What to Do When You Outgrow Your Project Manager Title

Galen Low: For a lot of us, becoming a project manager was not our go-to answer to the question, "What do you wanna be when you grow up?" And yet the title starts to become our identity. Maybe you look back and remember you were always a planner, or a good communicator, or a process junkie, or just a natural leader. We make it make sense.

We become the label. But what do you do when you start to outgrow that label? What do you do when you feel stuck in a job title that doesn't really describe who you are anymore? And what do you do when your job title doesn't even mean the same thing anymore, and may not even continue to exist? To dive into that, I've brought in a career coach who is an experienced business analyst and former monk who specializes in career dysmorphia.

Together, we'll be diving into what career dysmorphia is and why it may be holding you back, what to do when you feel trapped by your job title, and why AI disruption might actually be a great opportunity to rediscover your purpose. I may even let him do a little diagnostic on me as an example. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Welcome to the Digital Project Manager Podcast—the show that helps delivery leaders work smarter, deliver smoother, and lead their teams with confidence in the age of AI. I'm Galen, and every week we dive into real-world strategies, emerging trends, proven frameworks, and the occasional war story from the project front lines.

Whether you're steering massive transformation projects, wrangling AI workflows, or just trying to keep the chaos under control, you're in the right place. And if you've been liking what you've been hearing from us lately, please consider following us wherever you're listening or watching, and maybe even leaving us a review. All right, let's get into it.

Today, we are talking about what to do if you start outgrowing your job title as a project professional, and whether we may be heading into a job title crisis as companies reorganize and reshape roles. We'll be unpacking why great project leaders stall out mid-career, what you can do if it starts happening to you, and how anyone can start rediscovering their professional identity beyond the confines of their job title.

With me today is James Compton, founder of Limitless Leading. James spent over two decades in project delivery, leading business analysis teams, and serving alongside project managers in the financial services sector before turning his attention to a question that nobody seemed to want to answer: what happens when the career you've built stops fitting the person that you've become?

And that led him to create the Career Dysmorphia Dossier, a diagnostic that has since been completed by over 600 mid to senior project professionals. And today, he coaches BAs, PMs, and change professionals through identity-led career reinvention using his own AI-augmented coaching platform.

James, great to have you here.

James Compton: Thanks a lot, Galen. Thanks for inviting me to this. Good topic. I think it's really relevant for your audience as well, and I love the word chaos because it definitely is like this is what we experience, right, in the project world because it's chaotic, it's disorganized. Big recipe for kind of burnout and asking the questions and the tough questions of ourselves, like, what am I doing and can I keep doing this?

So looking forward to getting into this with you.

Galen Low: I'm looking forward to it as well. And I'm glad you said that about the chaos, too, because you know, projects are chaos. We're so used to trying to make them look tidy or, you know, there's a conception that the job is to be tidy and organized, and everything runs perfectly, and that's not the case.

And guess what? Careers are like that, too, right? Anyone in any career, you know, it looks like this path you follow, and you go straight ahead, and you climb the ladder, and you're good. You know, like you've been mentioning to me as we've been prepping for this that's just... You know, there's a lot of chaos that happens.

There's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of ambiguity in people's careers. We make all these decisions, and we have these identity crisis, and it's not always something that we talk about. You know, we're passing this on to future generations to be like, "Oh, yeah just, you know, get a job. It'll be fine."

And so I'm really, really excited to dive in.

James Compton: And figure out as you're going along, you figure it out, right? That's the,

Galen Low: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, especially right now the topic is so timely. I know you've been doing this for several years, but now is just such a moment in people's sort of career existential crisis.

We've got AI disruption. We've got economic disruption. We've got a whole bunch of things going on right now. And for all the people who are somewhere in the middle of their careers or even just starting it's a much more confusing place than it was even just a few years ago. So I think this is gonna be a topic that resonates with my listeners, and I think there's a lot of places we can go with it, and I really do hope that we do that.

But just in case, here's the little roadmap that I've sketched out for us today. First, I just wanted to hit you with a spicy question that's been weighing on many of my listeners' minds. But then I'd like to use that to just open the aperture and talk about why so many mid-career professionals feel trapped by their job title, how project managers specifically can build their careers by interrupting their thinking and zooming out from the day-to-day grind, and maybe just why this period of disruption might actually be creating a great deal of opportunities by creating new career paths.

How does that sound to you?

James Compton: Sounds like a real plan. You know, if you look at it from when we work with organizations especially, it's whenever there's change going on, who's hired, right? We're hired to come in, help deliver the change, help make sense of the chaos that's going on, but it's to create an ultimate outcome for the organization at the end of it, for some growth, for some opportunity.

So we just have to apply the same thing to ourselves, interpret what's going on around us in terms of the disruption, and think, "Okay, what is the opportunity for me?" So we want to work together on reframing the idea. So normally, most of us are focused on, you know, the skills and what do I need to do next, and the kind of what I call is the execution layer of our career.

But there's two other layers beneath that, that we usually ignore, and this is the time when we actually need to take those more seriously. So that's what I want to get into, and the spicy question, I'm definitely looking forward to that as well.

Galen Low: Awesome, and good teaser for what we're gonna get into. All right, let me set the scene with a sort of big question because right now, a lot of professionals, not just project professionals, are going through an identity crisis.

You know, I had mentioned with disruption from AI and the global economy, people are finding that the job they do and the value that they deliver, like you said, is shifting beneath their feet. And not only does that mean that the path that they were following or the ladder that they were climbing is no longer clear, it also begs big existential questions like, "What if the job I want to do doesn't exist in three to five years' time?"

So my question to you is this: Are job titles in free fall, and if so, could this be an opportunity to stop letting our job titles define us?

James Compton: Yeah, definitely. You said to me, you know, you were the VP of innovation and growth, right? You said that. Yeah. That's right. Yeah, a good title. I love the title. And then you said- It's sexy, right?

Yes, totally sexy, and then you're like, in the next sentence, you're like, "But it didn't really mean anything." So that's interesting, right? So titles don't really describe what we do, and especially for the kind of roles, right, project manager, business analyst. It's if you tell somebody, "Oh, I'm a project manager or business analyst," people are like, "Okay."

Right. But they're a label that an organization finds convenient at the time. Of course, they need to define labels, and there's a set role, and there's the responsibilities that come with that. But the problem comes is we start believing the label is us, right? We identify with it. So then when it starts to go, well, then we feel like that we're going with it, but we're not, because nothing that you're actually good at was really in that title in and of itself.

There's a separate thing, right? I call it like you've got the wrapper, and then you've got the sweet within the wrapper. So which one's the real thing? And then you look at what's happening, right, with job ads at the moment, right? You read one, and it's three jobs bundled into one- Yeah ... and 500 applicants are going for it.

It's oh, hold on a minute. When did I become a tech person who can do this, this, and this, and five more things- Right ... and 25 more things? So, you know, you look at that and you think, "Well, that's not all I am," but you're being ... measuring yourself against a spec that you don't really match, and so that's where the crisis is coming from that as well.

There's kind of that bloat of what you're expected to do. But it's also the way out, 'cause then when you stop asking a question like, "Do I fit this?" and you start asking, "Actually, what exactly can I do, and what do I want to do?" then the pigeonhole that defines you with the title, that stops holding you back, and you start thinking very differently.

Galen Low: I really love that. I really like the word label. I think that really resonates. And yeah, we do. We sometimes sort of feel like our identity becomes that label. And then when the sort of contents, right, or when the wrapper changes, like you say, you know, it's unclear to us, like, whether or not we can do that job.

And I think it kind of conflates with the other thing, which is that, you know, a lot of these job ads that we're looking at, they're asking for heaps of experience, and then we combine that heaps of experience with all of the, you know, job responsibilities or requirements, the qualifications that we're looking at, the technical stuff that maybe we don't have, or the presentation skills that maybe we don't have, and we're going, "Gosh you know, I don't have that much experience doing that thing."

