Your story is unique, but your situation is common

There’s a moment, usually around week 6 of a senior transition, that almost everyone describes the same way.

The initial energy has worn off. The CV is done. The recruiter calls have slowed. And a slightly uncomfortable thought arrives: I’ve been incredibly busy, and I’m no clearer than I was a month ago.

I had my own version of this. So have nearly all of the senior professionals I’ve spent the last 6 months talking to.

Redundancy puts you into a very specific mode. Call it reactive. The shock, the financial worry, the identity hit, they all push you toward motion. And motion feels like progress.

So you do the legible things. Update the LinkedIn profile. Message a few people. Apply to the roles you can see. Take the coffees.

None of it is wrong, exactly. It’s just that it’s activity without a target.

You’re answering the market before you’ve decided what you’re actually offering it, or whether you even want what you’re applying for.

The data is unsentimental here.

Cold applications at senior level convert around 1%. Most Director-plus roles never get advertised. The reactive playbook has you aim at the smallest, most crowded part of the market, with the least clarity.

The reason isn’t a lack of capability.

The people I’m describing ran commercial functions, entire business units, some of them multi-billion P&L owners. They’d never have accepted a business case built on gut feel and “I’ll ask around.” They have rigour.

But rigour needs taking some distance, and here there isn't any. You could be ruthless about a business case because the business case wasn't you.

Your career is you. The one doing the analysis and the one being analysed are the same person. You.

Herminia Ibarra calls this the ‘liminal phase’. The old professional story has collapsed and the new one hasn't formed. It's very hard to run a clear-eyed strategic review from that vantage point, which is exactly the moment everyone tells you to go to market.

So you get activity instead of strategy.

There are really 2 questions that always come out and generally once the job search starts:

Every senior professional I’ve spoken to reaches the first question eventually. The ones who reach sooner and take it seriously, will ultimately make better decisions than the ones who don’t.

Here’s the move. Treat the career decision like the business decision it is.

You’d never invest a few hundred thousand pounds, which is roughly what a year of foregone income costs at this level, without market analysis, a financial model, and a clear position. Your career transition deserves the same four inputs.

A read on what the market actually values in your domain now, not 3 years ago. An audit of what’s transferable versus what belonged to the previous role. A real financial model of your runway. And a position: one sentence on why you, for this particular thing, over everyone else.

Skip one and you’re deciding with a blind spot.

This is exactly the work I’m building Zelova to do. A career strategy service that starts with the 2 questions, not the CV, and turns the answers into a concrete plan. Here’s why I’m telling you this in a career newsletter and not a founder one: the gap I’m building into is the same gap I write about every week, and the same one I sat in myself in January.

The solution is being worked and a waitlist is forming. If any of this resonated with you and you are curious, you can join it here: www.zelova.ai

If you’re at week six right now, or you remember being there, I’d like to know what finally moved you from busy to strategic. For me it was a specific conversation. For others it’s a number on a spreadsheet, or a question they couldn’t take their mind off.

Reply to this email or message me directly.

Until next time.

David