Career change options only become available to you once you can actually see them. And which options become visible depends very much on the people you surround yourself with.
If I hadn’t gone to Burning Man in 2010, I'd never have thought about becoming a coach.
Burning Man is a week-long temporary art city and adult playground in the middle of the Nevada desert.
What made it career-defining is that I found myself surrounded by people I'd never come across in my normal professional life.
Artists who’d quit advertising to paint full-time, engineers who'd left tech to build things with their hands, former executives running NGOs, yoga teachers, spiritual healers, tech bros before the word was even invented and, of course, every type of hippie you can imagine.
Many of them had walked away from socially impressive careers to do something entirely different.
But what struck me most was how unremarkable and normal those career choices had seemed to those who’d made them.
That's how Burning Man became a symbol that an alternative future was perhaps possible for me too.
How your social circle defines your career change options
So much has been written about the importance of your social and professional network for connecting with job opportunities.
But your network does something even more fundamental: it literally decides how wide the range of career options is that you’ll consider.
You can’t be what you don’t see, so it’s unlikely you’ll ever imagine shifting into a new career if you’ve never seen another person who’s similar to you making a comparable shift.
If nobody in your immediate world has ever moved from corporate law into policy work, or from engineering management into executive search, those career paths won't quite register as realistic possibilities to you.
In addition, we tend to set our benchmarks for salary, status, job satisfaction and general ‘doing well in life’ relative to the colleagues and friends closest to us professionally rather than the market.
That’s why a career change might make complete sense to you on a logical and emotional level, but the social arithmetic raises a different question altogether, which is: what will the people I respect think of me if I do this?
Say you’re earning £140,000 in a role you dislike, but you’re considering a lateral move into something you're genuinely interested in, which pays £90,000. That £90k salary may well represent solid compensation for that role and sector.
But if you use your friends and peers who operate at similar salary levels to your current one as a reference, £90k may read as failure, so you’ll hold back from even applying.
Why career advice from the wrong people kills a career change before it starts
It gets worse. Let’s say you discuss shifting industries or careers with a friend.
They may be supportive, but they’ll often evaluate your idea using the very assumptions, hierarchies, and norms of their own professional world.
Ask a senior lawyer whether moving into mediation makes sense, and they'll almost certainly apply the logic of the legal profession: the status implications, the compensation expectations, the sense of what counts as serious work.
They’re not trying to be unhelpful or judgmental, but they’re giving you advice from inside the same space you're trying to leave.
This is why conversations with people already working in your new industry or career will be far more useful than conversations with trusted people from your current one, especially if your chosen career is a little unconventional.
Also, when moving into a new field, you often leave behind a world where you already have seniority, a recognised title, and a clear place in a hierarchy.
You go from someone with standing to being a relative newcomer again, and some of your previous career capital may not count for much.
In my coaching, I notice that this aversion to losing social status is often an unspoken blocker when it comes to weighing up a career change and shows up as resistance, doubt, or a vague sense that now isn't quite the right time.
Five ways to think beyond your circle when considering a career change
If you’re excited about leaving your industry behind but have no idea how or why, then going beyond your current circle is one of the most practical things you can do.
1. Test a career idea with a loose acquaintance before you test it with a close friend.
In 1973, sociologist Mark Granovetter published research showing that people are more likely to find new jobs through acquaintances than through close friends or colleagues.
His argument was straightforward: your close network largely knows what you know, while acquaintances operate in different worlds and carry information, perspectives, and connections that haven't reached your immediate circle.
Nearly fifty years later, Stanford professor Erik Brynjolfsson and his colleagues put that theory to one of the largest tests in social science history, analysing LinkedIn data from 20 million people over five years.
They confirmed Granovetter's original finding, but added an important nuance: weak ties work differently depending on your industry.
In more digital sectors, loose acquaintances consistently increased job mobility, while in less digital or trade-based fields, stronger ties proved more effective.
The principle holds, but who counts as a useful acquaintance depends partly on where you're headed.
2. Seek out people who've already made the kind of move you're considering, and ask them the questions most people don't.
The standard informational interview covers the practical side: what the role involves, how they made the transition, and what skills transferred.
But what you also need to know is what it cost them, and not just financially.
Ask how their relationships shifted with former colleagues, or whether their sense of professional identity took a hit, and how long that lasted.
Also ask them what they’d do differently in hindsight.
They might not volunteer this spontaneously, but if you ask directly, you'll get a straight answer, and that will tell you far more about what you're actually weighing up than any amount of research into job descriptions or salary benchmarks.
3. Pay attention to what your current circle treats as self-evidently good or bad.
Every professional world has a set of unspoken assumptions about what constitutes a smart move and what constitutes a mistake.
In consulting, moving client-side can be seen as a step down, while in academia, leaving for the private sector can be seen as selling out.
In finance, a smaller firm means going backwards, etc.
These assumptions often show up in phrases like "oh, are you sure?" and get treated as obvious facts.
So, write down what your professional world treats as unambiguously good and bad, then ask yourself whether you actually agree, or whether you've simply been around each assumption long enough that it started to feel like your own.
4. Notice who isn't in your network at all.
Most people think about their network in terms of who they know.
The more useful question is often who's completely missing.
Do you know anyone working in the public sector, education, or early-stage startups?
Anyone who makes a living as a ceramicist, a dog trainer, a sailing instructor, or a private chef?
If the answer is no, that absence is probably already having an impact on your sense of what's possible.
Not because you've evaluated those paths, but because you've never been close enough to someone living them.
A single conversation with someone whose professional life looks nothing like yours changes what feels available.
5. Find your own Burning Man.
Maybe not literally, as it’s quite the undertaking, but deliberately put yourself in environments where people are doing things you'd never encounter in your normal professional life.
A conference in an adjacent industry, a massage course, a community of career changers, a hobby that attracts a wider range of people than the usual white-collar crowd.
Or indeed, rolling around naked in the Nevada desert.
The goal isn't conventional networking, but recalibrating your sense of what's possible by treating those people as a reference point rather than a curiosity.
The more time you spend around people living a different professional reality, the more that reality starts to feel genuinely available to you.
The question many people forget to ask before a career change
Most people approach a career transition as a question of self-knowledge.
What do I want? What am I good at? What would make me happier?
Those are very important questions indeed.
But because your answers are already shaped by the world you've been operating in, they’re not enough.
The most useful question isn't always what do you want to do next, but who do I need to spend more time with before I can see clearly what I might want to do next.
If you'd like to work through this with someone outside your current world, you can book a free career change consultation here.
