take the first steps for defining your project. This cohort session leaves you inspired and excited about the next steps.

You and I connect for your initial coaching call to talk through your objectives and identify starting points for self-discovery and exploration. You have some light homework in advance of our first weeknight session.

In the weeknight sessions, participants share progress, identify bottlenecks, and mostly help each other keep moving forward. I facilitate these sessions with emphasis on keeping individuals moving through the stages.

Our coaching and group sessions guide you on the work and challenge you to think, ideate, explore, and ultimately experiment with options that fit your life-stage criteria. Throughout the program there are materials and tools to guide you and you're never more than a call or e-mail away from your coach.

While everyone changes careers on their unique timelines, after our 90-days come to an end, if you've done the work you have a clear plan for pursuing your next steps. The private program forum allows you to remain in touch with your cohort members and share updates or ask questions. And, you retain lifetime e-mail access to Art.

Our first stage of the framework focuses on identifying the range of possible types of career changes that might appeal to you. We do this without filtering. Some individuals already know they want to start a business or shift to a new industry, but for many, they have no idea. In running this exercise with a cohort, I compared career options to flavors of ice cream. After working through the exercise, one individual offered, "I think I have an ice cream sundae!" Whether you have none, one or ten different directions in mind, this stage jump-starts thinking.

You can't navel-gaze your way into a new career, however, you can take stock of yourself, your history, your superpowers, and those moments when you are at your best and look for pointers.

In Self-Discovery, I work with you for one week's worth of exercises to tune-in to you and then use the insights to start your Big Idea List. It's amazing how many ideas we've had in our lives that we discarded as we pursued adulting. For many individuals, it was something they thought they wanted to do earlier in their lives that responsibilities got in the way of. When you join, ask me about the senior IT professional who wanted to be an astronaut!

This is (my favorite) and the largest stage of the Career Reinvent framework. It starts with the career reinventor building their unfiltered, all-ideas are eligible Big Idea List (BIL). The BIL exercise is one of divergent thinking where we draw upon the output of self-discovery and work to identify as many ideas as possible, no matter how unrealistic they seem.

As the BIL exercise completes, it's time to add some rigor to the process. I guide you through the work of identifying your Life-Stage Filters. These are the criteria that are essential for you at this stage of your life and career. From geographic preferences to work-life balance, income needs and many others, you single out those that are most essential. We develop a weighting scheme and then run the ideas from your BIL through the Life Stage Filters. Inevitably, just a handful make it through at this point.

You work to explore the few that emerged from the Life Stage Filters exercise and at some point are challenged to make a decision on whether to move to the Experimentation stage. If none merit that level of consideration, we return to your Big Idea List and Life Stage Filters to generate the next set of candidates.

This process is iterative and what starts in Exploration as an exercise in divergent creativity resolves to one that includes rigor and analysis. Once a candidate or two emerge as meriting Experimentation, it's time to move to the next stage.

There's an old saying that if you always wanted to own and operate a hot dog stand you should take some vacation time and go get a job at one for a week or two to see if the romance of the idea matches reality. That's a great example of an experiment—a process for you to try out or test whether the idea matches the attraction.

I work with you to take an idea that emerged from Exploration into this stage and design an intelligent experiment to test it out. From moonlighting or creating a side-hustle to going to work at the hot dog stand, we find ways for you to learn and test the idea. This is a key part of the process of minimizing the risk from making a career shift.

And while experiments by definition often fail, experimenting is better than jumping off a cliff hoping for a soft landing. Once an experiment works out to your satisfaction, it's time to shift to the next stage.

Congratulations, you've made a decision on your "next" career stage! Now it's time for the business and project planning necessary to get you from today to where it's appropriate to launch. If your choice for now is a side-hustle, I still encourage you to define at what point it becomes a full-time choice. If your life situation suggests you need two years until you can make a shift, then we plan out a two-year transition. Much of this stage is about business planning, including ensuring your finances are in order before moving forward.

Launch means something different for every individual. Some people want to announce to the world that they've shifted or opened or started their new venture. Others want to do this in a phased approach. The choice is yours.

About the Coaching Portion

The coaching portion is all about you and your success. In our 1x1 sessions, we tailor the activities to your unique situation. I guide you through the exercises, challenge you to focus on key issues and am there to help you navigate the pitfalls present in each stage. In my experience, the blend of a cohort that supports and inspires you and a coach that guides and holds you accountable is a critical success factor.

Are you ready to get started?