Three Strategies to Future-Proof Your Career

Welcome to a very special career-focused episode of the podcast. Liz shares insights, strategies, and real-world examples  from working with the fastest-growing companies in the world, and distills them for your career-- so you can stay a step ahead of AI and the job instability it creates. 

This episode is for old and new listeners alike, but special gratitude goes out to all the original Reset listeners who made this such a beautiful journey. 

Show notes:

Pre-order Liz's new book- AQ

Get Your Pre-Order Bonus here

Take the AQ Archetypes Quiz - AQquiz.com

Subscribe to the Life Skills Newsletter 

Follow Liz on Instagram

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:04

Welcome to the Reset Podcast. After a two-year hiatus, we are back for a special five-episode drop, perhaps more. As always, the goal is to explore your inner world, embrace who you are becoming, and to support you in reaching your greatest potential. I'm Liz Tran, and I am so glad you are here. Before we get started, I wanted to just say how much fun I am having with this reboot of the podcast. I love seeing your DMs, your emails about the podcast being back. It's really fun. And I have a small ask for all of you. Over the years that I've been recording almost a hundred episodes of this podcast, I have never once taken sponsorship ads, partnerships, anything like that on purpose because I wanted to keep it as a space between me and you that just felt very pure in its intentions. So my ask today is simply this if you have ever, ever, ever found value in this podcast, please, please, please pre-order a copy of my book, AQ, before February 3rd, when it comes out. And the reason why this matters is because every pre-order counts towards week one sales, which is usually the biggest pop for a book, because everything that gets ordered in advance counts towards week one. And that is the best chance to make any of the bestseller lists. So if I sell 3,000 books in week one, but I've also pre-sold another 3,000 books, then my week one number actually looks like 6,000, which is amazing. So the book is$30, which I know is a big investment. But if you've ever found any sort of value in this podcast, one way you can support me is just to pre-order the book. And if you can't financially, I totally understand. Don't force it. But if you can, I would be forever grateful. We have a bunch of pre-order bonuses that you get too. So for instance, you can join two webinars next week. One is getting your mind right for 2026, putting your plans down on paper. The other is all about the AQ archetypes. They will be recorded for anyone who cannot join the webinars. I also have my trusty manifestation journal that I love so much that I swear by that I will send a copy to you if you're in the US and a printable version as well, no matter where you are. And there is a bonus podcast episode, and you get an immediate download of chapter one of the book. So you can go into depth about what your AQ archetype is. It's actually just so easy to do. You can literally pre-order the book anywhere that books are sold. And then if you go to my website, which is lizentran.com, you can submit your pre-order bonus very easily. It takes 10 seconds. You just do it through a typeform link, and then you'll get all of your bonuses. All of them, including my undying, everlasting gratitude. So please, please, please, please pre-order. You'll see link in the show notes. And even if you can't, that's okay too. Today's episode, we are talking about how to future-proof yourself and your career, no matter what happens. Now, this is especially apropos for anyone who's been following the larger economic trends, will know that there were a lot of layoffs in 2025. And this impacted everyone, from Amazon, of course, to non-tech companies like Lufthansa, the airline. And what was notable about these layoffs was that they came from a different place from where we have seen layoffs in the past. Traditionally, when a company lays off a lot of their staff, it's because they're trying to correct for some sort of past miscalculation. So maybe revenue is lower than they anticipated. So they need to right size the team, or there's a product line where the margins weren't what they anticipated. So they say, okay, let's fix it, let's course correct. Let us atone for our mistakes of the past by letting some people go in areas that don't need those people. The difference of what we saw in 2025 was that these layoffs were not about the past, but rather about the future. Every notable company in the news would say, we are laying people off because we're making way for a new future. We are paving the way for automated warehouses or ultra-modernized fleets. We are saving money by reducing headcount in certain areas so that we can funnel those resources into what we see as the future. Layoffs traditionally have been about recorrecting the past, whereas the ones that we saw in 2025 were about trying to anticipate some future vision, some future state of the company. And if you are anything like me, I don't even work at a company that could potentially lay me off. But it is normal if you are feeling job anxiety and wondering