Sept. 14, 2022

Spark : Jenny Wood : How do you know when it's time to FLIP roles at work?

“How do I know it’s time to switch roles in your career?”

Jenny Wood of Google's Own Your Career program

Has been asked 1000+ times. Her advice👇

Don’t switch roles . . . F L I P roles

Ask your self honestly:

F - Fun - Am I having fun?

L - Learning - Am I truly learning?

I - Impact - Does my work make an impact?

P - Personal - Does my work match the lifestyle I want?

On next week's episode 76, Jenny Wood shares how she’s used the FLIP model in her own career.   

Full episode drops next week (follow Adam Coelho on Linkedin)

Transcript

Adam Coelho:

Welcome to the mindful fire podcast, where we explore crafting a life you love and making work optional. Using the tools of mindfulness envisioning and financial independence. Let's jump into today's mindful fire spark. A short mini episode pulled from one of our most popular episodes. To listen to the full episode, just click the link in the show notes for the episode you're listening to right now. Let's jump into today's mindful fire spark Okay, Jenny, so you mentioned that. Letting your happiness and the question, am I happy guide your career. And so how do you know when it's time to change roles?

Jenny Wood:

Great questions. I actually have a little acronym on this one. How do you know when it's time to change roles, Adam, or I like to say, how do you know when it's time to flip roles? Flip stands for F L I P fun learning impact that's business impact and personal. So am I having fun? Am I excited about the challenges we have? Am I showing up at each team meeting, raising my hand with new ideas? Or am I rolling my eyes? When somebody comes off mute to speak saying, oh, we tried that four quarters ago. It's never going to work right. A little bit cynical. That's not fun. I know what fun feels like in my body. And that doesn't feel fun in that meeting. Oh, am I learning new things? And I don't just mean incremental learning. Step function, learning like real big incremental steps in my learning. And by the way, I don't just mean learning about a product. Learning about yourself too. So I just went through this experience. I just started a new role 10 days ago and I had been in my old role. For almost three years. And I thought he was still learning, but it was like real small learning day to day. It wasn't big learning. And when I think about the personal learning, I realize now that I'm in this new job, how much I am making massive learning leaps and bounds every day, one example is I used to struggle with decision-making and being quick about decision-making and now I'm finding myself being much, much faster. And I realized in this, new role is giving me an opportunity to be faster. And that decision making, who are we going to hire? Who are we going to pass on? How should I set up the structure of the team? These things are much faster now for me. And that used to be a real development area. So I realize I'm learning not just about new products and new systems and new team. I'm learning about myself in this new role and how I've grown professionally in my ability to make decisions faster. So that was L learning. I impact the business impact that was making some business impact in my past role recently, but not nearly as much as I was making two and a half years ago when I started on that team and had new goals that we defined a new processes and structures and built a new C suite for our leadership team. Like that was real impact. And I think it had frankly tapered off if I'm being honest with myself. And then finally the P stands for personal, what is going on in my personal life. And this can be two things it can be do I need to change cities because my fiance is in Ann Arbor and I'm in New York. And that happened to me at the time. In a previous life at Google or personal could also mean, is this job so stressful that I'm staying up at night? Worried about it or am I so unhappy in this role that I am not even showing up for my friends or am I so overworked that I don't have time to go to dinner with my boyfriend, whatever your case is in your own individual situation, all those things fall into personal. And that is okay to consider when you're thinking about, do you stay in a role or do you go, so again that's how do you know when it's time to flip roles? F L I P fun learning impact personal.

Adam Coelho:

Yeah, that's definitely helpful to remember and flipping rules. Thanks so much for joining us for today's mindful fire spark. I hope you're feeling inspired to take action to make things happen in your own life. If you got value from today's mindful fire spark, I invite you to check out the full episode by clicking the link in the show notes, or by searching the guest's name, wherever you're listening to this. And make sure to hit subscribe. So you receive all future episodes and mindful fire sparks. And I invite you to take action in your own life. By answering three simple questions. These are the first three questions I ask myself when I'm feeling lost and I'm not sure which direction to go. You can find out what the questions are by downloading my free journaling guide available at mindfulfire.org/start. And just by doing that, you're already closer to the vision that you have for your life. I'm excited for you. Are you excited? Go to mindful fire.org/start. And find out the three questions right now. Thanks again, I'll catch you next time on the mindful fire podcast.

Jenny WoodProfile Photo

Jenny Wood

Jenny Wood is the founder of Google's Own Your Career program, which helps Google employees increase their impact and influence in their current role and/or land their next role. In just a few months, the program scaled from 153 users to 23,000 users across 180 global offices with 97% positive feedback. Jenny also leads a team of 25 Googlers as the Global Lead for Mobile Apps Customer Care. Jenny loves improv, tap dancing, hiking, and flying airplanes as a private pilot. She lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and two children.