Chief Change Officer - #402 Helen Hanison: Success Isn’t Always Success — Part Two

Episode Date: May 31, 2025

You’ve admitted the career no longer fits. Now what?In Part Two, Helen Hanison, former global PR executive turned executive career coach, walks us through what real change takes—beyond pep talks and pivot memes. She unpacks her three-act framework (Alignment, Redesign, and Transformation), explains why people cling to jobs they secretly loathe, and warns against the “anchor bias” that keeps us chasing the same dream long after it’s stopped making sense.From spotting your outdated success scripts to mapping out future obstacles, Helen makes the case that career reinvention isn’t linear—it’s a zigzag of bold choices, mindset shifts, and quiet resilience. If you’re ready to do the inner work instead of just tweaking your LinkedIn title, this episode is your field guide.Key Highlights of Our Interview:Alignment Before Action“If you skip alignment, you’re just kicking the wrong can down the road.”Why getting unstuck starts with strengths, values, and purpose—not a job board scroll.Beware the Anchoring Trap“The first idea you fall in love with? It’s probably not the right one.”How to test-drive multiple versions of your future instead of clinging to the shiny one.Redesign as a Contact Sport“Agile career design means you keep moving, even when the path gets messy.”Helen shares how mini-experiments and pilot tests beat fantasy-level planning.The Psychology of Not Quitting“Hitting the wall isn’t failure. It’s a push-off point.”Hope Mapping, resilience habits, and the real mindset work behind meaningful transformation.Outgrowing the Old Career Narrative“Perseverance is not always noble—it can be your trap.”Letting go of the stories, scripts, and social prescriptions that no longer serve you.________________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Helen HanisonHelen's website: https://www.helenhanison.com  --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<

Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. I'll show it is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. What happens when your shiny, successful career starts to feel like a trap? Helen Hannison has the answer. She went from board-level PR executive to career coach. After realizing that the ladder she was climbing was leaning on the wrong wall, in this two-part series, Helen shares how she hit pause, got unstuck, and built a career that actually fits. We'll talk about career detour, tough choices, and why midlife isn't a crisis.

Is a chance to redesign. If your job looks great on paper but feels like sandpaper, this one is for you. Let's get into it. Let's dig into the boat now. You structure it into three acts. Act 1, Alignment. Act 2, Career Redesign. And Act 3, Transformation. First, why did you choose these three as the core structure? Why start with alignment?

Why follow that with career redesigned and then end with transformation? And second, for each of these X, what are the key takeaways or core messages you would want readers to walk away with? Let's start with Act 1, the Act of Alignment. To me, the Act of Alignment is an important foundational step for everyone in career redesign. And I'm pretty insistent, actually, that we give this proper time and attention at the beginning of working with somebody because otherwise, if we don't hesitate there on purpose and take inventory, what happens is I'm helping somebody kick the can down the road of what they think or assume the right problem to solve is. Now, maybe I'm supporting them, but I'm just supporting their own thought

process that they would have had without me. What I'm trying to do very deliberately here is say, let's go back to basics. We build a career compass, a very personal, highly bespoke, and it's made up of three components. One is strengths. And I find the professionals I work with tend to be pretty fluent at talking to their own strengths. They build careers on them.

They've heard them in appraisals. They're aware of what other people give value to about them and their work. However, if you're feeling very disconnected from what you do, you might not be owning them as much as you used to, or you might feel very disconnected from them. You might be discounting them altogether, assuming everybody has them. So there's something there and that's important because for any career redesign to be robust, it needs to be strengths-based or else we're in fantasy land, or something like that.

What we can do. So it's important, but it isn't as important as values. So we can very quickly move on to the value of values because they're directional, we need to utilize our strengths in order to express our values. So values are less easy for people to access, they operate under their consciousness. But put very simply for time now, it's what do you want to stand for? What are the most important drivers for you in life? Because that's what we need to, your career to have synergy with.

We need to have some kind of logic link between what you do and what you feel is most meaningful. And then we wrap it all up with a sense of purpose. So we start to get a bit more action orientedoriented about living into those values, if you like. What is going to feel purposeful? Now it's a verb. What are you doing to achieve that feeling, that alive and aligned feeling? Now act two is really like the meat in the sandwich.