what this means for you. Many of us were actually impacted by these big corporate changes, whether you work at the company or if it's a downstream effect, we cannot help but wonder what is next for us? What is coming down the pike? How are we supposed to handle all the changes that are coming our way? For me, I have been an executive coach for seven years now. And it was really only in the past year where I started to question the future of my industry. I started thinking, are the rates right? Are there too many coaches? Seems like everyone's a coach these days. Is there the market to support this work? Can technology do this better? And that's actually when I started working on a product that I'm building right now called Intergenius, which is actually an AI executive coach. That's my hedge for the future, but I don't know what it's going to look like. I don't know if executive coaching is still going to be a thing in five years. And I think especially for jobs that involve any sort of repetitive automated tasks or even creative work, we're wondering about that too. I'm sure everyone has seen the news where this is really hard for influencers. Will there even be influencers in five years? So there are all these questions that come up. And there was a study in that came out in 2023 that showed that Gen Z is anticipated to have an average of 18 jobs across six industries in their adult lives. That's a lot, especially when you compare that to the baby boomers who often held the same job for decades with constant salary increases and a guaranteed pension at the end of that run. It's a huge difference. And that study was from 2023. And I imagine that it's even more pronounced now. But 18 jobs across six industries, what does that mean? It means constant reinvention. Baby boomers, not so much. If you even think about the term career ladder, what does that mean? A ladder is something that you climb vertically, right? It is a specialized path where you are going up in a straight line, rung by rung. As you increase your expertise, you increase your depth and your knowledge, then you ascend to higher levels of that function. That's a career ladder. That concept doesn't really exist for us anymore. In fact, the way I think about it is it's not even a ladder. It's not even a net. It's a rock climbing wall where you could go up or down or to the left or to the right, or completely come off the wall. You can go diagonal, you can go around. But in addition to the many possibilities that a rock climbing wall holds for the person who's climbing it, there are also these unpredictable obstacles that come up too. So imagine you're on a magic rock climbing wall where the holes disappear, or suddenly it's flipped upside down, or a pathway disappears. To be really frank and not to perpetuate a scarcity mindset, just to be really logical, that is the world that we live in objectively. We just do not know. And I do not purport to have a crystal ball. I do not purport to be the expert of where the world is going to go. But what I do feel assured about is that we cannot predict the future. And that's okay, because what we can do is future-proof ourselves. You can make it so that even if that wall that you're climbing in your career flips upside down, puts you on a pathway that you don't understand, you are still a strong enough general athlete that you can handle anything that comes your way. That's the difference. In a career ladder, you prepare yourself for just one particular route. You get to know that up and down motion better than anything else. You become a vertical expert in that one thing that you do. Whereas what the future now demands of us is that we become functional, strong, resilient no matter what pathway we're faced with. I want to give an example of this. This is one of my clients. And over the course of his 17-year career as someone who's known in his mid-30s, he has reinvented himself so many times and operated in the unknown. To me, he embodies that high AQ way of not climbing a career ladder, but actually figuring out this magic rock climbing wall. He started off as a party promoter in college. And this is because he went to school in a different country because it was the best school for the cheapest tuition that he found. So he went to university, but he didn't know anyone because he wasn't from that country. And he thought, okay, the way that I'm going to make friends is I'm not getting invited to parties. So I might as well throw the parties. So he started throwing parties. Pretty soon he was making some good money off of this, even while he was still in school. And when he graduated, he kept doing that until he realized I'm not a college student anymore. What am I doing throwing parties for college students? So he pivoted into managing musical artists, which there's a relation there, right? He didn't know anyone who had ever been a music manager, but he found his way into the offices of someone who was a professional artist manager and he convinced them to teach him everything that he knew. And pretty soon he was managing really prominent artists like Solange. He was Solange's manager. He convinced Tina Knowles, who is a notoriously shrewd, smart, savvy momager, that