Today's Building Block: Work (yes, work...) What makes transitions so hard to navigate?  Herminia Ibarra, a thought leader on leadership and career development and author of Working Identity, shares her insights on creating new options as you prepare for your transition to retirement.

Herminia Ibarra joins us from London.

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Bio
Herminia Ibarra is the Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. Prior to joining LBS, she served on the INSEAD and Harvard Business School faculties.
An authority on leadership and career development, Thinkers 50 ranks Herminia among the top management thinkers in the world.
She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network, a judge for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award, a Fellow of the British Academy, and the 2018 recipient of the Academy of Management’s Scholar-Practitioner Award for her research’s contribution to management practice.
Herminia is a member of the London Business School governing body. She chaired the Harvard Business School Visiting Committee, which reports to the university’s board of overseers, from 2012 to 2016, having been a member since 2009, and served on the INSEAD board of directors.
A native of Cuba, Herminia received her MA and PhD from Yale University, where she was a National Science Fellow.
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A second and updated edition of her groundbreaking book Working Identity was recently published by Harvard Business Review Press.

Whether as a daydream or a spoken desire, nearly all of us have entertained the notion of reinventing ourselves. Feeling unfulfilled, burned out, or just plain unhappy with what we’re doing, we long to make that leap into the unknown. In this powerful book, Herminia presents a new model for career reinvention that flies in the face of everything we’ve learned from ‘career experts’. While common wisdom holds that we must first know what we want to do before we can act, Ibarra argues that this advice is backward. Knowing, she says, is the result of doing and experimenting.

Based on her in-depth research on professionals and managers in transition, Ibarra outlines an active process of career reinvention that leverages three ways of ‘working identity’: experimenting with new professional activities, interacting in new networks of people, and making sense of what is happening to us in light of emerging possibilities. Through engrossing stories, Ibarra reveals a set of guidelines that all successful reinventions share. She explores specific ways that hopeful career changers of any background can.

A call to the dreamer in each of us, Working Identity explores the process for crafting a more fulfilling future.

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For More on Herminia Ibarra

Website

Working Identity by Herminia Ibarra

Articles

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Check out our Best Books on Retirement

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Mentioned in This Podcast Episode

The HBR Guide to Designing Your Retirement

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Podcast Episodes You May Like

The Portfolio Life - Christina Wallace 

Are You Ready for The New Long Life? – Andrew Scott

Retire Happy - Dr. Catherine Sanderson

Why Retirement is About Much More Than Money – Ted Kaufman & Bruce Hiland

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Wise Quotes 

On Transitions

"Transitions necessarily imply a loss of a sense of identity, a loss of something that has been meaningful and valuable. You're moving away from someone you've been, but the future you isn't clear yet, or the future destination or the next role isn't clear yet. So you're kind of hanging in limbo and that's very uncomfortable. We live in a world in which certainty is valued, know who you are and the nature of this process and part of what makes it productive is questioning who you are, but that's necessarily uncomfortable.