What's Next?
and what I'm seeing in this lately.
There's a theme that keeps coming up in the conversations I've been having over the past couple of months, and it is ‘What's next?'
I've always thought summer is a great time to start asking that question. Something about it just feels right. In nature, the hard work of the year is mostly done by now — the pollinating, the rearing, the harvesting — and what's left is this small, glorious window of longer days and warmer light that seems to open up space for thinking. For actually sitting with it, ideally with a notebook and a glass of something chilled!
But here's the thing about ‘what's next?' — it's a big question. Maybe too big. Left too open, it can tip over into overwhelming, and when that happens, it's so much easier to just... not. To put it aside and carry on keeping on, because at least that's familiar.
What I know though, is that if we allow ourselves to sit with it — properly sit with it, not just think about thinking about it — and start asking smaller, better questions, the answers do start to come. Not all at once. But they come.
If you're an ambitious high-achiever asking this of yourself, chances are you've got no shortage of options. Which sounds like a good problem to have, and in some ways it is, but it also makes the choosing harder. And then there's the noise — all the people around you who care, who have a stake, who have an opinion on what you should do next. Most of them mean well. Some of them have their own agenda tucked in there too. Either way, that noise has a way of drowning out the quieter knowing underneath it.
Something related to this that I've been seeing more and more over the past year: people co-creating their next role, rather than simply applying for one that already exists on a job spec somewhere. It's a genuinely exciting shift — for the person, but also for the organisation.
Financial services carries a lot of history. A lot of ‘this is how we've always done it here', and yet — I've seen some really senior examples of organisations bending that history to meet an emerging need, matching it with exactly the right person, and getting brilliant results.
The role that wasn't there until someone was honest about their frustrations or desire for change, had a conversation about it, and something new got built out of that. The organisation gets someone whose experience and reputation they already trust. The person gets a role that actually fits the level they're operating at now — not the level they were at two to three years ago when their job title was written.
In fact, none of it, in any of the examples I've seen, came down to job title. It was about the quality of the work, the impact, the daily experience of the work, growth, value-delivery and sustainability.
So if you're somewhere in the middle of the ‘what's next?' — it might be worth remembering that you don't necessarily have to leave to find it. Sometimes it's already there, waiting to be created from nothing.
If you're sitting with this question at the moment, and finding it hard to land on the answers — drop me a line. I'd love to hear where you've got to. And if it feels like it would help to have a thinking partner alongside you as you work it out, drop me a message on WhatsApp.
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