Your job title was never your identity. But it felt like it was.

Every senior professional I have spoken to during my research says some version of the same thing in the first conversation.

The career advice industry hears this and reaches for the CV. Update it. Refresh the LinkedIn. Start networking. Get moving.

But the professionals saying this are not stuck because they lack activity but because they have not yet separated their professional identity from the organisational container it lived in.

Herminia Ibarra at London Business School has spent 25 years researching how professionals change careers. Her core finding, published across multiple papers and most recently in the Annual Review of Organisational Psychology in January 2026, is that career change is not a linear planning exercise. It is iterative identity experimentation.

Ibarra calls these experiments “provisional selves.” You do not work out who you want to be and then go do it. You try versions. You test possibilities. You discard some and lean into others. The process is messy and non-linear, and it takes longer than anyone expects.

For senior professionals, this is especially hard. You have spent 15 to 20 years building expertise in a specific domain. The idea of “experimenting” feels like regression. Your entire career has been about certainty, authority, and knowing the answer. Provisional feels like the opposite of everything you have been rewarded for.

But the data supports Ibarra’s model. Every discovery interview I have conducted confirms it. The professionals who try to skip the exploration phase and jump straight to “next role” tend to land in positions that feel wrong within 6 months. The ones who give themselves permission to explore – even briefly – end up in roles or career structures that fit.

In every interview I conducted, every subject – without me prompting – named the same core challenge: “I do not know what I actually want.” Not “I do not know what jobs are available.” Not “I do not know how to write a CV.” The fundamental blocker was the absence of clarity about direction.

This makes sense when you think about it structurally. Inside an organisation, your career direction is largely determined by the org chart, the promotion track, and the company’s strategic priorities. You advance within a defined framework. The organisation does the direction-setting for you.

Outside the organisation, that framework disappears. And the question “What do I want?” (which you may not have seriously asked yourself in 15 years) suddenly becomes the only question that matters.

Here is the framework I only share with my subscribers developed through my research for working through this systematically. It has four stages, and the order matters.

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Stage 1: Retrospective. Before you look at a single job listing, map where you created disproportionate impact across your career. Not your job titles. Your actual contributions. The patterns that repeated regardless of which company you were in.

Stage 2: Market Scan. Research what the market currently values in your domain. Not what it valued 3 years ago. This requires active work and is not a 30-minute exercise.

Stage 3: Gap Analysis. Compare your strengths map from Stage 1 with the market demand from Stage 2. Where are the mismatches? Some of your strongest capabilities may be in areas the market is moving away from. Some capabilities you have undervalued may be exactly what is in demand.

Stage 4: Positioning Statement. One sentence. Why you, for this particular thing, over everyone else. If you cannot say it clearly, go back to Stages 1 through 3.

The outplacement industry, which is supposed to help with exactly this kind of transition, was rated as generic and seniority-blind by every interview subject in my research (over 200 Directors, VPs and C-suite individuals). The process feels the same whether you are a first-time manager or a 20-year Director. The frameworks are not calibrated for the complexity of senior-level repositioning. The average engagement lasts 3 months, when the research suggests the journey for Director-level professionals is 9 to 12 months.

This gap between what senior professionals actually need and what they currently receive is something I am thinking about a lot.

In fact, it's something I'm actively building toward. If you want to follow along as it takes shape, you can join the early list here: www.zelova.ai