But I really like your framing of okay, well, you know, not just have you done it and has it been a skill that you built, and now is it just part of your identity that you're like, "I self-identify as a really strong person at complex stakeholder management." Then actually many of us, especially if you've gotten deep into your career and you're even just moderately successful by your own definition, you actually can do some of these things that are in the job advert.

But also, I think what you're saying is you don't have to become that, or you don't have to push that away because, oh yeah, that's not me. I don't identify with the entirety of this job description, and therefore I need to find the thing that better matches the label that is me.

James Compton: Totally. Yeah. And you know, if you...

So if you just keep the label aside, and I'll tell you a story in a minute when we, when we get into the next part. Like, when you get rid of the label, you stop digging in that, and you dig into that- And you defend that label, you actually miss a whole bunch of opportunity that's sitting in front of you.

Galen Low: That actually, it happened to me a few years ago when I was like, "Okay, well, who am I," right? I had this existential crisis, and my background is project management, it's business development, it's a little bit of you know, people and team leadership. And I was like, okay, well, I had all these searches, right, in LinkedIn searching for, you know, project delivery professional, project manager, producer.

And I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna crack it open. I'm just gonna search digital and digital transformation and let's see what jobs are out there that even if it's a title that I had never considered, I'm gonna click on it and see, you know, what's inside and can I do those things and just let myself cut myself loose from this jar that I felt like I was in.

'Cause I was like, I don't really want the sort of project manager role or even like director of delivery role. That's not what I'm looking for. I'd like to sort of spread my wings a bit. But anyways, all I all that to say, I totally agree. I wondered if we could zoom out a bit because in your work you talk a lot about career dysmorphia, which even like without an explanation really resonated with me, and I was just wondering for our listeners, could you tell us what is career dysmorphia, and what compelled you to turn your attention to project professionals through that lens?

James Compton: Good question. Yeah. So career dysmorphia was a term that I found just stumbled across and thought, "Actually, this kinda summarizes the distorted view of yourself in your career, the disconnect between what your career actually is and how you feel about it." And your feeling about it is what predominates, and the reality of what you've done becomes like a background thing.

So here's the thing. Client of mine sat in a room with HR, like working on a project, and she was leading a team of 12, and this is the business analyst team. So I know our audience is, is project managers, but we're I've always considered myself like the wing man.

Every good project I've had has been like two peas in a pod.

So she sits in a room, and she's like, "We're business analysts. We do this work." And they brought in a product function that basically said, "We're taking all the work away from your team." And she just dug her heels and is "We're business analysts. This is what we do. This is unfair this has been taken away from us."

And she went on a mission And so if, if you listen to the language, she didn't say "We do really good things. These are the things that we do." She was defending the job title, the identity that was that. Like how you defend your own name. It's like almost like, "How dare you be prejudiced towards me," right? Like that.

Galen Low: Right, right, yes.

James Compton: And, and so the wrapper became the suite or the costume became the skin. Like they became fused together. So look at body dysmorphia. Body dysmorphia, people know what that means, right? You look in the mirror and you're just like, "Oh, God, I'm, I'm not attractive," and you don't actually see what's actually there, your actual beauty.

You don't notice it. So career dysmorphia is the same thing. You look at it, but you don't feel. Like it's like it's a distorted view, how you show up, how you feel about yourself. And people can't see that. They're like, "Oh wow, you know, Galen's so cool. Like he's such a good at what he does and so organized."

But internally it feels like something different, right? So it was 2021 and I just finished my 20th year doing project consulting, like I said, you know, working with leading business analyst teams, sometimes stepping up and doing PM work. It was moving around. Had the, you know, good money and car and everything, family.

Everything was nice in life. Like on the outside it would look wonderful, and behind it there was this part of my life where I just felt like really anxiety and frustration. I was like... And what I felt like, some funny, one of my clients said the same thing, "I feel like I'm living in a box that I can't get out of."

That was what it was. And that was the dysmorphia. And I didn't know it was dysmorphia at the time. So what is it? Like we as project experts, we're st- we're trained to serve someone else's direction, but we're not really shown how to build our own, right? So we deliver against a goal that someone else set.

And so many times people say to me like, "I've got this goal. This is on my top of my list right now." And at the end of the year I'm like, "So how'd you get on with your personal goal that you want to do, your project or your side thing?" "Yeah, I, I got busy. I got pulled into so many things and it just sunk to the bottom of the list."

So you're really good at what you do and then someone asks you where you're going and what you're doing and there's not an answer to it. So that's the gap, that there is an unanswered question. Who am I and where am I going? So then when people take the diagnostic, what's interesting is there's... I'll show you some stats on screen in a bit, but the biggest pattern that's there is I create archetypes.

So everyone does a s- the diagnostic and they fall into a, an what you call as an archetype, and the top archetype where people fall in is what you call a strategic blind spot. So they're really good, they're tactically brilliant, they're really good at what they do, and they're strategically lost. "I don't know what it's for.

I don't know what all this is in service of. I'm not sure where I'm going. You know, I'm good at solving everyone's problems, but I can't fix my own direction." And that's the idea of the dysmorphia.

Galen Low: I really like that, and like it's such a vivid image, right? That sort of, like you said, it's parallel to body dysmorphia and I can picture it.

Like from a professional and career point of view, looking in the mirror and just really like- not recognizing yourself or not liking what you see. And I love that story about that business analyst just like ferociously defending a job title even though, and I'm just like, I'm reading between the lines here, even though it's like fundamentally it was like, you know, some of the responsibilities were being moved into a different job title, which, you know, might not have even been taking away, but maybe like shifting that individual into a different title, and that's what they were, like, resistant to.

Don't take away my label. We've been trained to self-identify as these labels we've been given or that have brought us success, so much so that we cannot even see beyond it. And ah, gosh, that thing about yeah, did you accomplish your goals this year? Those big things. And it's just so easy to not, because A, especially if you're really good at what you do, people are gonna want you to keep doing more of it.

It's gonna, you know, start piling up, and it's a lot easier to do the thing that you're good at than to do the thing that's a bit uncomfortable that you really don't know how to do. And I think everyone can relate to just, you know, procrastination, period. And I think that is the driver b- you know, behind a lot of our big career decisions.

'Cause like that's a big thing to think about, or I could answer a whole bunch of emails and feel great. So let's go do that. And maybe sometimes maybe, you know, miss the forest for the trees You had mentioned about the career dysmorphia diagnostic and you shared with me that, you know, there's a lot of data behind it.

This is not just something, you know, pulled out of a hat. And I do wanna go into those on-screen visuals as well. We'll describe it for our listeners too, but I'm wondering if you could just tell me about the diagnostic and the data. What makes this career dysmorphia dossier and diagnostic more than just a buzzword?

James Compton: Yeah. So it was in February this year, and I'm, like, looking at who I help and how I help, you know, people stuck at career crossroads. Like, where am I going? What do I do next? And like I said, I came across the career dysmorphia concept. I'm like, I love scorecards. I've always done, in my career, in my coaching work, I've always done scorecards with people.

I think I'm obsessive- ... about scorecards, right? And I thought, "Hmm." And then I came across Claude Code. I'm like, actually somebody showed me it was like an awakening moment for me. I could build my own diagnostic and get really rich data. And so I designed and launched a diagnostic, and it's 17 questions.

Takes about seven minutes to do, and we've had 600 plus respondents done it since I launched it- Wow ... at the end of February.

Galen Low: That's awesome.

James Compton: Really interesting. And I launched it on LinkedIn. I do content on LinkedIn every day, and mostly mid to senior people, mostly project experts. Around eight in 10 of those respondents have 10 plus years experience behind them, so they're not, you know- Oh, wow, okay.

Yep ... they're mid to se- they're mid to senior level. And then it gives you a severity score of how chronic is this dysmorphia condition. And then it tells you the pattern that you're running, which is the archetype that I pointed to. And by the way, you, I te- such strategic blind spot was, like, the top scoring one.

There's a secondary pattern that identifies, and many people come up as the dependable one. Ah. Right? So and that was really it. So it's a secondary kind of pattern in them. So th- it's not a critique. It's if you want to break out of a pa- if you wanna grow, you have to figure out the pattern that you're in now that's keeping you performing the way you are.

