At the heart of this book are the stories of dozens of people who changed careers. It analyzes their experiences through the lens of established psychological and behavioral theories. Based on the stories and extensive re- search in the social sciences, the book affirms the uncertainties of the career transition process and identifies its underlying principles. But it does not offer a ten-point plan for better transitioning, because that is not the nature of the process. Instead, it lays out a straightforward framework that describes what is really involved and some tried and proven unconventional strategies that will make the difference between staying stuck and moving on.

The book hinges on two disarmingly simple ideas. First, our working identity is not a hidden treasure waiting to be discovered at the very core of our inner being. Rather, it is made up of many possibilities: some tangible and concrete, defined by the things we do, the company we keep, and the stories we tell about our work and lives; others existing only in the realm of future potential and private dreams. Second, changing careers means changing our selves, reworking our identities. Since we are many selves, changing is not about swapping one identity for another but rather a transition process in which we reconfigure the full set of possibilities. These simple ideas alter everything we take for granted about finding a new career. They ask us to devote the greater part of our time and energy to action rather than reflection, to doing instead of planning. Hence, the unconventional strategies.

Endings are tougher and take longer than we think. No matter how unhappy we may be in a job, most of us continue to revisit the possibility of making it work because the present role is necessarily tied to a possible self—an image, outdated though it may be, of whom we once wanted to become. June’s academic identity, for example, kept reasserting itself throughout the entire transition period, even after she had handed in her resignation. “My department was family, a dysfunctional one,” June says, “but one I was an intimate part of, one I joined at age seventeen when I went to college.” For her, leaving academia meant not just giving up a long-term career objective but also an image of who she should become that important people in her life, including her mentor, harbored. The emotions she felt when she found the pile of draft articles that would have assured her professorial future show just how much giving up a possible self—even one that has become a burden or lost its appeal—marks a real loss.

A working identity, however, is not merely what we do and with whom; it lies also in the unfolding story of our lives. Throughout a career transition, the narratives we craft to describe why we are changing (and what remains the same) also help us try on possibilities. June’s attempts at explaining herself—why she wanted to make such a seemingly “crazy” career change, why a potential employer should take a chance on her, why she was attracted to a company she had never heard of a day before—were at first provisional, sometimes clumsy ways of redefining herself. But each time she wrote a cover letter, went through an interview, or updated friends and family on her progress, she better defined what was exciting to her, and in each public declaration of her intent to change careers, she committed herself further.

Unexpected events often provoke insights that allow progress toward a solution after a period of being stuck. They allow us to reframe our stories. For John, the revelation was not that he should become a writer. It was that he could not live in two worlds and that he would have to come to terms with letting go of the old identity that was slowing him down. John had never stopped to challenge his basic assumption that he could maintain his old social and financial status while moving into a realm that would allow him greater artistic expression.

Arranging life’s events into a coherent story is one of the most subtle yet demanding challenges of career reinvention. To reinvent oneself is to rework one’s story, revising it frequently, trying out different versions on others. Events punctuate continuous experience, giving us some pegs on which to hang our reinvention stories. Some events unfreeze us, help us start moving away from the old; other events focus our energies toward the future, helping the new direction to jell.