he should be the person in charge of her career. And he was probably 24 or 25 at the time. This work led to him starting his own company. And he could have kept doing that work because he was massively successful at a young age, but he found that his interests were going elsewhere. And he started becoming interested in crypto and how Web3 could empower musicians to own their own music. And so from there, he started doing research, reading, not knowing where this was going to take him, not really deciding that it was a career per se. And he wound up leaving a comment on a pretty prominent venture capitalist's blog. And that venture capitalist said, I love your idea. Let's meet up, let's talk. And that led to him, my client, an outsider in tech who had never even known a startup founder before, raising money from a top-tier VC in Silicon Valley and starting his own company. That company, long story short, did not work out, failed pretty quickly. They ran out of all the money they raised. He wound up selling his company to Spotify, and then he went to go work there, didn't like the big company thing, left, became an investor at a top-tier venture capital firm. And then five years ago, during the pandemic, when he had a very young child at home, a brand new baby, he actually left and started his own fund in one of the rockiest environments for crypto ever. It was so hard for him to raise a fund. And anyone who follows Web3 knows that it's been up and down. And something that really struck me about what he said is I asked him, isn't it intimidating that you're in such a volatile market that you don't know what's going to happen? You don't know if Bitcoin's going to go up or you don't know if it's going to crash. You don't know if something like the Sam Bankman-Fried scandal is going to disrupt the whole industry and make everyone have a bad taste in their mouth. And he was like, you know what, Liz? I actually like the low moments. I like it when it's not so hot. I like it when the market is cold, because then you get less noise of everyone just rushing into this market. You get so much more signal. And the only people who are left are the people who really care about these crypto projects. When I look at my client's background, he has been a chameleon, a masterful artist in reinventing himself all along the way. But at the same time, there's also a consistency in who he is. And so when we think about future-proofing yourself for this never-ending magic rock climbing wall that we call life and career, there are two types of skills that you can possess. And I talk about all of this in my book, go into much more detail. But in short, part of those skills are technical skills. Technical skills are very specific to a job that you're doing. It's photo retouching, web design, computer science, engineering, product design, anything that is related to a set of work that is a very specific skill to that work. The context really matters. Then there are durable skills, which are human-oriented skills that are widely applicable. Communication, risk taking, problem solving, collaboration, receiving feedback. And what you'll notice is that in my client's career, the technical skills came and went. Sometimes he had to do a lot of financial analysis as a VC investor, or he was actually party planning, or he was planning concerts and tours for artists. Those things all changed. They came and went. He leaned on them. He didn't lean on them. It didn't really matter. It wasn't what made him who he was. What actually mattered were his durable skills. And namely, he is an excellent verbal and written communicator and also about creativity. He's extremely creative with his ideas and with his vision and viewpoint. And so one of the secrets to future-proofing yourself, no matter what the world brings you, is an investment in your durable skills. Thinking about what it is that you can carry with you from job to job that is not specifically related to the work that you do. As an example, as an executive coach, I lean a lot on the same skills that I did when I was a waitress. I was waiting tables when I first moved to New York because I moved here in 2008. And as soon as I started applying for jobs, the recession hit. And it's really funny because I'm actually recording this podcast here right now at Penguin Random House, my publishers, my dream publishers. And when I was 23, I was in an interview process to be an assistant at Penguin Random House, which at the time was my dream job. I've always loved books, always been a voracious reader. And I thought, oh, I want to move to New York. I want to work in publishing. I want to get on the subway every day, and my business casual, and I want to put great books into the world. And after my third round of interviews, I got the most disappointing message from the HR team. They said we're no longer hiring for this role. We're closing this job down. It's on pause. We're on a hiring freeze. And I was devastated because I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I'd already thought maybe I was going to go to law school. That wasn't a pathway for me. Then I thought, okay, I'll move to New York and work in publishing. I never thought that I would spend