'Cause until you n- recognize that, you can't figure out what does your next step look like and how should you strategize. Your strategy is usually based on the version of who you are right now. So I expected to find that also in the diagnostic that the people who are struggling were the ones whose careers weren't going well.

That's what I was expecting to see, but it actually wasn't the case. So what I did is I asked two questions in the diagnostic. One of them is: How does your career look on paper? And the second question is: In practice, how does your career feel to you? So I was contrasting. And nearly four out of five people, their careers look impressive or strong.

So it's like impressive, strong, solid, and fine. Four options. And that was the kind of like it looks really good, but four out of five of them said it was basically draining or flat. So there was a complete contrast. Again, it's that kind of proves the dysmorphia. And then the second thing I found that it also compounds as well.

So as time goes on, it spreads. And so people who compartmentalize their career say, "Okay, this is my career and this is my life." You can't really do that, and I'll explain it later. But the number of areas that then your career dysmorphia will spill into is your sleep, your energy, your health, your relationships.

And really interestingly, the second top area that it actually was affected is your identity beyond your job, which means if you're feeling like that about your career, your identity beyond your job is an uncertain thing. So y- that is fused to you, and it affects your life. And then what was also interesting is that nine in 10 people who filled in the diagnostic had already tried to fix the problem.

Galen Low: Okay.

James Compton: And half of them said that what they tried, it barely helped or even made it worse. So career dysmorphia is real because the thing that you're doing on the outside looks good and you're disconnected about how you feel. There's a disconnect between how you feel and what you're doing, and that's driven by An identity crisis, and that's being accelerated by everything we see around us.

I know exactly what's going on here, and being a project expert myself, having been in the environments, it's catalyzed. If you think what a project is, it's a compressed timeline, you know, to create a particular objective, so it becomes like a pressure cooker. So no wonder people would feel like that in their roles.

My solution has always been to try and move around and keep myself fresh. I have a number of things I've done that is keeps me moving to try to stay fresh, but it still catches up with you, and I'll tell you about that. And I'm not saying, by the way, don't train or don't get a qualification.

I'm not saying that. PMs especially, certification is important because it's a rigorous discipline, and that has to be respected. But it's not a substitute to mask the feelings "I don't know who I am or where I'm headed." And oftentimes it's like a, a soothing balm to say, "Hey, you know, I'm gonna get an Agile cert."

And one of my clients did this, is like, "Yeah, I think I need an Agile certification to kinda make the next move." I'm like, "How do you know that that's the thing that you need?" And we concluded that actually she didn't need it, and that she should just make the move anyway. And then you figure it out when you're in it.

So normally what we do is we kinda put that obstacle in front of us that, "I need training," 'cause it makes us feel confident, but it doesn't really solve it. You're still left with that sense of, you know, directional confidence. That's how I've seen things. So shall I show you, and I can walk through the visual?

Galen Low: Boom. Yeah. I see your landing screen.

James Compton: Well, exactly. So this is a research. So I've created a research dashboard that aggregates all the 600 plus, and this is continually... At the moment, we've got 605 people. When I launched it, it was obviously, you know, about four months ago it was nothing, so it's grown interestingly.

What's really interesting is 78% describe their career as impressive on paper, and 82% of the people are describing as draining in practice. So impressive on paper, yet draining in practice. That is the essence of dysmorphia, and that's the questions we ask. But what's really interesting is the gap here, right?

And I'll describe this on screen. So this is a grid, and this grid shows you the patterns of where the hotspots are, where it's highlighting that the people whose career looks impressive or strong, actually in reality there's many of them that feel it's flat, draining, a loss. When you look at that visually, you think, "Wow, how come not as many people are like, 'My career's good, and it feels good'"?

It's not. So there's the majority on the side of it looks good, but it just feels it doesn't feel good at all. Right. Right? And a quick one on the patterns. So strategic blind spot gets 43%. So 43% are a strategic blind spot. They're not sure what their direction is. The next one is 30% of people come out as a perpetual performer archetype.

So, and the third one is the invisible expert who are 19%. So three archetypes form, What is that? 90-plus percent are in the three archetypes. And interesting, that's because that's the kinda stuff I work on. So in my membership, I help people. Invisible experts, I help them with visibility and recognition.

Perpetual performers, I help them with working on capacity, like expanding their capacity, you know, focus, distraction, re-energizing, things like that, because perpetual performers are often burnt out and giving too much of themselves. And strategic blind spot is for those who are just like, "I just don't know where I'm going."

But what I notice is actually there's an overlap with these three, and everyone's got a little bit of it.

Galen Low: I was gonna ask that.

James Compton: Yeah, right. So to really solve the career dysmorphia problem, you actually need to figure out where's your direction, which is the strategic blind spot; making sure that you've got the capacity to move to your next thing.

What is capacity? It's mental capacity. It's like, okay, I'm focused. I've got a sense of mission. I'm energized about what I'm doing. That's the p- performer. And the invisible expert is like I'm showing the world what I'm doing. 'Cause many people Somebody said this to me "I don't wanna be seen."

Many people are like, "I don't wanna be seen," or, "People are overlooking me," or, "I do all this detailed stuff, but nobody really recognizes what I do." So those are real issues that we have to solve in ourselves and our career, and that's the whole plan here. So lots of other stuff on that as well. Yeah.

Galen Low: It's really interesting. And for folks listening, the graph we're looking at, from top to bottom the archetypes are strategic blind spot, like we said, don't really sort of know where to go; the sort of perpetual performer, someone who is like- Always just not having enough space to kinda plan their next move.

They're just always worried about performing in their role. The invisible expert we just talked about. And then I like the the dependable one, the people pleaser, and then golden handcuffs. And I noticed that in the chart there's no one who is falling into the golden handcuff archetype. I wonder if you could describe it for me, and maybe speculate or tell me your thoughts on why, why it's either so low or it, it appears on screen as zero.

James Compton: It appears on screen ... I think there was one or two in, out of the 600, so it hardly shows. It's actually not a primary archetype. It's like a side effect of things, so how people feel. What is golden handcuff? Golden handcuff is I'm stuck where I am 'cause I'm paid well.

Galen Low: Yeah.

James Compton: You know?

Galen Low: Yeah. Okay.

James Compton: Right?

And actually it is a secondary thing that is actually limiting people to move. They think that, "Oh, okay, if I have to take a pay cut to make the next move, I'm stuck, so therefore I have to carry on doing what I'm doing." And there are ways around that. There's some advance planning that can be done.

There's transitioning. There's all kinds of ways. But other than that, it became a secondary thing, so actually that drops off the list, and it then is just five. The dependable one, I wanna be the one that's always available, the indispensable in the project kind of person, the central p- I did this a lot in my career.

I'm like, "Gonna put myself right in the middle of projects and everybody comes to me for everything 'cause if I do that, then I'll be able to stay here forever," you know? And it was a little bit of a trap. So that generally shows up as a secondary pattern for many of the top three, of the blind spot, the perpetual performer, and the invisible expert.

Galen Low: You touched on it earlier 'cause I'm like, I'm going through all of these and and at certain points in my career I was definitely all six- ... at the same time. But you're not sorting people into buckets. You're almost, like, identifying almost like a mindset or what area to focus on to help someone move beyond the sort of discomfort or strain that they're in in their role even if everything looks good on paper.

James Compton: Absolutely. Like somebody I'm helping now, a really interesting guy, he's a PhD, he's s- like awestruck like intelligence when I was talking to him on the, on the call, and he works for a space agency and, you know, he builds rockets and stuff. Amazing guy. Really interesting. And he did the diagnostic, and he gets on the call and he's like, "I've printed di- diagnostic out and I'm an invisible expert and I know exactly why.

You know, every conversation I have, all these things I'm doing, the management don't appreciate what I'm doing," and, and all these kind of things. So we dig into it, and you find out what's behind that part of things, but then you see ... So then that, that's the predominant aspect of the personality, the thing that's keeping him stuck right there.

