You've been asking the wrong career question
Stop looking for your next job title.
Start looking for your vocation.
It starts on Sunday afternoon. A specific, physical dread. The creeping awareness that the game you've been playing extremely well has somehow stopped being worth winning.
No amount of Uber Eats or Netflix binges will fix it. Nor does the thought of a new job posting. But that's usually where most executives go first.
That instinct is understandable. It's also a rookie mistake. You're not a rookie anymore.
We ran a webinar on career transitions recently. Before we said a word, we asked participants what was holding them back from making their next move. Most common answer, by a wide margin: "seeking the right opportunity." Second: "don't know what I want."
Those aren't two different problems. They're one. If you don't know what you want, the right opportunity bite you in the butt and you still wouldn't recognize it.
A 2025 Deloitte C-Suite Barometer found that 76 per cent of senior executives report burnout, exhaustion or significant stress. The average age for a professional career change is 39, right in the middle of what should be a peak decade. And almost universally, the default response is to scan job postings. But a new job doesn't close the gap between who you are and how your organization needs you to show up. It relocates the gap.
The more useful and less frequent conversation is about the person doing the pivoting. This is the work Arthur and Fabiana guide senior leaders through in their executive coaching practice. Getting clear on three things before you touch your LinkedIn headline. We call it the VVP Framework: Vocation, Values, Posture.
V: Find Your Vocation — The Work You Did Before Anyone Paid You
Here's a word that doesn't come up enough in career conversations: vocation.
In the older, more useful sense: what you're called to do, rather than what you're trained to do.
Fabiana describes vocation as the work you did before anyone paid you for it. The compulsive, somatic pull toward a certain type of activity, driven by something you couldn't explain or help. Your whole body in it. Not because someone asked. Just ‘cuz.
Here's what makes this more than philosophy. Vocation follows you through your career uninvited.
Three examples from Fabiana's client files:
The salesperson who was always running fundraising on the side. Unpaid. Unasked. Compulsively.
The senior tech consultant closing eight-figure deals who spent his evenings connecting people to jobs they weren't fully qualified for on paper, because he could see the fit when others couldn't.
The account director who built employee communities at every company she joined. Whether it was in her job description or not. It never was.
None of them were paid for those things. All of them were doing them compulsively.
The common denominator beneath all your job titles, across every role, every company, every phase: that recurring pattern is the vocation. It tends to be deceptively simple. Problem-solving. Building community. Creating clarity out of chaos. Connecting people. Fixing broken processes. Selling ideas others can't yet see.
Why does this matter at a career pivot point? Because vocation is portable. You can carry it into fractional consulting, a board seat, a new industry, or a restructured version of your current role. A job title is a container. Containers get swapped. Vocations don't.
The 68 per cent year-over-year growth in fractional executive roles entering 2025 tells you something: the market has finally recognized that real value is portable and doesn't need to be tied to an org chart. Your vocation is the asset that travels.
The prompt: What did you always end up doing, even when it wasn't in your job description? Not the tasks you were assigned — the things you gravitated toward. Write it in plain language, not job-title language.
V: Audit Your Values — They've Shifted, and That's Data
Most people assume their values are fixed. Fabiana doesn't buy that. Neither does a decade of client work.
Values shift with career stage. With life stage. With what you've seen and what you've paid for. That's just development.
In your twenties, the operative value is usually exploration. You'll sacrifice almost anything to try new things. In your thirties it becomes achievement and security. By your forties something else surfaces: the desire to make decisions from who you actually are, rather than from fear of looking like a failure or losing status.
Fabiana calls it sovereignty. The ability to ask what you want from your work beyond the paycheque and the title, and to take that seriously. When you operate from that place, options open that you couldn't see when you were running away from something.
Sometimes the violation is so fundamental it becomes the catalyst. Fabiana's own story: she left consulting after leading an engagement that eliminated over a thousand jobs. The value being violated was one she'd held for years. She went in knowing it. Tried to make it work anyway. Two years. It still didn't hold. There is no creative reframing that makes a non-negotiable negotiable.
