For Brooke Taylor, achievement – the kind people recognise – was everything.
“I grew up in Silicon Valley, in a culture that really prized achievement and intellect over everything else,” she says.
After chasing down goals throughout her education, Taylor was successful in her career and became, she says, “golden handcuffed” in a managerial job at Google.
“And that worked really well for a long time. I was able to climb up and get promoted quickly. I was one of the top salespeople … I got this big award one quarter, but after getting that award, I still felt empty.”
The pressure to achieve every goal was affecting all aspects of her life.
“Throughout this time … I was also numbing out with drugs and alcohol … going deeper and deeper into my addiction.”
So she made the call to take a different path.
Taylor describes her step back from corporate achievement as “the biggest risk that I took in my life”. But she’s glad she did it. She took time to invest in career coaching and chose to live a sober life.
Now a career coach herself, she helps people who are in a similar position to the one she was in, struggling with the pressure to achieve. She finds much of that struggle is due to our conditioning, and believes our education doesn’t always prepare us to be courageous in our careers. “School rewards perfection … the world rewards bravery,” she says. “Entrepreneurship, or intrapreneurship, even management, requires more bravery than perfection.”
In her coaching role today, Taylor sees clients pivot job paths entirely at age 40, start successful companies and secure funding, and step into new leadership roles at their workplaces. She is also in demand as a consultant for elite firms, such as Amazon, Uber, and, yes, Google.
Photograph: Ezra Bailey/Getty Images
With the current job market favouring candidates, it is an ideal time to consider taking your career in a different direction.
“I was down to my last $500 in savings.”
Ali Clarke had been nurturing her startup, Bondi Blades, for a year with little success. Time was running out; she might have to return to the security of her old career in finance.
“I thought … maybe this was good while it lasted,” she says. Then she got a call from her distributor: there had been an order of 150,000 units of her biodegradable dermaplaning blades.
Clarke credits “right product, right time” and “a lot of trial and error” as key factors in the success of her lockdown beauty startup. She had taken a risk in turning her spark of inspiration into a new career.
Clarke had been working as a mortgage adviser with the Commonwealth Bank for 20 years. On the cusp of maternity leave, she realised some of the luxuries that she could afford working in a full-time finance role might be out of her budget when she focused on her new baby.
She found herself thinking about the salon price she’d paid for a low-tech beauty treatment, and about other women who might be rethinking the same high price tag. She had an idea for a DIY solution: first for herself, then at scale. She decided to take the opportunity and go for it.
Over the following year in lockdown with her family, Clarke faced additional stress, as her partner was unable to work due to pandemic restrictions. Yet she kept going, joining entrepreneurs’ circles on TikTok, educating herself, developing her product, and engaging influencers for marketing. Now, thanks to the ongoing success of her young brand, she’s been able to fully commit to her passion project. Clarke’s product is stocked in nearly 2,000 retail stores.
“It’s given my family financial freedom and a better quality of life … so it’s absolutely paid off.”
“You sort of think that someone’s going to get angry or say, ‘Oh, my God, what a betrayal’.”
Brendan Gibson remembers getting ready to tell his boss he needed a change from his sales job – and thinking that it would be his last conversation as an employee. He was not prepared for his boss’s reaction:
“Oh, wow, OK … I completely understand. How can we help you with that?”
His boss suggested a role within the company that Gibson hadn’t been aware of. It was in Melbourne, and he lived in Sydney.
“I didn’t really know what I was doing even in two years’ time, but I just kept saying yes,” Gibson says.
Photograph: Westend61/Getty Images
Weighing the risks: change can be positive at any stage in your working life.
His embrace of risk started with just voicing what he honestly felt and has paid off in ways he hadn’t expected. Now head of B2B marketing at Seek, in charge of marketing to hirers, he says he has “a lovely partner, and now we just had a child down here … so yeah, Melbourne is definitely home”.
Having worked with many employers in his sales role, Gibson wants you to know something. He’s seeing “hundreds of thousands of jobs” available, yet “there aren’t hundreds of thousands more people in the workforce”. So in a twist, he’s seeing employers taking the risks. Instead of demanding a candidate with 10 years’ experience doing this exact job, they are simply saying: “I need someone who can do this job.”
So if you’ve been feeling insecure about applying for the job you want, it may be time for a rethink. “Ask yourself: ‘What do I really want to do?’”, Gibson says. And apply, even if you “only tick 30% of the criteria”.
Gibson believes change can be positive at any stage in your working life.
“People don’t have to just take risks because they’re completely unhappy,” he says.
“You can just want something more.”
With vacancies high – and competition low – now may be a better time than ever to take that leap and apply for a new role on Seek.