Yes, this can change over time, and so the archetype helps you figure out, okay, if I'm like this- What is that telling me about myself and what do I then need to fix at the root level of myself to switch out of that? And once you unblock the pattern, then the invisible expert goes from... Like for example, I said to him, "Well, what about if instead of being in the weeds all the time..."

Okay, so here's a, an example. He was like, "I need to retrain. I'm the invisible expert. Nobody's noticing what I'm doing, so I need to accrue more skills." I'm like, "I'm in awe about the skills that you've got. Why are you retraining from scratch again?" 'Cause he's figuring he's like, "This is the way I'll get accepted," but it doesn't work.

And so stop doing that and say, what about you become a mentor or a coach or whatever, and mentor others. You're a natural guide. And I do other things in the work. I characterize people using concept of human design, which tells them about what you're here to do and how you should show up in the work that you do.

And he was like, "Oh yeah, the coach, the mentor kind of thing. That makes sense." And he's like, "Yeah, but I don't want to be a, a mentor and like that. I don't want to deal with people." It's so you have to treat the whole person, see where they're coming at, and give them the steps to take. And that's how careers become much more expansively defined about what's the possibility, breaking out of a mold that it's defined you, and that's the whole idea behind this.

Galen Low: I like that. We've been talking about certifications and upskilling a bit and, you know, what struck me is that, like you said, it's not the wrong thing to do in many situations, but it's mostly to keep doing more of what you're doing. It doesn't really create variation. It might push you up, but it won't sort of spread you out.

When you said the thing about you know, the person you're helping who's a rocket engineer, you know, going into mentoring, I'm like, "Oh yeah, that's like what a great way to show that your value..." If your value is invisible right now, you know, getting a few acronyms after your name probably won't make it more visible.

But if you're not that person who wants to like just shout it from the rooftops, "I'm valuable," and, you know, make a big stink about it, the other way you could do it is take that expertise and knowledge and make it visible by giving it to others as well, and being valuable by, you know, growing that knowledge within the organization.

I think that's like actually a really interesting one. I also think it's interesting because when I entered this conversation, I was like, okay, either do different projects or become a gardener, right? Those are the only two options. Yeah, you're- Like you, you don't recognize yourself in the mirror.

You have to you know, go rediscover yourself and then, you know, come back and do a completely different career. But that's not really what you're saying. You're saying how do you Expand the role that you're in, not confine it to the job title. Maybe still find that you're good at it, but also find different gratification from it because, you know, it starts feeling better, not just looking good on paper.

James Compton: Exactly. And his thing was like, "I just knocked down a wall into another division. I'm starting to help with other divisions," right?

Galen Low: Cool. Yeah.

James Compton: So there's lateral moves within your organization. There's upward moves within your organization, and that's before you even touch your professional network.

Then you can go wider and go into your professional network. And then you look at the trends and what's going on. There are so many ways you can get creative. And what I say to people is the archetype is to help you break out of what I call as a survival mode of I'm just keeping things going so I can pay the bills and create security for my family.

And I respect all of that. We need to do those things, but you also need to parallelly tread a adventurous, creative, experimental way to just expand your mind. And the perpetual performers actually have the highest pain, and that's understandable 'cause they're always on, so the burnout rate is faster, and it's hard for them to context switch.

So someone says to me, "I've got 10% allowance from my employer to do my personal project a lo- you know, in my work time." And I'm like, "Do you use it?" No.

Galen Low: Right.

James Compton: 'cause the context switching becomes so hard, 'cause you're cognitively like so loaded up that to step out of it into something that you haven't really thought about or defined is really hard.

So what do you do? Like you said at the beginning, you tidy up your emails. Right, yeah. And you maybe arrange your, plan your next week. It's all related to the thing that you're always on doing. So helping people snap out of that and give a space to just work on yourself, and permission to do it, is the best contribution.

Galen Low: It strikes me that, you know, like a lot of organizations, the reward systems are built to create, maybe inadvertently, the perpetual performers, the dependable ones, right? It's 'cause the reward system is like, keep doing good stuff and people will clap, and you feel valued, and keep doing that. As soon as you step outside of that, you're like, it's like the rewards sort of vanish because they're longer term.

They're not short term. There's not like immediate gratification. I wondered if we can go back to that first chart. I just wanna like step through it, because I like what you've done here. Yeah, so the gap is a five by four grid, and it's pitting the sort of on paper attributes versus how a career feels.

Along the top is emerging, comfortable, flat, draining, and lost. And then along the side is impressive, strong, solid, and fine. And, and I, I, I gravitated towards the top left, right, where it's like, okay, how it feels is energizing, and on paper it's impressive, right? That's kind of like, I guess, what people are really striving for.

It's probably the sweet spot. But it's also, you know, among the sort of mid numbers here, whereas, you know, I'm seeing like the hotspot on this chart being like the combination of like it looks strong on paper, maybe people are being modest , but it's draining, right? And that's you know, it's scoring a 61, way above the 22 in the top left box.

But in other words, sort of like pitting the, the attributes of how it feels in the career versus on paper. I think it's a really interesting visual. I think I probably botched the axis when I first started describing it . Along the top is how it feels. Along the side is what it looks like on paper. Let me ask you this, just to play the devil's advocate.

Is there also just a natural correlation where if you're the kind of person who has built a career that looks strong on paper, it might be draining because, A, it was hard work, and B, you're pushing yourself to keep doing more. You're the kind of person who just might not be happy with a strong on paper career, and maybe that's what's draining about it.

You know, I guess my question is could it be Like, not a dysmorphia diagnosis, so to speak, right? In medical terms where it's like, actually that's just a normal career. What sort of makes it, yeah, not just like a normal thing and something that should be addressed or can be addressed?

James Compton: Yeah. So I think that, I mean, if you look at this, like you've got the draining column is the most highly populated- Yeah. ... for the most part, right? So you've got like near 180, like almost like 200 plus. So that means more than a third of people are feeling like they're drained by what they're doing. And I think there is definitely a, "I'm overworking, I'm doing too much," even though it looks good, yes, to push yourself, but you can't sustain being drained.

And the-- If you look at some of the cost, the duration of this as well, like there's another chart here where we're looking at the compounding effect of cost. So yes, it can be draining, but the thing is you've gotta be able to recover from it, otherwise you are gonna be in a dysmorphia 'cause it's gonna become part of you.

I'm just tired and drained all the time. And the other question is, and we haven't-- I haven't analyzed that or questioned that, what is the draining actually? Is it mentally, emotionally? Is it physically? 'Cause physical draining is something you can recover from, but emotionally, mentally draining is destructive, right?

So it's gonna have its toll. And many people are, you know, suffering the burnout. There's mental health things. People are not sleeping. So if you look at the cost here, sleep or energy levels are the biggest thing. And you gotta look after yourself, like you've gotta look after yourself mentally, right? So when I lived-- we haven't really talked about this or introduced this, but I lived in an ashram before I started my career, right?

Galen Low: Right. Yes.

James Compton: And one of the things was all about, you know, regulation, right? So one of the mantras, if you like, is if you're regulated in your eating, your sleeping, the amount of work you do, and your recreation, then you can be balanced. You-- That's obv-- It's obvious. It's stating the obvious.

So, but many of us are not balanced and it, and we have these other distractions with social media. The stress gets to you. Many people say to me, "I can't sleep at night. I'm taking my work and I'm thinking when I'm going to sleep, and can't shut off," right? So that may not be a dysmorphia issue, it may just be a I'm burning out issue.

But it does become part of us, and it needs to be looked at. So hence capacity for me is a component that is indicated from here that one's capacity is struggling. But you also have the direction, you also have the visibility, and those compound together to create an overall dysmorphia. So draining is one component of the whole situation, if that makes sense.

Galen Low: It makes a lot of sense, like in the sense that, like we've normalized imbalance and there is a longer term cost in that, even if it seems fine right now. You mentioned burnout, and then like even longer term than that is sort of dysmorphia. Like actually, like I am spending most of my life doing a thing that I don't really relate to.

