Johnathan is a serial ‘step out of your comfort zoner’, but shared with me one of his 9 career transitions!

He was working as a recruiter: “I’d recently removed from New Zealand to Australia. So I was very fortunate enough to come over with a job when we moved here. I was working in in recruitment but my heart wasn’t really in it, I was getting frustrated with how recruitment worked. But one night I thought I know what a good CV and a good LinkedIn profile and I know what a bad one looks like. No one’s actually telling the candidates this we’re just rejecting, rejecting, rejecting. We’re not actually saying ‘hey, this is what you are doing wrong’, there was nobody providing sort of feedback. I felt that everyone was working for the client as a recruitment consultant, but no one was working for the candidate.

“And so I had a like an epiphany moment as I was sitting on the couch off to the shower and I thought, I’m going to try something tomorrow and I’m going to push this boat out as far as I can before it sinks.”

Johnathan ran with his epiphany immediately, talking ‘the mother of all epic sickies’ the very next day and calling a local school that taught Microsoft technical education. He was able to secure a meeting with the head of the school for that afternoon “I said, ‘hey, look, I’m a career coach. And I specialise in helping people build their technical careers. I’d love to come in and talk to your students, if I can, about how to set themselves up for success.’ “

“He said to me, ‘Well, this sounds like a really good idea. When can you come in and talk to one of my classes and share these tips?’ And I say, well, as luck would have it, I have some time available this afternoon!”

Once there Johnathan told the head of the school about his background and his idea – and found himself in front of the students that same visit!

“The guy said to me, ‘this sounds amazing. Tell you what, I’ve got a class running right now. Do you want to jump in right now and just have a bit of a chat to these students?’”

Despite having nothing prepared, Johnathan continued to push that boat out and spoke to the students for an hour and a half!

“I walked out of there really, really invigorated because I kind of reconnected with my passion. So the interesting thing is that he said to me, at the end of it, ‘look, that was fantastic. When can you come in again, we’d like you to develop a programme.’ And I thought to myself, ‘okay, look, I’ll come back to you on that one’ – because I knew I had to go back to work the next day.

“I was so far outside my comfort zone, but I was being kind of propelled by this energy in this interview. And this, this wow feeling. And at the same time I was also had that voice in the back of my head going, What the hell are you doing?”

This huge day led eventually to the business Jonathan now runs.

Johnathan has some great advice for people thinking about stepping out of their comfort zone “One thing that I teach people is reframing the comfort zone or reframing the tasks that you want to accomplish. We’ll call it an experiment, which means if you think about your career, and it’s on a long sort of line, why don’t we take a small part of where you’re sitting at right now, and let’s just extract it out. Let’s find something that you can do. That is not going to impact in your career. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try another approach. So this is not the be all and end all of your whole entire life. But most times we put in a good framework and we set the experiment up for success.”

Johnathan had other great techniques for stepping out of your comfort zone, but instead I am going to share with you his final words – you can always contact Johnathan to find out more!

“Sometimes getting outside your comfort zone means confronting yourself and your professional self in a mirror and going, what am I? Where do I want to go? How do I need to position myself to get there? How do I understand the full range of what who I am and what I do and the value that I bring to an organisation?

“So part of getting out of your comfort zone means going on a journey of figuring out and finding out who and what you are. And that can be an incredibly rewarding experience and one that can really build and foster a greater sense of self confidence in people. So getting outside of your comfort zone can produce an enormous amount of reward, career acceleration, and purpose and fulfilment.”

Thank you so much Johnathan!

About Johnathan:

Johnathan is a Career Consultant who specialises in Professional Identity and Personal Brand Management. Using a structured method, he enables his clients to de-clutter their heads so they can gain a greater understanding of who and what they are, their capabilities and most importantly what makes them valuable. He also helps them increase their professional self-awareness so that they can move their careers forward with greater confidence and clarity of direction. Johnathan typically works with professionals at mid-career phase (Gen-X), to define their professional identity and then build a powerful Personal Brand to help them re-energise their careers and attract exciting opportunities. You can read more at johnmaltby.com. au or connect with him on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnathanmaltby/