Don’t give up! Personal board of advisors for career inflection points
Non-obvious insights in crafting a personal board of advisors so you live your best life and don’t give up in these identity transitions
As a former product leader who pivoted to executive coach and CEO of my own business, one tool that I find extremely valuable and highly underutilized in career inflection points is a personal board of advisors.
From iterating on this for myself and with executive coaching clients on their own versions, I thought it would be useful to share my spicy non-obvious insights in crafting an effective personal board of advisors.
5 Hot Takes on Personal Board of Advisors:
- A personal board of advisors is critical in career inflection points and transitions so you DON’T GIVE UP.
- Pay for mentors and to fill the gaps where support can greatly accelerate you in your transitions.
- Squad goals: Your personal board of advisors will never all meet each other.
- Your personal board of advisors will always be changing.
- When you are clear on the gaps, the universe puts possibilities in your path!
Let‘s go through an example for each of these hot takes:
1. A personal board of advisors is critical in career inflection points and transitions so you DON’T GIVE UP.
Last year there was a low moment where I wasn’t sure if I should keep going in my business, my dating life was at low, my health was at a low due to perimenopause kicking my ass (now awesomely resolved!). I didn’t want to give up, I love my work, I know this is my calling and I am aligned in my zone of genius and purpose, and yet one thing I know for sure (as Oprah likes to say):
We will all face self doubts in every growing transition.
Luckily my personal board of advisors pulled me out of my hole!
THIS IS WHY we all need a personal board of advisors!!
The biggest reason why is because we’re often undergoing identity shifts when we’re transitioning through a new career inflection point. Identity shifts bring discomfort because we are reconciling our old identity with our new identity and working our way out of misalignment to feel fully aligned in our new identity.
This could be a Senior Director shifting to embrace an identity of Chief Marketing Officer or VP Marketing. This could be an employee who previously worked for others shifting to a new identity of founder and CEO. This could be an E6 individual contributor engineer at Meta transitioning to a broader leadership identity of E7 (Senior Staff Engineer) that starts involving influencing stakeholder dynamics, beyond solely succeeding on stellar technical problem solving.
Identity shifts happen in every transition even if you “have done it before” because you are taking on new challenges you haven’t gone through yet. One of my clients is shifting identities from a formerly successful bootstrapped founder/CEO to a founder/CEO building a completely different, VC-backed AI company with ambitious goals in this crazy wildly unknown AI era.
There can be a lot of feelings of internal misalignment and self doubt in the roller coaster of growth that comes with entrepreneurship, or anyone in career transitions or pivots, or growing fast through new roles and changing bigger scope in startups and high-growth companies. For founder/CEOs and business owners, this will happen at every level of business growth. As they say, “Every level has a new devil.”
These transition times are when we might easily give up. We have one foot in the door of our old identity and we don’t yet have solid footing in our new identity.
DON’T GIVE UP!
Craft your own personal board of advisors. They will pull you back from the edge of the cliff or abyss of despair when you’re about to give up in these tenuous transition times. Your personal board of advisors helps you fill the gaps where you need help or want to accelerate working your way out of misalignment to confidently embody your new identity.
There have been many times when I wanted to give up in my current path. I know there will be more times ahead when I might think about giving up, and I embrace this because it means I’m growing and my business is growing.
If you’re in a dark moment right now and wondering if you should give up:
My message of light to you is DON’T GIVE UP!! Get you a personal board of advisors!
2. Pay for mentors and to fill the gaps where support can greatly accelerate you in your transitions.
On a family trip to Eberle Winery, the tour guide told us that founder/owner Gary Eberle, a wine pioneer in the Paso Robles region of California, was a former college football player who pivoted to the wine business. He didn’t know anything about this craft or business, so he sought out Robert Mondavi (a wine pioneer in Napa Valley of what is considered to be one of the most popular wineries in the U.S.) to be his mentor.
A lightbulb went off in my head! I was in the early days of my executive coaching business, and I decided that’s what I needed too!
As soon as I got home, I reached out to Phyllis Reagin, a new connection I had met just a few weeks prior and asked if I could pay her to be my mentor. She already had given me immense value and insights, and I knew she would be an invaluable mentor in this transition. She was a highly-experienced executive coach with 12+ years experience and ran her own successful businesses. I asked to do mentor sessions, like to be her apprentice but I would make it easy for her and bring all my questions.
The first takeaway is: Pay for mentors. I see all this Silicon Valley career advice out there about find sponsors and mentors at your company and network with senior leaders to become your sponsor or mentor. My spicy take is it is blessing if a sponsor takes you under their wing, AND most people are busy—they don’t got time for this! They have their own problems, their own careers they’re worrying about, they get a deluge of coffee requests. Does this resonate? :)
Pay for mentors and add value to them on top of that.
The second takeaway is I wouldn’t have met this mentor without my personal board of advisors and you get what you pay for. If you want high value support and to make best use of your time and energy, invest in it. I was part of a paid group coaching program and community for entrepreneurs and business owners, and we randomly met through that because Phyllis responded to one of my posts asking for advice for my business. Imagine that: I paid this group to fill a group support gap on my personal board of advisors, in order to pay for a mentor, which was another gap I wanted to fill on my personal board of advisors.
The third takeaway is there are likely other gaps you have that are valuable to pay for. My clients pay me to be on their personal board of advisors, to help them navigate identity shifts and major transition journeys. For myself, I pay for mentors and coaches in both the craft of executive coaching and the business of executive coaching. The craft and running a business are two very different things. For example, I also pay for coaches on my personal board of advisors to help me with gaps in sales and marketing in running a business (and there are other peers on my personal board of advisors who I don’t pay money to but we help each other in our businesses).