I'm kinda just stuck with and stuck in. Thanks for showing me this. I think this is really cool. I wondered if I could ask, you know, you had mentioned that some people who've come to this diagnostic have sought out help before in some way, shape, or form. Like they're, they're like on the journey.

But like for the folks who don't even know that they're on the journey, like what are some of the symptoms that show up? Or like what are some of the like, I don't know, early warning signs that, you know, you may have A bit of career dysmorphia that, you know, where you could have a massive benefit from addressing it.

James Compton: Yeah, that's a good question. So it, 'cause it normally doesn't show up as like a crisis in that way. For some people it does, right? Some people come to me and it's like, "Oh, I need some help. I'm in like complete crisis." But with other people it's like a slow burn and what I call is leaks that happen, right?

So you got a bucket and you fill it with water- Right ... and you've got these leaks in it, and slowly, slowly, but you don't recognizing it. So, so parts of your week are going somewhere that you don't necessarily make a conscious choice of, and there are five of them that I've identified. And see if how many of these are life for the listeners, right?

We'll go through them one by one. So the first one is meetings that you know that you shouldn't be in, right? So, and you know within about 10 minutes it's like this meeting is not relevant to me, but you kinda stay anyway, right? And that's a point of where you've given... What I'm saying is you're giving your power away.

So career dysmorphia comes from you actually not taking control of your situation. Like for example, you hear this a lot, like especially on LinkedIn, like you should be the CEO of your career But it just mean, really means that you need to be in the driving seat and make the conscious decisions about everything that you're doing, and is it serving me as well as serving those around me?

So staying in a meeting when you don't need to be there, m- a lot of people are like, they'll just kinda stay quiet and, and won't say anything. Second one is the yes that came out of your mouth before you checked your diary, right? Right. So it's like, "Yeah, yeah, I can, I can do that," you know? It's like, "Yeah, no problem."

And you're like, "Oh no, another thing to add on to the pile."

Galen Low: Right.

James Compton: Another leak is the rescue work, right? Not your project, not your responsibility, and somehow you still pick it up. I did this a lot, rescue work on projects. It's a natural thing, right? You step into a project and you're like, "Oh, you know, somebody hasn't put together a playbook or run book for the go live.

Well, I, I can do that 'cause I know what we need to do," right? And so somebody in the support team hasn't raised a ticket for this or that, and we need to get some deployment of technology and make some s- change requests or whatever. I'll do that. So you fill in the holes, right? And I would do this really well.

The gl- and we were often called the glue that fills things in and sticks things together. Yeah. So you end up picking it up, right? So that's a leak. Four is proving loops, right? So you have to prove yourself, right? You've got a document. It's good enough, and you keep reworking it, you know, maybe once, maybe twice, 'cause it, good enough just felt like I'm not quite sure about this.

There are instances when you need to make sure that you've dotted the I's and crossed the T's, and there are instances where it's just you know what? This is good enough. Just get it out there. We need to move to the next thing. So that takes your attention, your concentration. It is another leak.

The fifth one is then recovery. So weekend is meant to give us s- space to refill, to reenergize. Instead you spent it on the thing that you didn't get to in the week, right? So you give away your time. So capacity then, and that's one of the components. There's three pillars in, in what I do, in the work that I do: capacity, visibility, and direction.

And that capacity gets eroded. It's the first thing to go. You're in the, then you're in the weeds, right? And that's what you mentioned about the draining elements of it, the burnout. Those are very big signs. There are other things as well. It feels like you're being conscientious but you're not. The other thing, the other leak is, is where you're thinking to yourself, you know that you need to plan what you're gonna be doing, or somebody asks you what you're gonna do in three or five years.

You're like, "Dunno." So you'd revert to the, the, the present. You just carry on doing the thing, you know? Many other things there as well, and what you're doing is you're giving your power... Here's another thing, like, complaining. Oh, you know, my job sucks, this and that. You go onto a LinkedIn or you go onto a job location.

You have a look, and then you just kinda get busy and you carry on with your work again 'cause you get pulled back. But you're complaining to other people, you know, oh, the, the work is not, not good. The company's not good. They don't look after us. So do something about it then. What's stopping you from just making a change, right?

Some people just like to complain. They just sat by ... And then the other thing is I, I say to people in the diagnostic, I'm like, "Does the Monday version of you and the Saturday version of you, does it feel like they're the same person?" And very few people, like fewer than one in five say yes. Hmm.

Interesting. So there's a split identity that then forms Split identity. So you become disconnected from your career and you just, when you feel that disconnection coming slowly in gradual ways, you need to start thinking, "Okay, maybe I should just figure out a..." And it's the first thing, it's the bottom rung of the thing.

So as I said, there's a pyramid earlier, and the execution is the thing that we tend to do. Get a skill, you know, change my job, whatever. Then you've got strategy, then you've got identity. Who am I? Where am I going? And what do I want to do? If you are not thinking about that, especially in the age we're at now, that's a sign of, of, of just leaking.

Unless of course you're fully satisfied in what you're doing and you're really good. Like you gotta be honest with yourself.

Galen Low: I really like that, like the leaky bucket, right? It's not a moment of crisis. It's not, you know, intense fatigue. You know, it differs from burnout symptoms and those warning signs.

It's almost like this sort of complacency where you like set your agency aside, you'll complain about it, but you know, you're not actively making a change to make it fit better what you feel. So I think it's interesting and I think a lot of people can relate to it. I mean, maybe let me ask you this. If somebody is like, "Yeah, James, that's exactly how I feel.

Yes, I'm the person who always complains no matter what, but also, you know, I'm in all these meetings, I'm not speaking up. I'm not m- my weekend self, you know? Like I have this sort of two identities." If someone's l- like listening and they're recognizing this in themselves, you know, they're successful on paper, but inside they're just like kinda out of steam, like what's something they can do right away?

What's the very first thing they should do this week?

James Compton: This is a good question. So the first thing is what I call as an interrupt. So one thing I talk about is in my, in the work that I do is the inner method. It's a method of inside out leadership or inside out change, right? And the first thing is I, for interrupt And it just means stop doing the same thing on repeat day after day.

Step out of the box and look at it from another angle from somewhere else, and you can do it any time, and it doesn't cost you anything. But normally, as you s- you know say, we go on autopilot, right? You wake up in the morning, you clean your teeth, you know, you make a coffee, you go out for a walk, you take the kids to school.

Everything is running on a program. So stop the program of what you're doing in your career for a minute and give yourself time to think. COVID was a great example of that, right? COVID was an, an amazing example. I always s- say this, like, when COVID happened, the world stopped, and people were like, "I don't want to do this anymore."

Somebody came to me and he's ... He was a McDonald's manager for McDonald's in Scotland you know, one of the branches, and he's "I wanna be a business analyst." I'm like- ... "All right. Okay, then interesting." 'Cause his partner was a business analyst, and he was, like, fascinated by the work. So I trained him, and he just got a role.

He got two offers. So he was determined to change, so he comes to the conclusion ... Now, this is an example of somebody going completely extreme, and we don't always recommend that, but everyone's in a different place. But what he did was he took a chance on himself, and he bet on himself and "I want to do something different."

And he just allowed him to, self to do it and "How do I make this happen?" Right, so that's the first thing. You have to have an intention. There has to be a desire to change. So y- and then you stop, and then, then there's a question. Let's try it together, Galen, and let's see. Sure, yeah. Could ... And this is the question as the interrupt that everybody can ask themselves: If you could do something in your career that genuinely energized you And money and time were not a limit or a constraint, what would it be?

Galen Low: Ooh, that's a tough one. I have the luxury of I do a lot of things that are really gratifying in my role, but, you know, for me it would be like, I mean, you know, it's no surprise I host a podcast. I just like talking to people. If I could just talk to people all day and not necessarily do much else, I absolutely would do that.

I find it... You know, I'm an introvert, so it actually, it drains me, but I enjoy it. So it's kind of like, you know, maybe a bit contradictory to most conventional understandings of like what an introvert would do, but I find people fascinating, and I like having conversations, and I like learning stuff, and I like having autonomy and, you know, I think if, if that was, like, all I did, then that would be lovely.

