4 Ways to Grow Your Career (in Survival Mode)

Noelle, a senior leader career coach and host of We Lead Anyway, addresses a workshop question: how to do career pathing when everyone is in survival mode amid AI, shifting technology, layoffs, and doing multiple jobs for one paycheck. She says traditional five-year plans can feel unrealistic and emphasizes that survival mode is real and not a personal failure. She distinguishes intentional surviving from self-limitation, focusing on control, clarity, and consistency. Her practical framework centers on what you can control: delivering on current responsibilities, sharpening one skill in small daily increments, maintaining one key relationship to stay visible, and keeping a record of wins through a “smile file” or brag document. She recommends thinking in 90-day windows or one small move at a time.

Transcript

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Welcome back to We Lead Anyway. I'm Noelle, senior leader, career coach, and your host. Please hold while I sip this wonderful, hot, delicious coffee. Thank you. I hope that wasn't too ASMR for anyone. So recently I was running a workshop and someone raised their hand and asked a question. And I've been thinking about it ever since because this is a real thing. But the question was how do we do career pathing when we're all just in survival mode? So some of you know I work with leadership teams or companies, ERGs, to do certain workshops, career pathing, et cetera. And the room went quiet because everybody felt that. And you could see it on their faces, right? There's this mix of I want to grow, I want to grow. And I am barely keeping my head above water right now. And I think that's important to talk about. How do you think about your career, your growth, your next move when you're in pure survival mode? And that I promise you there's an answer. It's just not the one that, you know, career books are selling. Because really, what is the framework for survival mode? So here's the first thing I said in that room, and I'll say it to you. Survival mode, it's real. It is an actual condition that a lot of us are working in right now. You have to contend with the market, with AI, with ever-changing technology. There are many people doing three jobs with one paycheck. We're dodging layoffs. It's a lot. It's a lot. And if you listen to my recent podcasts or watch the video about an empathy recession, it doesn't get any easier because nobody understands what you're going through. And most career advice, it's not written for this. Most career advice or frameworks just tells you to map your five-year vision and build your personal brand and network like your life depends on it. And when you're in survival mode, that advice doesn't just feel hard. It feels almost insulting. Like I cannot think about five years when I'm trying to make it to Thursday, lady. Okay. So if that's where you are, hear me. You're not failing. You're not. You're not failing at your career. You're surviving a season that is genuinely difficult. And that takes everything you got sometimes. Everything. Okay. So truth, you probably cannot do big, ambitious, vision board career pathing right now. That's okay. We don't need you to. But I have to call this out. There's a difference between surviving and surviving survival mode and self-limitation. So surviving obviously is keeping yourself afloat with intention. But self-limitation is using the fact that you're in survival mode to stay where you are, to say this is the thing that's keeping me from what I want. And the thing that separates those two things is control, clarity, and consistency. Okay, so let's talk about control. When you're in survival mode, you don't have the capacity to manage everything. So you should stop trying to. You let go of what you can't control and you pour your limited energy. And these days it is limited with everything going on. You pour that into what you can. What can you control? You can't control the economy or whether your company does layoffs. You can't control the market or hiring freeze or your boss's mood or if the role that you want exists right now. Just stop spending your last drop of energy there. It's a leak. You're not going to get that back. But here is what you can control, even on your worst week. One, how you show up on what's already in front of you. Right now, you don't need a new big project to grow. No. You need to be known as the person who delivers what's already on your plate. And in survival mode, your reputation is built in the small stuff. The thing that you said you do, done. That is career pathing. It's quiet, it's not glamorous, but it compounds. Okay, number two, one skill. Not a whole certification, not a five-year development plan. One skill that you can sharpen just a little. 15 minutes here and there. You can brush up on how to use AI better with bite-sized clips from TikTok. I love TikTok for that stuff. It's all this all the time retention span I have these days. I fully believe in YouTube University. You can learn so much from there, and there are great AI content creators. Or ask Claude how to reduce steps in your workflow. Just don't give it any proprietary data. You can get creative. It literally takes 15 minutes a day. Because when the season ends and it will end, it won't be like this forever. You want to come out of it with something more than just exhaustion. Okay, number three, one relationship. You don't have to network like it's your full-time job. You have to stay visible to a handful of people who matter. One message, one check-in, one, hey, I'm thinking of you. How are you doing? Survival mode makes us disappear. And disappearing is the thing that hurts you long term, right? So you got to stay a little bit sane, even when you're trying to do your best to survive. For your record. This is the one that people skip, but it's my ultimate favorite, and I will bite you on it. Keep track of your wins, especially right now. A running list of what you did, what you solved, what you carried, because survival mode has a way of erasing the memory of your own value. And the day that you have capacity again or an opportunity shows up, you don't want to be starting that list from zero. So what I do is I make a smile file, make a brag book. I literally just have a Google Doc with all the good things that people have said to me, all the people who've reached out and said thank you, cross-functional partnership, kudos, things that I've created or put in place because come review time or time to ask for a raise or promotion. I need those things in my back pocket. And here's the mindset shift that makes all of this doable. For now, stop thinking in five years. In survival mode, five years is a fantasy. In the world of AI, we have no idea what it looks like. Think in 90 days. Or honestly, think in one move. What is one small, controllable thing I can do this month that my future self will thank me for? That's it. And if that's all you have in you, then that's all you do. One move. And the next one when you have it in you. And that's not lowering your ambition. That's matching your strategy to your season. You can only do what you can do. So to the person in that workshop, and to all of you, listen, survival mode is a season. It's never forever. And it's okay to acknowledge where you are, what the circumstances are, and then adjust yourself to that. Let go of what you can't control. Protect the little energy that you do have, and spend it on the handful of things that are actually yours to move. And that's how you keep career pathing, even now, quietly, one controllable step at a time. You don't have to thrive every season to lead anyway. Sometimes leading looks like surviving intentionally. Listen, if you have a topic you'd like me to discuss, email me at noelleleadsanyway at gmail.com. And if you're interested in personal or professional development, or if you are an organization in need of a leadership training, please visit leadwithnoelle.com. And until next time, all of y'all go take up space.