An Expert Tells You How to Turn Your Career Challenges Into Opportunities

Q: Four years ago, I left my career in luxury cosmetics to follow my husband to another country. I didn't work for two years when I had my first child. Then I started a jewelry company, but after two years, my cofounder and I decided it was far from profitable and stopped business. Now I'm a receptionist. How do I turn this detour into something positive for future employers?

Cali Williams Yost: This is something that I find very interesting with people who have taken different career paths: You actually didn't take a career break, you worked for yourself. It's the craziest mentality: "If I'm not getting a paycheck from somebody, I'm not working." You were an entrepreneur. That would be a great example of a pivot into a different type of flexible work and life reality.

So how do you expand your skill sets so you're even more valuable the next time you pivot and you go on to the next job that you want? As a receptionist, you are in a customer-service role, and many organizations have client-relationship management systems, like Hubspot or Salesforce — learn that, offer to be one of the people who contribute to maintaining that. You can also be somebody who monitors social media. Say, "Look, it's like people are walking into the front door of our organization when they go on Twitter or Facebook. I want to keep track of what people are saying." They will value that information, and it allows you to learn these systems, which you can then use in your next job.

Q: I'm 28-year-old architect but have been studying at a culinary academy for almost a year. I've found myself stuck between my salaried job, where I'm not progressing, and my desire to make my own path as a business entrepreneur and pastry chef. How do I turn my side hustle into a career that supports me?

Cali Williams Yost: You don't have to make some dramatic decision to cut off your sole source of income to take a risk on this new career; you actually can do it in a slow transition that allows you to keep the income of your current job but also move into this new career in a staggered way.

I would imagine that you could potentially stay full time as an architect but start to do some of these culinary activities on the weekends and in the evenings. You could connect with somebody who is doing weddings; maybe a restaurant needs a second sous chef if they're short on the weekends when they're busier. As that maybe heats up, maybe you get more hours at the restaurant, or maybe you start catering more during the week.

This is where you go to your architecture firm and say to them, "I would like some more flexibility and to work fewer hours. Here's a plan for how this is a win-win for everyone." You may have to take a pay cut. You may have to go on a project basis. You may lose your benefits, but you still have that income that's going to help you make this next stage of the transition. You've pivoted as you need to build this other side of your life to where it can be self-sustaining.

Q: How do you prevent burnout? And how do you deal with it when you realize you're already burned out?

Cali Williams Yost: Burnout is the 21st-century challenge that we do not talk enough about. The first thing you need to do is understand what your signs of burnout look like, because not everybody's are the same. For me, for example, all of a sudden, things just start to get really hard — the thing that used to take you two minutes to do now all of a sudden takes 45 minutes. When that starts happening, the first thing I do is say, "What are some small activities or actions that I could put back into my work-life fit that may actually make me feel good?"

Typically when I've gotten into this place, I've started ignoring the things that actually fill me up, that make me feel really good. That could be something as simple as, "OK, I'm going to leave half an hour earlier, and I'm just going to go for a walk with my friend. Or I'm going to make sure I make a dinner date with my husband for the weekend. Or I'm going to sit down and spend some time with my daughter, because I've gotten so busy that I haven't even connected with her." It's about understanding the things that give me perspective again and help me reconnect with myself.

This is where you could begin to leverage this flexibility that more and more of us have but that we don't tend to thoughtfully use. You could say, "I actually can work remotely in my job. Maybe what I could do is think about the tasks that require a lot of thought and I have a hard time finishing when I'm in the office." So do those tasks like a report or a data analysis when you're working remotely and save yourself the commute.

You really have to think about how you're working and where you're working. That's when you start to say, "I think I am going to go to my kid's play" or "I am going to go to the gym." All of a sudden, you start to be efficient with your work, but you're also rebuilding these other things into your life that really do make you your best self.

Cali Williams Yost is a noted workplace strategist, researcher, author, speaker, and the founder of the Flex+Strategy Group/Work+Life Fit Inc.

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