the next 15 years working in tech. So when I sold my first book to Penguin Random House, it was just such an emotional achievement for me because it felt like, in a way, this dream I'd had for 15 years that died was able to be reinvigorated again. And the point of why I tell this story is because I have been and still am the same person who was lost and waiting tables, going to work at 4 p.m., working till 4 a.m. with the bars closed, trying to figure out what I was doing with my life. That person and the resourcefulness that I had then, those durable skills that I leaned on, those are still the same as the ones that I'm using now as a knowledge worker who sits in my home office all day on Zoom calls, right? On the surface, there's such a difference in the technical skills. But the durable skills have endured, and if anything, I've really worked on them. And so what does it look like to work on your durable skills? It means constant, lifelong learning. It's an attitude of continuous self-improvement, not in a scary or weird way, but in an exciting and empowering way. So I think that everyone should be reading at least one self-help-ish book at any given time. Choose whatever you want. Go to the bookstore. Maybe it's about becoming better at managing your finances. Maybe it's about being a better speaker and communicator. Maybe it's about being a better partner and friend and having healthier relationships. Whatever it is, none of us are perfect. And when we can work on our human-based, durable skills, then we prepare ourselves to be those general athletes that can handle anything. I'm 40 years old and I've done a lot of personal work that has come in the form of professional help, like therapists and coaches, has come in the form of spiritual work like meditation retreats and ayahuasca. But I still always think that there's something that I need to be doing. I remember asking my therapist once, when does this work end? When am I done? She said, Liz, what do you think the point of life is? It's never over. What have you considered that maybe the point of being human and one of the greatest gifts of being human is that we can change. It's not a responsibility or burden to shoulder. It is actually a gift and a privilege to be able to change yourself. So that's what I want to invite everyone to do as you're thinking about how to cultivate your durable skills. What do you want to get better at that will hold for one job to another? Another. Right now, I'm working on something that I have actually worked on and off with throughout the years. And it's around mindset, self-belief, and confidence. And I've been down this road before. It's not my first foray into this line of work. I really dug in very deeply around the idea of working on my confidence when I started my own business. And suddenly all these markers of external validation that I had experienced and chased throughout my whole adult life had disappeared. Now I'm back there again. You know, I'm on the precipice of doing a lot of things I've never done before. I'm starting this AI company. I'm going to have a second kid. I'm about to go on a book tour with a book that's very different than my first book. And I'm feeling those pangs of self-doubt creep in again. And so my current mission is working on appreciation, self-confidence. And that's a really important, durable skill. So what will it be for you? I think this is a really well-timed episode because obviously we have a lot of New Year's resolutions. So in 2026, pick something that is exciting for you, an area where if you could dedicate some TLC into mastering it, that it would really unlock who you are. And maybe the idea comes from thinking about what the sorest points are. One of my closest friends is incredible. And one of her goals is to diminish the negative self-talk that she has for herself. What is it for you? The second thing I'll say is that not only should you be working on building those durable skills all the time, it's also letting yourself dabble and think about and explore all sorts of new worlds that you haven't been privy to before. And some of those might involve technical skills. So giving yourself the runway to think about new jobs, new industries, what could be, and I call this frame of thinking green hat thinking. It's expansive, it's rich, it's full of hope and possibility. And as the world changes, it's very easy to slip into a negative mindset and to think, oh my gosh, everything is changing. It's so different than what I know before. But what you have to remember is that with change comes possibility. So yes, some doors might be closing that you previously thought you would walk through. But what it also means is that there's so much more opportunity than there was previously too. It's just about learning what that is. And that's the thing is I think for any of us who felt soothed by the idea of a career ladder, which is actually a really comforting thing, right? Go to school, get your MBA, get your JD, whatever it might be, and then you just keep going and everything's fine. This is just about letting go of that expectation and knowing that once you're off that ladder, the world actually becomes so much bigger. So don't be the person