A few weeks ago, I quit my job. In reality, I did something much bigger than that: I walked away from an industry where I had spent years building my career, my reputation and a significant part of my professional identity.
If you’ve ever built an audience or a reputation around one specific area, and then felt yourself pulled somewhere else, this one’s for you. I’m going to use my own change as the example, but the real point of this post is the questions underneath it: the ones I think anyone facing this can actually use.
For years, I worked in reporting, analytics and project controls within the infrastructure sector. Over time, that became more than just my day job. It became one of the main topics I created content about, the community I contributed to, and the area where many people came to know my work.
Then I decided to take a different direction. It wasn’t about falling out of love with the industry. Over the past year there was a real increase in expectations around commuting and office presence, and as work-life balance became non-negotiable for me, I realised I could no longer reconcile those expectations with the life I wanted. My priorities had changed, and my career needed to reflect that.
Changing careers privately is one thing. Changing direction publicly, in front of an audience who knows you for something specific, is another.
The moment you start sharing your knowledge online, you build an association between yourself and certain topics. People start recognising you for your expertise, your perspective, the conversations you contribute to. Over time, those topics become your personal brand, or at least the visible part of it.
So if you’re in this position, here’s the question that will come next, because it came for me: do I keep creating content about what I’m known for? Do I drop it and start somewhere new? Or is there a way to do both?
I don’t think there’s a clean answer to that. But I’ve found a better question to ask underneath it, and it comes from a framework I already lean on a lot: Ikigai.
Using Ikigai to Work out What Actually Stays
Ikigai is a Japanese concept built around the intersection of four things: what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can be rewarded for. People usually describe it as a way of finding purpose. I use it as a way of naming the different forces that are pulling you toward a direction, so you can actually see them instead of just feeling pulled.
Applied to a career change, or to the content built around one, Ikigai asks you to look past the job title and the industry and find the deeper pattern instead: the topics you gravitate toward, the skills you’ve built over time regardless of where you built them, the problems you enjoy solving, the places where your input genuinely helps someone. And reward doesn’t have to mean money. It can mean recognition, fulfilment, or simply becoming visible to opportunities you’d never have found otherwise.
Here’s what that looked like for me. My personal brand was never really “project controls.” It was built from how I communicate, how I solve problems, the way I show up for people, and the stories I choose to tell. None of that disappears when the industry changes. Some of it didn’t even come from my career in the first place. Motherhood taught me patience, prioritisation and adaptability. Volunteering taught me leadership, empathy and how to create impact without needing authority to do it. If you map your own experience against Ikigai’s four questions, I’d guess you’ll find the same thing: more of “you” survives the change than it feels like in the moment.
That doesn’t make the change less intimidating. There’s real comfort in creating content about something you already understand: the questions people ask, what resonates, where your credibility comes from. Moving into a new area means accepting you might not have all the answers anymore, and that’s a genuinely uncomfortable trade to make.
There’s a risk in the opposite direction too, though, and it’s worth naming if you’re weighing this up. Continuing to create content purely because it’s what people expect from you has a cost. The content I enjoy reading most is written by people sharing something they genuinely care about right now, something they’re learning, experimenting with, or living through first-hand. That authenticity is hard to fake once your own reality has moved on.
None of this means abandoning what came before, and I don’t think Ikigai asks you to. Project controls will always be part of my professional journey; it gave me incredible opportunities. Careers are made of chapters, and ending one doesn’t mean it failed, or that those years stop counting. It means you’re allowed to keep growing.
If you’re thinking about changing careers, moving into a new industry, or just changing what you create content about, I’d start exactly where Ikigai starts: not with what you should leave behind, but with what you already have.
- What do you genuinely enjoy exploring?
- What do people already come to you for?
- What have you built that others, including you, might be underestimating?
- And what’s pulling at your curiosity enough that you’d learn it from scratch if you had to?
For me, the honest answer is that I’m still working through my own version of those questions, and I’ve made peace with that. What I do know is that I don’t need to reinvent myself. I need to explore what genuinely matters to me now, and find where my existing strengths overlap with what I’m curious about. That overlap is usually where the next chapter is already sitting, waiting to be noticed rather than invented.
That’s where I am right now, and if you’re standing in a similar spot, I hope this gives you a way to actually work through it, rather than just a story to nod along to.