Is career redesign? And it's a completely different gear again. It's all about action. How do we convert that radical self-awareness, that incredible career clarity we've got in Act 1 into our real world now? And we translate that into a series of pilot tests. We start thinking about a number of different career designs that have merit, that feel resonant for you. So that starts to dispel the myth that there's one true pathway you should be

on or used to be on or wish you were on. There's a number of ideas. And once you can start to see that, you can start collecting experiences or collecting conversations or both and just testing the, I suppose it's like, well, I can't say that today, stress testing your own aviation because there's no risk that way. You've already put yourself in the environments in some way or given yourself exposure to different ideas to before you make any dramatic moves or big leaps.

And so it's an agile, career design is very agile. You keep attracting incoming information, you keep testing, you keep tweaking. And so you're always iterating, always moving though. And that's the fastest route to transformation, which is the third act. The act of transformation is really because even the best of career designs aren't enough all on their own. We need the mindset mastery to strive long enough to actually succeed, to understand how to encounter the inevitable obstacles and barriers and not get thrown off track. And that takes a certain amount of learning to interrupt our inner critics and anticipating

a certain amount of learning to interrupt our inner critics and anticipating practical barriers and obstacles and having the resilience and the tools to keep moving forwards anyway. Yeah, that's all three. Yes, for this podcast, I always say it's about walk the walk, talk the talk leadership. is about walk the walk, talk the talk leadership. I like to talk to guests who have gone through real change themselves, not just sharing advice, but live experience. That's the kind of value I want to bring here. Now, when I skimmed through your book, one word really stood out, which is hope map. What is it?

Can you wobble through the idea? Yeah, sure. Hope mapping is in the act of transformation and it's an important part of protecting your plans. Because if we can anticipate obstacles and do the cognitive heavy lifting to decide how we would navigate them if they show up, it's not as hard when they do. Hope mapping is actually a psychology tool. I wish I could claim it as my own, but it's actually from a psychologist called William Schneider and there's seven steps to it. And this is explained in depth.

And in fact, I think the QR code in that chapter leads through to your own PwnKMAC. So you really get the chance to use all the tools that my one-to-one clients get to use in coaching, having had the explainer in the book. What it does is really help you think about worst case scenarios. And then what would you do with for making implementation plans? So the, what happens is you've got a way literally on the map. It's a math of grids, if you like, when you, yes, I wish I could have, I had one quick enough to hold up, but you'll see it is a math of grids.

It's a bit like one of those compete your own stories where if something happens, you go to that box on the right. And if the other thing happens, you go to the box on the left. What you don't do is stop. You don't need to get stuck. And you, you can, you've had the answers already down. And I think that is really such an important part of getting into that final stage of action with career redesign, because you find is you'll lose track of where you are. You'll lose hope. You'll have doubts that settle in and start getting louder.

And that might seem like a reasonable, valid signpost to a bought mission. And it's the only thing you can do. I think what I always say to people who are feeling at that point, the problems are coming at them, they're close, but now there's this obstacle that threatens the entire thing. You are that close and the growth you actually want for yourself and the hope that you've held close for yourself is just the other side of navigating this. So don't stop now. The only sure way to fail is to give up trying.

So that's why the hope map is so important. It's actually a very practical tool and psychology bat. You asked about protecting hope and I think that to me is actually all about the resilience involved. And that's a bit more self-talk. It's understanding how to nurture yourself through what might become hard. And that can be about interrupting inner critics whose voice is almost indisternable from your own thoughts about this plan isn't good enough. This is too risky. It's not responsible to keep trying.

Whatever it is that comes up for you, it's important to acknowledge it. A lot of people want to avoid those thoughts and squash them, or they feel like they're actionable instructions to stop trying, and that is somehow valid. But what's important to know is those somewhat negative sort of dialogues that pop up for us probably stem from something that was valid in the past. We don't need to carry them. They're outdated stories for today. So it's about looking at them and thinking,

so hang on, what's the anxiety here? If that's the message from my inner critic, fear of failure or fear of success sometimes, what can I do about that? How would I dilute that? So we're not ignoring So we're not ignoring or avoiding the message. We're actually embracing it and using it to spark some kind of action. So it's a bit like the Hint Map, although that tends to be practical. But it's the same idea again. Let's embrace the things that threaten to hold us stuck again, albeit down the line, and do something actionable to make sure that doesn't happen. And then call time. That's enough from the inner critics and that's enough doubt. So you back yourself. You've done the thinking by this point really quite in-depth thinking and you deserve to

carry that through to its eventuality. Yeah, as you were explaining, it reminded me of something a career coach asked me years ago. He said, Vince, what would you do if you couldn't fail? I remember being younger and not really knowing how to answer that question. But it stuck with me. Change is always hard. It comes with risk, uncertainty, setbacks. And like you said, once you've made the decision, don't stop. Think ahead. Map out the possible risks. Anticipate the bombs.