Did I answer the question properly though? Is like, is that what it means?

James Compton: Yeah, 100%. There's no right or wrong answer. It's like- ... it's your expression of you, right? And then question then, so before you answered it or while you were answering, did something else happen? Did a little voice on your shoulder say, "There are loads of people doing it.

There's so many podcasts already. That's not realistic for me," or, you know, "I'd have to just walk away from what I'm doing and I wouldn't have no idea, like, where would I get money from?" What came up? Did any little voices come through?

Galen Low: Yeah, there was two that jumped out at me. One is "That is not a job."

And the second one was, "It sounds like a job, but it's because the only way that job can exist is if there's a bunch of stuff that's unpleasant, that is draining, that is hard work, that makes you always on." In my head I'm like, that's the trade-off. Every job is going... And this is why I was like earlier we were talking about normalizing imbalance, and I was like, "James, isn't, isn't it just normal to you know, look decent on paper but feel drained?"

Like my agency days, that was you know, that was a lot of it, right? You know, and my title was VP of Innovation and Growth. Like that looked great on paper, but I was like, "Oh, my gosh, like what I'm doing is insane." I was working long hours. I was doing really uncomfortable stuff. And I was like, I guess that's just the price I pay for, A, looking good on paper, which was important to me at the time, and B, you know, whatever else in the job that is fun.

The cost of it is that I will have to do a whole bunch of other things that are draining, that don't really suit my identity, that, you know, I really need to not even flex, but stretch into, right? I'm like, I feel like I'm stretching into all these spaces because it's on my JD and that's my job and, you know, that's what I need to do.

But in my head, it like it doesn't really quite exist to have a career or a job even, like a role that is you know, ideal and perfect, like this utopian thing. My brain goes, "It must have the friction that I complain about. It must have the things that, you know, are difficult, that are not my skillset, that take me a long time, that cause me to work late at night, you know, or on the weekends instead of hanging out with the family."

Yeah, those things cross my mind. And yeah, I guess maybe I am coming at it from that standpoint where I'm like, "That's a nice question, James, but I don't see it as like an actual possibility." How many people come to you and actually say that? They're like, "James, that's nice, but you're living in a fantasy world here."

James Compton: So I think the idea of what you see as a podcast is the seed of an idea that could be developed into something that could be commercially viable, but you're just not sure how to do it yet. So you look at it on the external and you think, yeah. You write it off immediately, right? The voice doesn't fact check.

It doesn't give space for discussion. It doesn't look anything up. It just decides, "No, not possible," right?

Galen Low: Interesting, yeah.

James Compton: Closes the door. So without exploration, without any kind of innovative way of looking at it, almost like an entrepreneurial mindset, like you just discount it. And so how do you know that you're not closing the door on something that could be something that's possible?

And this is what we sort of tend to do generally in everything. We've got a preconceived notion of an opportunity and what it might look like, and then we poo-poo it. You know, that's not possible- Yeah. ... because we haven't actually allowed ourselves to go into it. So that's what I call the lower self.

We have two aspects of ourselves, the lower self that pulls us back, and it's really fast and it gets there before you get a chance, you get a look in to explore something. Right? And the thing that it shut down may have been something that you've wanted for years. Somebody wrote to me and "Yeah, when I was a child, I dreamt about being a teacher," right?

"And doing teaching." I'm like, "Okay, so how could you dovetail that in what you're doing today?" Because teaching is an element of the project work that we do, right? There's so many people that are training and doing things like that. There's space for everybody, and what we tend to do is we say, "Too many people are doing that already.

There's no way I could get a look in." Right? So the... How do you know that? You haven't tried it, right? So you talk yourself out of something before exploring. So that's how this works. And we've got a, yeah, th- look at them notes here. You've got to suspend judgment on whatever comes up in you to then look at it and answer honestly.

And you might write it off, but who would... In organization when they're working on a project and sitting in a boardroom and discussing it, what's the direction, what project should we kick off, and, you know, what are the things we need for the business, everybody explores it. Nobody's like, "Nah, you could- Impossible."

It's like we're brainstorming, right? When you do brainstorming, the, one of the first rules is there's no idea that's too crazy. Just put everything on the board. That's how you get your best thinking. That's how you tap into creativity, and things will come out of you that you're like, "I never even thought about that before."

So it may be a podcast, but it may be something else that is related to your, the busy work. And you said a couple of things. For example, you said, you know, doing things that I felt were draining. I'm an introvert. So we put labels on ourselves, and I might say that you might be an ambivert, which is halfway in between extrovert and introvert, which means you do like the interaction.

You like people. You are interacting. I'm similar. You like the psychology, like how people work, how people think. It energizes you. So the interaction energizes you, so maybe you're not truly a full introvert, who knows? Fair. Right? So we b- th- these are exactly the things we all do. We, we create a definition about ourselves.

Maybe we've done a personality test, and we're like, "This is... I'm, I'm an ENFJ from Myers-Briggs," or whatever, that thing-

Galen Low: Right, yes, yes ...

James Compton: like snapshot in time 'cause six months, one year, five years later, and this happened to me, your Myers-Briggs result looks different. So What's underneath it, that's the thing that you're here to do.

That's the discovery, and that's how it... So here's the thing. So one of the things I put together is a small workbook. So for people who are asking the question, "What are the things I could do with my transferable skills?" I put a workbook on 100 way- things that you could do for influence, impact, and leadership, and there's 10 themes in there, right?

There's consulting advisory. There's thought leadership. There's program kind of level work. There's facilitation skills. There's coaching, mentoring. There's a whole bunch of things. And I gave it to somebody, and I said, I think because she was like, "I'm totally stuck in my career. I don't feel creative anymore.

I don't have space to be. I'm just not as excited or engaged." "Try this. Here's the book." So it's got some materials about why it's important to do this, and then there's a little scoring mechanism. You know, I said you like scoring, right? And there's a scoring mechanism. What, what, what are the three points?

There was three things. So does this appeal to me? Does it match my skills and personality? And could I overcome the obstacles, the little voice in my head that says, "You can't do that. That's not gonna doable. You're too old. You're, you s- you need to reskill. You can't burn everything down," right? You can score yourself and, and it opens your mind 'cause there's 100 ideas.

Right now we've got maybe one or maybe a few or something like that. So with more, you're in creative mode. It's oh I didn't realize I could do all of that with my skills. And we are project experts, so our skills span stakeholders, communication, so many things, that there's many things that we can do.

With the disruption that's happening, we can go so many different places.

Galen Low: I will definitely include it in the show notes 'cause it sounds really interesting. I also really like the categories. Obviously, I like a good scoring system you know, us project MBA people. But I like the categories. I think you had said impact, influence, and leadership.

You know, three skill areas that arguably are what most jobs are asking for now in some way, shape, or form. You know, we were talking about job adverts earlier. You know, they've changed immensely. I was just looking at a post on LinkedIn from my friend. It was like, "Hey, I'm doing a comparison of basically the same job title, job posting from last year to this year, and here's what I noticed are different."

You know, with a few caveats, but, you know, it was kind of like, okay, yeah, the... all the sort of minutia, the administration that now is kind of like, oh, well, AI could do that. That's not valuable anymore. That's not, you know, what I'm... That's not what the role is anymore. But most of them did have the sort of characteristics of driving impact or leading through influence or, you know, leadership in some other way.

And I like that because in your 100 question, it ki- it helps you discover your value. It helps you, you know, step outside of that box, right? Get outside of the label. And if I'm understanding you correctly, also everything else around us is labels, right? Our, our, our lizard brain is like, "Oh, yeah can't do that.

Too many people." We jump to these conclusions because we're like, "I don't have the brain capacity to think about that too hard, so I'm just gonna assume these things." And like you said that can put us in a box. We're not... You know, we have one idea of where we could go, whereas we could probably find hundreds.

That might be too big of a number. That, that might be overwhelming, but there's definitely more than one avenue we can discover based on the skills that we have. And I think something interesting you said earlier, you had mentioned human design and sort of purpose, and then you were talking about, "Oh, yeah, when I was younger, I wanted to be a teacher," that kind of anecdote.