Arthur just calls it "the ick." The moment when the way an organization needs you to show up makes your body register the wrongness before your brain can explain it. That's a signal. You've outgrown the container.
A practical tool: personalvalu.es runs a free, ten-minute values ranking exercise. Some results will confirm what you already knew. Some will genuinely surprise you. The goal is identifying which values are non-negotiable. You can then determine whether your current situation is working with them or against them.
P: Shift Your Posture Before You Shift Your Job
Before the resignation letter, try something harder: showing up differently in the room you're already in. Or look for different rooms at your current job.
We spend entire careers asking what the organization needs from us to get promoted, to make partner, to hit the number. Try the reverse. What do I need from this organization? More autonomy? A specific kind of problem to solve? Proximity to a certain type of leader? If you've done the Vocation and Values work, you'll have a real answer. That answer tells you whether you need a new job or a new posture in the one you already have.
A story from Arthur: early in his time leading large agencies, he spent the first year trying to be the smartest person in every room. He had all the answers, delivered at speed. It was exhausting and, underneath the performance, not particularly useful. The minute he started saying "I don't know, what do you think?" in meetings, two things happened: the quality of the answers in the room improved, and his own influence grew. We're trained to perform competence in real time. The real leverage is in provoking it in others.
Stop showing up as the answer-giver. Start showing up as the question-asker. Same title, same team. You've just shifted the centre of gravity in the room. "That's a really good question. Let me think about it and come back to you tomorrow." Said with confidence, that sentence carries more authority than any answer delivered reflexively.
Try it. Sometimes that single shift turns what felt like a dead end into something worth staying for. Sometimes it confirms it's time to go. Either way, you'll know.
Okay. But When Is It Really Time to Go?
Not everything can be reframed. Some values violations are non-negotiable, and the posture work only confirms it.
The diagnostic is straightforward. If you've done the reflection seriously, tried different approaches, tried a different posture, and you're still cornered: your non-negotiable values are being consistently overridden. That's a direction, not a rough patch.
Arthur's frame: the goal isn't to run away from something. It's to be honest about what you're running toward. There's a difference, and you feel it in how you talk about it.
One note on the practical reality: portfolio careers and fractional roles require planning. The ramp-up can take 18 months before income stabilizes. Most people who make this move with preparation don't regret it. Most who do it on impulse do. Plan the transition before you announce it.
The Pivot Isn't About Starting Over
The career pivot conversation fixates on destinations. New titles. New industries. New business cards. That's the wrong level of the problem.
Who have you become over the last twenty years? Where do you thrive? What drains your will? What are you being called to do?
Strategic questions, not existential ones. The leadership capabilities that matter most right now, systems thinking, strategic clarity, storytelling, genuine empathy, are precisely the ones a considered career transition lets you lean into rather than leave behind.
Answer the who questions first. The what gets considerably clearer from there.
You're not starting over. You're starting from somewhere real.
Done With the Sunday Dread?
If you're done with the Sunday dread and ready for a conversation that's not about finding another job title, let's talk.
Arthur and Fabiana work with senior leaders who are figuring out what comes next and want a real answer instead of another round of LinkedIn browsing. Reach out directly at arthur@sensemaker.ca or connect with Arthur on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/arthurfleischmann/ . Fabiana can be reached at fabiana@claristrat.com or www.linkedin.com/in/fabianapereirahotz/
Arthur Fleischmann is a marketing and advertising consultant and the founder of Sense.Maker (sensemaker.ca). Former agency founder. Former Group CEO of Ogilvy Canada. He coaches senior executives on strategy, positioning and leadership.
Fabiana Pereira-Hotz is the founder of the ClaraStrat Institute and an executive coach with over a decade of experience working with C-suite leaders across North America and Europe. Former Market Lead and Deloitte Partner at Accenture.
Together, they are the first call for senior leaders who are done with the wrong questions and ready to build what comes next.