I study finance, so I tend to look at everything through that lens. In finance, we calculate risks, reprice them, we build models to manage them. But in life, most risks cannot be measured on a spreadsheet. So yeah, sometimes you have to take a step forward even when you are unsure. And if one path doesn't work out, it's not the end. You still got options. Hitting a wall doesn't mean full stop. That's one of the biggest takeaways I've gotten from our conversation today. Yeah, no, I love that actually.

It's not a full stop, it's a comma. I often say hitting, sometimes we need to hit the wall. If you think of a wall in terms of a swimming pool, your swim lengths, you do hit the wall, but it also gives you the impetus and the momentum you need to push up again in a different direction. And I do think career redesign, it is not linear. I don't think anybody's career or life for that matter

is linear, it's more like zigzags. And so long as we understand, we keep, we're motivated to keep on point because we know our why, we uncovered that in the value of values and unpacked our purpose, and I think if you have that motivation behind you, you never want to stop figuring it out and maybe career redesign is the problem you never stop solving and never want to. It's an agile, I think we're talking about career agility and it's that agile mindset of thinking about your

career as if it's a series of projects rather than one ladder or one linear journey that really helps people keep going. I really like the swimming pool analogy, because I enjoy swimming myself. I get it. Sometimes you just need to pause, catch your breath, you're tired, and you need a break. But after the rest, you get your energy back. You keep moving, you keep breathing. Even when your head underwater, there's a rhythm to it. We've overran a bit, but I have one or two more quick questions, because they tied right into this idea of transformation. You mentioned earlier something that stuck with me, which is don't get stuck in the past or the present. Could you say more about what you mean by that?

So I think we've talked a little bit about inner critics. Getting stuck in the past really to me means what stories are you telling yourself? What stories have you carried with you from your past? And it might not be your past career chapters, it might be way further back, but they are beliefs. They will appear as if their beliefs you feel are as solid as truths. However, if you are stuck in work that's wrong and struggling or overwhelmed and disconnected, then it's worth tracking what stories are holding you there.

Is there a story of, I can only do what I've always done? Is there a story of, it would be such a waste to just look away from everything I've achieved? Is there a story of, it's too long the way down at this point of being successful to try something new is too late for me. What are the stories? Where have they come from? Are they social prescriptions?

Are they things that your family brought you up on or maybe didn't mean to, but inadvertently that's what you saw modeled. What are they? Because if you can make their origins, the origin story visible, then you start to give yourself permission to unpack them and really question, is that serving me to make my choices through the lens of these stories? So that's the past. The present is again, this idea of persevering.

And if you think, I'm feeling like I want to hold the book up again, but if you're that person in the circle and you know, you're probably excellent at persevering in your profession because we have been absolutely weaned on this idea that perseverance is a virtue, but it isn't if it's holding you stuck, violating your values, and has you knowing what you do, even if it used to make sense. So it's again, just giving yourself permission to meet yourself where you are today, not where your past self put you, and just question what serves, what is actually going to get you closer to the hopes and vision that you

hold for yourself because that isn't often the same as staying where you feel stuck. It's time, it's a call to action, isn't it? It's time to at least open up about what career redesign might mean for your next chapter. might mean for your next chapter. I really like the circle metaphor. I think that captures the main idea of your book as well. So this is really my last question for our interview. Your book is called Unstuck, a smart guide to a Purposeful Career.

What are some of the unsmart things people tend to do when they feel stuck? Yeah, easily. It's, I think if I go through the apps, if I do it in order, then what I would say is the first thing that would not be sparked would be not to take the time to get all that career clarity because really I think for anyone, unless you can understand what you're strongest at, but also enjoy most that lights you up and feels purposeful to you, then there is no career design that you know will be aligned with that. You haven't taken the time to understand what it needs to align with if you're going to feel

fulfilled. So that would be the first big red flag for me. The second one would be to have an idea that you're very married to. People who have a singular idea that they're very married to. I find it very hard. In psychology, they call it anchoring. And you've probably heard of this throughout the financial sort of side of life. It's the same in this lane. Whatever idea you come up with first, you're not ever so prepared or flexible about moving too far from. So that is why in career redesign, we start ideating and we come up with a minimum