who limits your own sense of possibility. Be the person who's chasing down opportunities and broadening your world. We all exist in a sliver of our known world. And in this moment of unprecedented change, we need to expand that sliver. It's reaching out to someone who is a friend of a friend or even a cold email on LinkedIn because you're curious about their line of work. It's about reading books that you never would before, watching documentaries, learning about different industries and pathways and people and geographies. It's expanding that sliver of your known universe. And part of that is your network. So growing and growing to get ideas for what your life could look like. In this world, there's no one who has a pre-made, clear-cut path in front of them. No one. I'm sorry to say it, but it is a complete misnomer if you think that there's a path that you can walk, and as long as you do it really well, you will achieve it. Not even the animals, right? Penguins who their migratory routes have existed for centuries, they are now being asked to create new ones. And we're not immune to that. The animals have to do the same things that we do. We have to create our own pathways now. And chances are the path that you're going to take has never existed before. So getting really comfortable with the idea that you're going to have to be a pioneer in your own life, not following anyone else's footsteps, but rather creating your own trail. And so, how do you do this? That's a great question. Part of it, as we talked about, is honing your durable skills. That's one. The second thing that we talked about here is expanding that sliver of your known universe, broaden your network, broaden your knowledge. And the last and final tip I will give you for how do you future proof of yourself is to work on your mindset. We live in a very polarized world. Politically, people are so much more on one side of the fence or the other than they ever were. There really doesn't seem to be any true moderates out there. You're either on one side or you're on the other. We live in an extremely socioeconomically polarized world. There are people who are billionaires many times over, and then people who are subsisting on a tiny fraction of that. Never before has there been such a huge gulf between people and their experiences in the world. And what I truly believe is that the biggest gap that is polarizing us isn't political. It isn't age. It's not socioeconomic. It's actually psychological. And what the future will hold is that you will see the world become divided into two camps of people. The first camp are the people who resist change. They don't want it. They're pushing it away. And that in their political beliefs, right? Look at how so much of the populist movement is about a return to how things were before. Make America great again. Bring us back to the old times. We don't want to change. In fact, we want to rewind the clock. And the other side of the house, you have people who are embracing the future, who have a mindset of change, adapting, agility. And that is actually the biggest gap that we see in the world. It's not how much money do you have? Of course that's important. Of course, it matters in your day-to-day well-being. But the most important gap is the psychological gap of whether or not you are going to embrace change or you're going to try to push it away. And so that's the third tip that I'll leave you with today. How can you get into that mindset of becoming one with change, embracing it, loving it? Because that is the best thing you can do to future-proof yourself. Why waste time lamenting what should have, could have been when you can take that same energy and put it towards your future? So again, I will recap the lessons from today's episodes. One, you want to, like my client that I mentioned, hone your durable skills. You should be working on something that can persist no matter what job you are in at any given time. You should be dedicating your full efforts into self-improvement. Two, you want to expand your known universe. You want to make new friends, new acquaintances, see new things, immerse your brain in a different set of contexts than you are used to. And finally, the last one is to become the kind of person who sees change as an opportunity and not as a detriment. I hope that gets you in the mindset of thinking about what could be. I personally am scared and I'm really excited. I think that's actually what it is. We can hold both equally. We can be a little trepidatious about what the future is going to bring us. We can feel a little unmoored by the unknown. And at the same time, if we double down on faith, confidence, ourselves, our skills, then we're going to be okay. You are going to be okay. Thank you all for listening today. And I will end this podcast episode in the way that I have ended them in the past because I feel like it's apropos. Let this be a reminder to love yourself, listen to yourself, and say yes to life so that life can say yes to you. I will see you soon and hopefully see you on my book tour. We're doing stops in New York, San Francisco, Miami, as well as some virtual events, webinars. I hope to see as many of you in person as possible. Thanks.