The insight that guides your next career move is actually in your history

24 years of navigating multiple career pivots myself - from a professional in management systems to a practioner in people and organisation development, and then a public servant scaling industries, and now, a solopreneur, the hardest lesson is that the clues for your next move are already inside you.

A career coaching enquiry landed in my inbox recently. The young adult was seeking clarity on her next career move. She’d been in marketing for a good 10+ years, wanted out, but didn't know where to pivot.

Easy work:

Go to a job board.
Do a personality assessment.
Find a coach.
Do another qualification.
Hope something clicks.

Real work?
Start here: Extract the last 10 years.

She was sitting on a decade of evidence about how she actually works best.

Hidden in plain sight are clues about:
💡What energises her
💡What drains her
💡The environments where she thrives
💡The people she does her best work with
💡The problems she naturally gravitates towards
💡The patterns behind both her successes and frustrations

The challenge is rarely a lack of information.
It’s the inability to interpret what’s already there.

We collect experiences.
But we don’t always read them.
And we rush to the next step.

And so we keep searching externally, while years of useful data sit in plain sight.

Career clarity isn't finding something new for dopamine's sake.

It’s recognizing what has been true, then using it as the lens for what comes next.

Before asking, “What’s next?”
Ask: “What has the last 10 years been showing me about myself?”

Because that evidence doesn’t just explain the past.
It becomes a filter for what comes next - the kinds of roles, environments, cultures, and problems you are most likely to thrive in.

And this is often the shift in strengths-based career coaching:
not starting with options, but starting with evidence - and then translating that into direction.

The patterns of what consistently bring out the best in you aren’t random.

They are signals.
Signals of your strengths.

And strengths show up everywhere - in your successes, your frustrations, your energy, your choices, your work history.

Once you learn to read them, career decisions stop being guesswork.

They become recognition.
And that recognition becomes direction.

If you had to distil your career history into one strength, what would it be?