of three career life designs that you find attractive and appealing. You don't have to do them all, we've only, they're only one person, but we do have to come up with them and think about them and move into them in quite a bit of depth. So that would be the other unsmart thing to be married to one hope or idea. There's a sort of part too with that one of not trying, not pilot testing the idea, not stress testing it, not understanding how you respond when you expose yourself to this idea that you've had for yourself. Because how can any of us know if we're really going to love that environment or this nature of work or be able to access it? It is very risky, I think, to give anything up without having first diluted the risk and

tested it robustly. And then I think the final thing would be to think that you've done everything it needs, having gone through the thought process of aligning but also redesigning. Because the truth is transformation takes more than that. It takes this resilience and knowing how you top yours up when it feels like the levels are getting dangerously low. And that's, I think that would be unsmart not to take account of. And I will admit bias, but I also think it would be unsmart not to put support in place, whether that is a coach or important others, mentors, people who you really trust have your best interests at heart,

but know you and understand what you hope for yourself. Not to abdicate responsibility for your ideas, but to have input and an influx of other ideas and fresh thinking on them that just provokes thought. Yes, probably quite a lot, but that's four, I think. One last thing I want to say about community and support. Whether it's a coach, a group of like-minded people, or even just one person who gets it. It matters so much. Actually, you probably don't know this. None of my guests do.

Each of you is part of my support system. Every time I talk to a guest from somewhere in the world, it reminds me that I'm doing the right thing with the podcast. There are moments, many moments, when I doubt myself. Of course we all do. But these conversations with real people who care about change. They ground me. They remind me this is real. This work matters. So yes, support systems are vital. That might mean hiring a coach,

just like hiring a trainer when you go to the gym, or leaning on your family or siblings or friends, assuming they're all trustworthy and available, or simply having conversations with people who share your vision and feelings. That's how we stay afloat. That's how we keep going when things get messy or uncertain. And like you said, failure isn't part of the manual. Because if we keep moving, learning, adapting, we don't fail, we figure it out.

That to me is the key. Exactly. I couldn't have said it much better yourself. And it's a privilege actually to hear you saying that these conversations help you something. And that's very flattering. So thank you for saying that these conversations help you something and that's very flattering. So thank you for saying that. No, I'm serious. Every single one of you, I mean it. Each week, I get emails from different people saying, hey, I love to be on your show. Hey, I love to be on your show. I love to be on your show. Hey, I love to be on your show. And I talk to every one of them. For me, even it turns out they are not the right fit for the podcast,

I still make a new connection. And most of the time, they've already checked out my work before reaching out. So we are already aligned on some level, and that's how we keep the engine moving. Failure? Not an option. Stopping? Also not an option. Nice and that resilience will keep you in momentum won't it? I think a lot of this in momentum, won't it? I think a lot of this is a momentum game, actually. Before we conclude, is there anything I haven't asked that you would like to share? Something on your mind or something you feel is important for our audience to listen. I don't think I've got, we're covered in lock and that's been, I agree, it's been severely enjoyable but really energizing. I don't think there's anything, I feel

like that's a shame I haven't been able to say that. I suppose it's the thing of where do people find me? So maybe the website is the obvious one, helenhannison.com, but LinkedIn, I think, I feel much the same as you. Meaningful connections will always be important to me and that's the space I collect people. So that would be great. And I think to get the book, I would say, let's pop a link in for that because I've just done or upgraded my sort of page about the book. There's a bunch of offers and opportunities in only in there. So it is the right way for people to have a glimpse in and see if it's for them and

get it if they want. I suppose the only other thing that we haven't talked about, but I don't know if you think it's a value add would be there's a quiz that people might like to do to discover their act type. So if you're feeling a bit stuck in hesitation about where to start and you're not sure what version of stuckness you're struggling with, you just have this sort of quite ambiguous feeling the act quiz is literally one minute. It's quite light, but it really does a good job of signposting, whether you're stuck with the career clarity bit or you're stuck, you know, exactly what you need to align with, but you don't know the idea or how to move from A to B, or it's this mindset mastery

that is about transformation. So the quiz would be a fun, quick way to have an entry point into never getting stuck again. And that ends our two-part series with Helen Hanneson. From breaking down limiting beliefs to mapping out purposeful action, Helen's approach flips the usual career advice on its head. Redesigning your work life isn't about piling through. It's about pausing, rethinking, and making moves that actually match who you are now. Hopefully, you're walking away with fresh clarity, and maybe even your own hope map.

Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.