#74 | Why You Need A Zigzag Career Strategy To Build Unshakable Influence and Combat Your Imposter Synrome

Have you ever felt the need to apologise for a career path that looks more like a zigzag than a ladder?

If your CV includes pivots, pauses, reinventions, sideways moves, or roles that do not fit neatly into one clear story, this episode will help you see your path differently. Instead of treating your varied experience as something to explain away, Caroline shows how unconventional careers often build the exact transferable skills that make you more adaptable, valuable, and ready for what comes next.

 In this episode, you’ll learn how to:

• Reframe your nonlinear career path as evidence of range, resilience, and adaptability. 
• Identify the transferable skills you have collected through pivots, career breaks, redundancies, and reinventions. 
• Stop apologising for your zigzag and start naming its value with confidence in interviews, conversations, and career decisions. 

Play this episode now to start turning your unconventional career story into one of your strongest sources of confidence.

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New episodes are released every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings.

Stuck, simmering, or onto something juicy? I want to hear it. Drop me a line at caroline@inspireyourgenius.com - I read them all.

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This podcast explores resilience, imposter syndrome, and credibility while unpacking how boundaries, conflict, and feedback shape the way we handle pressure, influence, and guilt at work. It also looks at promotion, work-life balance, people pleasing, decision making, and visibility, offering honest conversations about how to grow professionally without losing your confidence or yourself.

Transcript

Caroline Esterson (00:00)
Hello there and welcome back. Can I start today by telling you something that the career advice industry has been getting wrong for a decade? The ladder. It's a lie. It's not malicious. It's just an outdated story that we've been telling people since the industrial age, that careers go upwards in a straight line through clearly marked rungs and that anyone who doesn't follow that path has somehow taken a wrong turn.

And if you have ever stood at a party and felt that, ⁓ excruciating pain when someone asks, so what do you do then? Because your honest answer involves three industries, two complete reinventions and a career break that you're still not sure how to explain. Well, this week is just for you. Because this week on Unshakable Her, we're talking about the zigzag, that nonlinear path

pivot that looked like a backward step yet turned out to be the absolute making of you.

Caroline Esterson (01:08)
Welcome to Unshakeable Her, helping ambitious women who are constantly second guessing themselves build the daily habits that compound into unshakable confidence. I'm Caroline Esterson and I'm in your corner. It's Monday, which means we're telling a story today because the best way to see your own situation clearly is to watch someone else live it first. Then we'll crack open the unspoken rule book of how power, promotion and visibility really move.

The stuff your manager won't say out loud, your mentor probably doesn't know, and your performance review will absolutely never mention so that you can stop second guessing and start moving. Grab your coffee. Let's go.

Caroline Esterson (01:56)
So here's what you're going to get from today's episode. Firstly, a story about someone whose unconventional career path was the thing that made her extraordinary, even though nobody told her that until much later. Then you're going to get a name for the shame that lives in the zigzag and why it's got nothing to do with your actual worth.

finally, one two millimeter move that starts your shift from apologizing for your path to completely owning it. So that's the shape of Monday. Let's go.

Let me tell you about Nadia. She's 43 years old and she's sitting in a job interview for a head of people role at a fast growing tech company. She's prepared thoroughly. She knows the company. She knows the brief. She is objectively the most qualified person that they're going to see this week. And she's also terrified. Not because of the questions that they might ask, but

more because of the question she absolutely knows they're going to ask. Now, the interviewer, young, sharp, kind enough, looks down at Nadia's CV and says, so, ⁓ your background is quite varied. Can you walk me through it?

There it is. Nadia takes a breath. She started as a primary school teacher, seven years in the classroom, then leading on literacy across the school. She was really good at it. Really good. And then she did something that made every teacher she knew look at her like she completely lost the plot. She moved into a project management role at an ed tech consultancy,

leading a team, delivering technology implementation into schools, no formal qualifications or corporate experience, just the absolute conviction that she understood both the classroom and the product and that someone needed to sit in the gap between the two.

It was bumpy she won't pretend otherwise, but she learnt things in that role that no qualification could have taught her. How to lead people who don't report to her?

How to sell an idea to a skeptical head teacher at 4pm on a Friday afternoon. How to translate between the world of technology and the world of humans who just want it to work for them.

From there, another pivot into corporate L &D, then three years freelancing, during which time she ran a community arts project because the funding came up and she believed in it and look, it all made sense at the time.

Then in-house at a financial services firm in her first proper people leadership role.

Then redundancy, during which characteristically she took the opportunity to take her advanced diploma in people management. Then consulting across both HR and L &D. And now we're here.

That's quite a journey, the interviewer says carefully. She smiles, clicks her pen once, looks back down at the CV. The question she didn't ask is the loudest thing in the room in that moment.

I want to stay with this moment for a second because this is becoming so much more the norm nowadays. Not necessarily the specific route that Nadia took, but the feeling in the room when someone looks at your career history and you can see them just trying to make sense of it. Particularly if there's been a necessary pivot after redundancy or even because of something like childcare responsibilities.

the slight apology that creeps into your voice when you're trying to explain it, or the way that you preemptively justify those pivots. But it was actually really relevant because, before anyone's even questioned it, the exhausting performance of making a zigzag sounds like a straight line. So here's what Nadia knows and what I want you to really hear right now. Nobody.

