Dorie Clark: Journalist To Entrepreneur
In episode #21 of My 2.0, guest Dorie Clark, strategy consultant, executive coach, and keynote speaker, shares her transition from a career as a journalist to an entrepreneur.
Dorie thought she was going to be an academic but got turned down for all doctoral programs. Her Plan B was to become a journalist, and she ended up getting laid off after about a year on the job.Eventually she found her way into working in politics, running a nonprofit for two years realized that she wanted to run her own business. And moved on to having her own consulting and executive coaching business.
On the topic of feeling stuck, Dorie felt she didn’t have the luxury of being stuck, and that always needed to figure something out and keep pushing. She decided she was going to exhaust every possible resource, call everyone she knew to hustle and network my way into whatever the next thing is.
Dorie’s advice to her pre-transition self is contained in her book Reinventing You. She interviewed about 50 other professionals who had made career transitions to create a guide that people could use to feel more in control of what can often feel like an out of control process. Her advice was for us to reinvent ourselves in small ways on an ongoing basis and keep ourselves current. The less likely we are to be faced with a situation where we're static for five years or 10 years.
When asked why she wrote Entrepreneurial You, Dorie said it was her attempt to figure out ways to scale her business in developing simultaneous and adjacent streams of businesses.
When asked what it means to have a brand, Dorie answered it needs to start with who we are and what we are able to do, and articulate it to the market. And that when we transition to a different career, we have to be the captain of our narration.
Dorie also talked about her new book coming in September ‘The Long Game. How to be a long-term thinker in a short term world’. Over the last 5 years, she has met a lot of great people and built up a longitudinal perspective and pattern recognition around observations that I've noticed in terms of very smart, very talented professionals in the stressors they face, that come in the way of long term growth. That we don’t know how long it takes to become a successful recognized expert. So this is her attempt to light this dark, long and opaque path.
When asked how we could future proof our careers, Dorie shared that the one thing we do know is that whatever position we're in, we want to be as protected and secure as we possibly can be. So that if disruption is coming down the pike, we are able to pivot with enough time.
On the power of identifying and defending ourselves against our vulnerabilities, Dorie shared that it’s very easy to focus on what you lack, but if we do that, we are accepting other people's frames. The truth is while we are lacking certain things, we are developing new skills all the time.
Dorie also shared the free self-assessment that is tied in the book Revinting You at www.dorieclark.com/reinvent.
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