3. Squad goals: Your personal board of advisors will never all meet each other.
I see lots of advice out there to find your squad and find your community. YES AND I have a different tweak on that take. I also want to differentiate from the mental model of a board of directors, like you might have for your company.
My hot take and mental model that I find most useful is: Your personal board of advisors is like an orbit of dots around you, your universe that you personally craft for yourself.
You are the only one with the full view of the universe of your personal board of advisors.
Your personal board of advisors will never all meet. It is not one entity, like a bestie squad or a board of directors for a company. Each dot (a person, squad, or community) in your personal board of directors universe fills a different gap in your journey. You might have multiple squads and communities of differing sizes on your personal board of advisors (I do!).
You might never even meet some of your personal board of advisors. One of my personal board of advisors was marketing and business coach Simone Seol. I soaked up her content, and took her paid and free coaching programs. I loved that she was super authentic, irreverent, and didn’t give a crap what people thought. She had significant influential impact on my mindset and my business earlier in my transition. I have never met her 1:1 online or in real life, yet she was still pivotal in my journey!
4. Your personal board of advisors will always be changing.
This is another important principle I want to differentiate in this mental model. It’s not static like a company’s board of directors. There is not a fixed or known time period that people are on your personal board of advisors.
Because you are constantly changing in the identity shifts you’re going through in this career inflection point (as well as in your next transitions in the future if we want to keep growing or keep our business growing), your personal board of advisors will always be changing.
This means regularly reviewing and adding to or removing from your personal board of advisors.
The people on your personal board of advisors will be changing in their own journeys as well, and sometimes your goals or exchange of value no longer align. As Ashvin Kumar (CEO when I worked at Tophatter as a product leader) says, everyone has their own tour of duty. He was referring to employee tenure and contribution at a company, but it applies to the personal board of advisors mental model as well. Maybe one person’s tour of duty is six months, maybe someone else’s is four years, but each person’s chapter in your journey can be just as meaningful and pivotal for that stage.
I had the blessing of having a weekly small peer circle of 3–4 entrepreneur-CEO-coaches as part of my personal board of advisors starting last year. We went through the Positive Intelligence Coach Program together, to learn about the different types of saboteurs (self-sabotaging self-protection mechanisms) that we all have to varying degrees, to improve our own self-awareness and improve our coaching skills.
This peer circle was one of the things that saved me in my low moment I mentioned in hot take #1!
And yet, everything has its own tour of duty. Now we might be winding down this peer circle, and I am forever grateful because it was incredibly pivotal for me in the time it was on my personal board of advisors and the stages I was growing through in my business.
5. When you are clear on the gaps, the universe puts possibilities in your path!
The first thing to do is to identify the gaps where you need support in your career inflection journey and fill in those gaps on your personal board of advisors.
The biggest gap I see in the market is most people don’t sit down and identify their gaps.
When you are clear on the gaps, the universe puts possibilities in your path!
Before that small peer circle came into my life, six months prior I knew I needed a regular small peer circle. This was a gap I wanted to fill on my personal board of advisors.
I didn’t know how I was going to make it happen but I was clear in my intention. By being clear in my intentions, I was putting it out in the universe (I didn’t pray or say anything like “Universe please help me find a peer circle” though that can only reinforce your clarity!).
And the universe started putting serendipitous possibilities in my path!
Within a few months, I randomly met Gerta Malaj at pickleball at East Cut in San Francisco. I play pickleball a lot but I don’t play at this location very often, so it was serendipity that we met that day. We found out we both went to Wellesley and MIT, and had our own businesses, a rare mix to find, so we excitedly connected. We met a couple times to get to know each other and exchange business ideas, and a few months later, Gerta blessedly initiated us forming a small group with Nancy Chu for the Positive Intelligence Coach Program I mentioned (and later, Jean Kang joined us).
This ended up being the small peer circle with other CEO-coach-business owners that I was looking for, and it was more pivotal than I could even imagine!
If that sounds too woo woo for you (it’s almost borderline too woo woo for me), here’s another way to put it:
If we are not clear on what we need help with, how can anyone know how to help us?
Once we are clear ourselves, the universe starts aligning possibilities and your eyeballs start seeing things that might have even been in front of you but maybe you didn’t see it before because you weren’t clear on what you were looking for and it wasn’t at the forefront of your mind to notice these possibilities. The non-woo-woo way of saying this is it’s selective attention and attentional bias from cognitive neuroscience and psychology (backed by science! Thanks, ChatGPT!).
Remember, don’t worry about how it will happen. You will figure it out!
When you are clear on the gaps, the universe puts possibilities in your path!
I hope these non-obvious insights help inspire a useful mental model for you in crafting your own personal board of advisors, so that even if your career transition journey is hard and challenging, it doesn’t have to be daunting and can even be FUN! That’s how I feel in my roller coaster journey, because I have my personal board of advisors. :)
The upside is this is fully within our control!
REMEMBER — DON’T GIVE UP!! Get you a personal board of advisors!
Christina Pan is an executive coach and former product leader with 20+ years experience at startups and high-growth tech companies. She started her career on Wall Street, MIT Sloan MBA, avid pickleball player. Her zone of genius is maximizing your zone of genius.
Thank you for reading! I welcome comments and feedback.
I might create a guide at some point to give people more structure on how to identify the gaps and create a personal board of advisors.
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