A lot of people would just be like, shrug that off, be like, "Yeah, you know, when I was in first grade, I wanted to be a firefighter, but that's dumb. Now I wouldn't... You know, it's not what I wanna do anymore." I don't know if this is a proper question even, but, like, how often do you find that, that from a sort of purpose standpoint, you know, in the sort of discipline of human design, that people do come back to these things, these early ideas of what they wanna do with their life, even though they came up with them very early on when they were, you know, arguably immature and did not know enough about the world?

James Compton: Two instances, I would say, at the... And there's other, other stories, but I'll give you two. One of my guys who I was helping, he was working in projects. He was a BA business analyst, and he had said to me, he said to me, "Before I started my job and out of university, I vowed to myself I would never work in a kind of support role type function."

And then he ended up in his career in a support role function. Right. And it's like, "Wah." And when we did some work on basically what are your values what's important to you, what's driving your decision-making, he's like, "Oh man, I completely forgot that I just went and got this role that I said I would never go and do."

So he, so he, but he had set up a side hustle. So he set up a side business which was arranging car racing, like across country, different, different places like that, and he makes money from that. And he actually bought the business from somebody else who was winding it down. So he's got his side thing, and he's like, "Okay, I'm using my role and I'm transitioning to that and I'm developing that."

I'm like, "Good," you know? Build more customers. There's always a need for it. So that was one thing. The other thing is on my side, like from my personal story, two things When I was, this is 2021, when everything fell apart for me and I hit the wall of momentum, I'm like, "I can't continue doing this anymore."

I, before leaving the role of the project I was on, I asked the project sponsor, I'm like, "Can you give me some feedback about what I could improve on?" And he said, "James," he said, "You should step up and stop being in the background all the time and being the person who's the invisible expert." That was my archetype, right?

Okay. All right. Let's see. Yeah. And I'm like, "Oh, interesting." And it freaked me out. And then, but at the same time, if I look at my past and where I was as a kinda kid, I was always a natural leader of the crowd and, you know, a little bit thinking differently and unconventional. So then I got...

I was working in the International Institute for Business Analysts, right? That was my BA days, and I was like- That's great ... "Let me volunteer and figure out my path and see where I'm going in this." And what was interesting is I was helping organize m- the mentorship scheme, and I, I was supporting it. The h- the t- director of professional development handed their notice in, and they turned around to me and said, "James, you should step up for that role."

I'm like, "I'm not doing leadership role." Exactly the thing that I was hiding away from when he said, "You need to be more visible." Yeah, interesting. Right? So then I said, "We'll put it to vote." So they're like, "Just put it to vote. Put yourself in and see what happens. No problem." So I put my profile together, and then it was all voted by the members, and I got more than 50% of the votes of four a- applicants, and I was r- like, really surprised.

I was really reluctant. I'm, I don't wanna be a visible per- I don't wanna step into this. I don't want responsibility. Responsibility is more work, and I don't want more work 'cause I wanna chill out. And it wasn't the case. It grew me. So we have a notion of i- if I do this, it's gonna be tiring, it's gonna drain me, I've got people to manage, and blah, blah.

And actually, it actually grew me amazingly. So here's one truth. The things that we resist and we f- say, "I don't wanna do those," are usually the ones that reveal the magic of what we're meant to do. Interesting. And that's a little bit where our human design comes from. So why are you resisting it? What's behind it?

Explore that and then venture into it and see what happens 'cause I bet you'll find something about yourself on the other side of that, and this is all what growth is all about, you know?

Galen Low: That's so cool. I love that. Is that the lower self that you're talking about? It's the thing that-

James Compton: Yeah okay ... the lower self is the, people call it comfort zone.

Galen Low: Yeah, okay.

James Compton: You know, you can call it the things that have kept us familiar. If they're familiar things, I know what's involved. I can predict it. And we like the predictable because then we can schedule our time even though we're being too busy and doing so many other things.

But we think that, you know, it's predictable, and therefore we can anticipate what it's gonna be. The unknown is what we fear, and we're like, "Oh, I don't know. What's, what's it gonna be like?" So there has to be a bit of curiosity and an adventurous spirit and a little bit of, you know, I kinda need to just kick myself up the butt Right

and move myself forward into something. And the unknown is where the magic reveals itself, and that's, that's what it is, yeah.

Galen Low: I think it's interesting because you said the word survival earlier, and I think a lot of folks listening in their careers right now, stuck in the middle of their careers, maybe even late career, and, you know, they're like, "Yeah, I do feel like I'm in survival mode.

There's a lot of disruption, you know, there's the economy, and, you know, I'm feeling old in my role now. You know, this younger generation's coming in." And I think the, the lower level sort of self is that survival. Listen don't take any risks and just, you know, stay the course, and we'll just survive.

And arguably, if I come back to where we started, arguably, even though there's a lot of disruption happening, there may also be a lot of opportunity there. And there's an argument to be made that yeah, maybe that lower self is trying to just keep you alive, and don't step outside your box 'cause, you know, there be dragons everywhere.

Yeah, right. Maybe there's actually not, right? Maybe this is actually the opportunity to step out of your box because actually, you know, either everyone's trying to get beyond survival, but I think more importantly, I think everyone is trying to rediscover their purpose as everything changes around them.

I wanted to kind of like, sort of jet this in because in the green room something we were talking about or a- even in the lead up to when we were preparing for this, you had been talking to me about disruption in general, right, throughout human history. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, we've got this AI fuel disruption it's changing job titles, job roles are different you know, who knows what's gonna happen?"

And you were like, "Yeah, this is not the first disruption we've seen in human history." Maybe we can close out with this. Can you tell us something we can learn from past dis- disruptions that helps maybe let's put our current career upheaval into perspective? Maybe in a positive way.

James Compton: Definitely. It's really interesting. So survival comes from a threat, right? We have a perception of something's threatening us. And like you were saying, we wanna keep things s- status quo. We wanna keep things predictable and comfortable. But we usually... And somebody said this to me, it was a really good example.

He was, like, I think early 50s. So I, I mean, I work with people at different age ranges, but you get later career, more senior people coming and they're like, "I could spend the rest of my career coasting to retirement quite comfortably in my role." So my glass is half empty and half full, right?

And I said to him, "Okay, but what would you really want to do?" And when we did his human design, it came up that he was a natural... One of the design concepts is a projector. So if you look at the archetypes of human design, a projector is... Around 20% of the population are projectors, which means they're natural guides and teachers.

Interestingly, a lot of people that come to me have that archetype, and s- and I also have the same. So I said to him, "Well, okay. Well, what would that look like for you?" And he's like, "Oh, I could be a team leader. I could be a coach." It gave him permission to do something different, which fueled his career to the end thinking instead of just coasting to the end and keeping my head down, it was actually do something that's creative and innovative and then you discover.

You're never too late to discover something that you can do. It's just that we just need to be understand that we've got into a comfortable position, and that comfortable position is tricking us a little bit in terms of what our, our potential is and what we can actually really do. We forget about it, right?

So about disruption, so yeah, company-wide disruptions, nationwide, globally, there's history, and it's really fascinating. In fact, I'd love to write a mini book about the different historical things that have happened 'cause there's so many lessons. I've got 12 stories right now and I'm pulling more together.

But there's a couple I'll tell just for here.

Galen Low: That's awesome.

James Compton: One for, one is, one is Dorothy Vaughan, right? So if you've ever heard of- What was the movie? It was called Hidden Figure. If anybody-

Galen Low: Hidden Figures, yeah ...

James Compton: amazing film. It's a re- it's a story about three African American women. It's a true story, and it's based on Dorothy Vaughan.

So Dorothy Vaughan shows how the job title really does die, right? So it's 1950s, NASA employs these rooms full of women whose job was doing calculations, and their job title was computer. They were called that, right? Then the IBM machines come, and they do in seconds what the, her team took days to do, right?

