Choose to Change Your Executive Career and Power It with the “Rule of Fives”

The one thing that might be holding back your executive career change is fear of the unknown. If you’re like many executives who are contemplating career change, you might be asking yourself some of these questions:

• Do I want to do something different?
• Is this the right time to make a change?
• How do I leave my team right at this moment?
• What will I tell my executive team if I leave the company?
• Will the new job be any better than my current one?
• How can I make a decision when I have a dozen problems competing for my attention?

If any of these questions resonate with you, then you will know what I mean when I say that overload and fear often can prevent an executive who is very wise about his company from being very wise about his career.

Decide to Make the Decision—Either Today or in Five Days

Your decision actually is less complicated than you think. In fact, the only decision you have to make is to decide whether to explore new career options. By focusing the first step on the choice to do or not do simplifies the vast universe of questions and unknowns that conflict and only serve to create mental noise.

If you’re an executive who is considering a career change, challenge yourself to decide whether today is the right day to change your mindset. If you decide that your calendar is too full, and you can’t devote the time to determining that today is the day you’ll start pursuing an executive career change, then you’ve made a valid decision. You’ve taken this particular issue off the table, and you can now schedule that decision and the strategy for it for five days from now. Put it on your calendar, and don’t think about it for the entire five days. Come back to it when you’re fresh.

Be Accountable to Yourself Following the “Rule of Fives”

You owe it to yourself to take your decision to move ahead in your executive career change to hold yourself accountable to the choice you make. You can do this in many small ways and assign quantifiable metrics to each, so you know whether you’ve completed each task satisfactorily. By following the “rule of fives,” you’ll have amassed significant information and strategy that will inform and propel your executive career change:

• Collect your annual reviews from the last five years.
• Reinvigorate your network and add five new members to your network each week.
• Comment on five LinkedIn group posts each week (or each day, if you’re ambitious).
• Research in depth five companies each week that you find interesting.
• Read five articles in your industry’s top news sources.
• Call five people in your network with whom you’ve not spoken in five months.

Be Accountable to a Five Strengths Expert

If you’re committing to an executive career change, consider adding our five key strengths to your portfolio of excellence. By working with our experts in these five strengths, you’ll become accountable in critical ways that will make you more successful in your executive career change.