Just nobody has a straight line anymore, not really. Jobs that existed five years ago have disappeared. Industries that didn't exist 10 years ago are now entire economies. AI is reshuffling entire job functions while people are still sitting in them. The idea that you can pick a lane at 22 and drive it straight to retirement, well, honestly, that was never really true. And it is absolutely not true nowadays.

What is true, however, what has always been true for people like Nadia is this. Every time you move, every time you pivot, every time you follow the thing that made sense, even when it looks sideways or maybe even backwards to everyone else, you are collecting something. That's something is transferable skills. It's not the stuff on your CV. It's the real stuff.

It's things like the ability to read a room that you've never been in before, to build trust quickly with people who have no reason to give it to you, to take something complicated and make it land for others, or to start from nothing and make something work. Technical and behavioral skills that translate across industries.

In our business, Wendy and I talk about building a mindset, skillset and toolset that grows with you. That collection doesn't belong to any one employer or any one job title. It travels with you. And here's the thing about a world where jobs really are changing overnight and nobody, nobody can tell you with certainty...

what the landscape looks like in five years.

person with a zigzag career and a head full of transferable skills hasn't gone about this the wrong way and certainly isn't behind. Instead, she's ready. She just needs to know it. And well, that interviewer is about to find out.

So let's unpick this. This week's entry for the unspoken rule book is this. The career ladder was invented for organizations. It's nice, tidy, easy to explain. But the zigzag that was built by people who kept following what they were actually good at. One of those paths create people with drive, grit, flexibility.

skills that are essential in demand and invaluable. I can tell you now it's not the ladder that built that.

We are still in 2026 operating hiring and performance systems that were designed around the idea of the specialist, the person who went deep in one lane, accumulating years, climbed rungs. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that path, but it is not the only path and it is increasingly not the most interesting one because the world in which we're working now

complex, fast moving, cross-functional, deeply human doesn't just need depth. It needs people who can translate across disciplines, who've seen multiple industries, who've been the new person more than once and know how to read that room that they've never been in before.

Because the world we're working in now, complex, fast moving, cross-functional, deeply human, doesn't just need depth. It needs people who can translate across disciplines, who see multiple industries, who've been the new person more than once and had to learn quickly. The zigzag isn't the consolation prize for people who couldn't stick to the plan. It's actually the making of people who can do things that specialists can't.

Nobody tells you that when you're 25 and feeling a little bit behind.

So back to Nadia. Nadia stops apologizing. Just. She notices the apology about to arrive and she decides not to send it. She looks at the interviewer and she says, I think the variety is actually the point. Every pivot I made taught me something the previous role couldn't. The teaching gave me something that no L &D qualification ever does.

I actually know how people learn under pressure, not just in theory. The community arts program taught me how to resource things from nothing. The financial services stint taught me how to translate people priorities into commercial language. I'm not a specialist, I'm a translator. And for this role, where you need someone who can hold the people agenda in a room full of people who think people suffer. And for this role.

where you need someone who can hold the people agenda in a room full of people who think people stuff is soft. A translator is exactly what you need. The interviewer stops writing. That, she says, that's actually what we've been struggling to articulate. Nadia gets the job, not despite the zigzag, because of it. Two millimeters, the shift from apologizing from your past.

the shift from apologizing for your path to naming its value. Out loud, with evidence, without flinching. That's Monday. And before we leave, let me give you two other quick examples from people we know. Yonna, who we actually talk about in episode four, actually took a downward move to help her move forward. It was a proper boomerang and it was the best move she ever made. Go take a listen if this is important to you.

And Giuseppe, Giuseppe was a car mechanic and then he got a job at Harrods. Not because he had retail experience or because he knew the industry. He didn't. Because he walked into that interview which he didn't even know was for Harrods until he was sitting in the room.

And when they asked him why they should hire him over the 25 other people they'd already seen, all of whom had experience he didn't have, he said something that made them switch on and think. He said, all of those people have to unlearn what they know and relearn it your way.

I know nothing, so just train me. It'll be much quicker. I'll be the perfect employee." They gave him the job on the spot. He said he doesn't know where it all came from, that it just clicked in the moment, but I know where it came from. And I think you do too. It came from someone who had spent years developing the ability to read a situation, find the angle nobody else was looking at,

and to back himself completely in a room full of people with more conventional credentials. That's not luck That is transferable skills at work, collected on a zigzag path, brought into a room. He had no business being in and used ⁓ to get the job anyway. That's the coat, Nadia. That's the coat. And this phrase will be completely understood on Friday.

If Nadia's interview room feels familiar, the apology that lives in your voice when someone asks about your CV, stay with that feeling

Because Wednesday we're going to show you exactly what the science says that zigzags have been building in you. And then Friday, we have a song that's going to completely reframe how you think about your unconventional path. I promise you're not expecting it. And I promise it's right.

Caroline Esterson (14:16)
That's it for today. Before you go, one ask. If a woman came to mind while you were listening, the one stuck, the one circling a promotion, the one quietly wondering if it's just her, send her this episode because she gets to feel less alone. You get to be the woman who refused to let her stay stuck, who reached back instead of scrolling on.

That's how movements start with one woman sending one episode to another. Every share chips away at the unspoken rules that have kept too many of us second guessing for too long because unshakable isn't built alone. It's built in the women who reach back. One forward, one friend, one two millimeter difference at a time. Be in her corner, like I'm in yours.

See you Wednesday.