Experienced professionals often reach a transition with one clear insight: the current chapter no longer fits. The harder question is what should replace it.
Penny has written publicly about recommending Herminia Ibarra’s Working Identity to clients in professional transition because the approach matches something she has observed across her own career changes: clarity often emerges through experience rather than pure analysis.
The trap of solving the future in your head
Senior professionals are usually very good at thinking. That strength can become a limitation in transition if every new possibility must be proven intellectually before it is tried.
A career identity is not only a list of skills. It is connected to relationships, reputation, routines, status, values, and the stories people have learned to tell about who they are. Changing direction therefore involves more than choosing a different job title.
Use experiments to create information
Instead of asking, “What is the perfect next move?” a more productive question may be, “What small experiment would teach me something I cannot learn by thinking?”
That could mean having conversations with people in a different field, taking on a project outside the usual role, teaching, advising, volunteering, shadowing, writing, or trying a side engagement that creates real feedback.
Identity changes through action
Experiments also give the professional something more important than market information: they provide lived evidence about who they are becoming. Some possibilities become more compelling when experienced. Others lose their appeal. Both outcomes are useful.
Coaching can help a person notice the meaning they are making from those experiments, challenge assumptions about what must be preserved, and decide which possibilities deserve deeper investment.