So then o- overnight, literally all the jobs are redundant. You know, the department's redundant, everything. And then the machine was called the computer, right? Right.

Galen Low: Yes.

James Compton: Took the job title from them. And Dorothy Vaughan, she was a supervisor of the group, and so she didn't wait to see what was gonna happen next.

She went to the public library. She found a book on Fortran, which was an old, the original one, the original programming languages. She taught herself how to program, and then she taught the entire team how to do it, and they became NASA's first generation of electronic computer programmers. So the value of what she was doing wasn't the calculation, it was her own intelligence that sat behind it, and she could adapt, and that was the thing.

It was adaptation. There's a story, and y- you definitely have to watch the film 'cause it's a wonderful fact. I'll probably watch it again myself as well. So but, you know, the most advanced technology, which was this IBM computer, still needed a human to sign it off before a man would trust his life to it.

So AI is coming, yes, but it's not trustworthy. It needs a human to front-run it. Where does AI come from? It's come from a crowdsourced human consciousness and human knowledge. It's not just invented out of nothing. So the human is always before AI. It doesn't matter what anybody said. That's my conviction.

Second thing is the accountants. What happens with the accountants, right? So VisiCalc launches in 1979. Lotus follows in 1983, and everyone says the same thing, right? The spreadsheet comes, then the accountants are finished. What happened to accountants over those decades since the early '80s? The profession grew, right?

And now we have got abundance of accountants everywhere, right? So computer's there, but there's always somebody that's more intelligent that will be able to harness the computer to do something that couldn't be done before. So we are in the driving seat. I definitely agree, and I'm a p- that's my strong opinion.

Job losses are real. Not minimizing it and saying, oh, you know, you know, 'cause people are losing their roles, right? Yeah, AI's replacing. But the productivity case behind them hasn't proved itself yet. It's very early. A lot of this is being sold with hype, right? AI companies are selling efficiency.

Executives want to look competitive, right? The cuts are made on the strength of the pitch that's made by the AI companies, right? And so that's a real thing as well. And so there's a possibility that the AI business case is really overbloated, and there's huge concern around the AI bubble because it's an overinvestment, right?

So that is absolutely the case. So disruption is there. There's many other examples. There's the Big Bang of 1986 in London Stock Exchange. You look at the Luddites, about the w- the British weavers that w- replaced. There's many stories, and if you read the history, history's so good 'cause it's "Oh, this is not happening to me for the first time."

And people survived through this. They adapted, and that was a thing. They adapted themselves. They got creative. They didn't dig their heels in and say, "This is who I am," right? They did all the good things to say, "I'm actually gonna take this as an opportunity." So it's just about how we address it. That's the difference between being in survival, being victimized by it, versus, "I'm gonna do something about this 'cause this is an opportunity," and that's how I'm seeing it.

Galen Low: I really like that, and I think even it comes back to what you said about labels. Hey, you know, don't ferociously, you know, die on the hill defending the label that was given to you that you think you became because you are not that. And in all the stories you mentioned, right, it's looking beyond that and going, "Okay I'm not just this title, I'm not just this label.

And by the way, all the things around me are not just labels either. Let me use my big brain to figure out how I add value and what my purpose is." And often, like you said, it's not to punch numbers into a computer or copy and paste really well or take notes even, right? It's like that wasn't the thing that we wanted to do when we grew up.

You know, that thing we wanted to do when we grew up is probably more closely aligned with values, you know, in our formative years that can then project onto opportunity in the market right now that may or may not exist, and then we just need to shut up our lower self. It's just take away that doubt and know that's impossible and all those voices that are talking us out of it because this actually is the time to, you know, pull a Dorothy Vaughn.

James Compton: Totally agree. And, you know, I've done it myself. I have gone and done different things without a safety net being in place, and I always something always comes because I'm believing in what I'm doing. I know, come, I have this inner conviction. So it's developing the inner conviction which needs to come from a sense of purpose and this is what I need to do.

When the conviction's there, then you'll find a way. That's absolutely a case, and there's nothing, there's nothing stronger than human conviction.

Galen Low: Boom. I love that. James, thanks so much for this. Just for fun, do you have a question that you wanna ask me?

James Compton: You're called The Digital Project Manager. So your thing, you- what you do is named after a job title.

Yes. And then you had said last week then when we met in the green room the title might not exist in a little while. So what will you do about it?

Galen Low: We're having an existential crisis of our own, like an identity crisis, you know, not gonna lie. You know, it is a job title that was trending, you know, in the early whatever, 2010s, and now there's still, you know, thousands and thousands of people who have the job title, but I think it is changing.

And I think more than it being a job title for us, it's becoming our own sort of heritage and identity, and not sort of boxing it into a job title, but our perspective that, you know, we have, you know, digital running through our DNA, you know, where things can be quick and we can iterate and we can, you know, exercise courage and, and be brave and lead people into unknown things.

The project bit, right, which is like, okay, well, listen, it's start and finish, but by the way, that's just collaboration. That's how we're all working these days, and I think that will always remain important. It's the manager one actually that I'm st- stuck stewing on because I think the title in the job descriptions, as we talked about, and the job adverts, is becoming a bit less about management arguably, and more about leadership, and that's what I see, and I do draw a line distinguishing the two.

And I think it's the manager bit that sort of is the label that sells it short in terms of what the role will be. However, I do think that even from a sort of colloquially, project manager is still going to be a thing that will exist for a long time. It will shift. I just don't think it's gonna disappear right away.

If it looks like it might Then we might need to rebrand. But it is, yeah, I'm losing sleep over it, but I, I think you know, it represents our philosophy as well. You know, even if it's not a job title, it still represents our philosophy, so.

James Compton: Totally agree, because yes, it represents, like you said, it's a category of expertise that is not gonna go away.

It might change its label, but it's like still somebody's gonna need to coordinate this stuff. Somebody's gonna still need to lead teams. You're gonna have change. You need to deliver change in a short time, in a compressed manner, and that's a discipline, so you can't... It's a universal principle, right?

So if you study the under- what's beneath everything, there's the universal principles that whether AI is there or not, you need those to be in place 'cause otherwise stuff just doesn't get done, you know?

Galen Low: Yes, the universal principles.

James Compton: You're gonna need a scope, you're gonna need a brief, you're gonna need a team, you're gonna need to communicate.

Those things are not gonna go away 'cause it's just organization, right? So.

Galen Low: Well, I'm glad you believe that too. That, that's comforting.

James Compton: Yeah, totally.

Galen Low: James, thanks so much for spending the time with me today. It's been so much fun. I've learned a lot. Really interesting stuff. For folks who want to learn more about what you do, where can they go?

James Compton: So a few things. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm James Compton on LinkedIn, and you can also see my website, which is jamescompton.me. There you can do the career dysmorphia diagnostic, so you get your own report, and also there's a research... We'll publish this, I think, won't we? There's a, the research dashboard, 'cause that was an interesting walkthrough today.

Galen Low: Yeah.

James Compton: So those are really analytical. You can see the research paper that's behind it as well. Cool. And then the last thing is the 100 Ways to Impact, Influence, and Leadership workbook. If you fancy trying that out, I'd love to see how you get on with it, so we'll put that out there as well, and you can learn more through that too.

Galen Low: Amazing. I will add all of those to the show notes for our listeners, and James, thank you again.

James Compton: Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it. And I just wanna say one small thing. Our career isn't like a compartment of our life. It's actually an expression of who we are and what we do in the world, right? So we spend more than 60% of our waking hours in it, so we don't wanna wait for someone else to decide, you know, like, where it's going.

No CEO would run a company in that way, and when you're deciding and when you've created the direction and when you've got that sense of purpose in what you're doing in your career, then you'll always know where you're going, you'll always be energized, and you never shrink to fit in whatever's holding you back.

So thank you.

Galen Low: Boom. I love that. Thanks again, James.

All right folks, that's it for today's episode of the Digital Project Manager Podcast. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to subscribe wherever you're listening. And if you want even more tactical insights, case studies, and playbooks, create a free account with us at thedigitalprojectmanager.com.

Until next time, thanks for listening