Four pivots, across four countries over nine years, without the risky leap

I met Nadia through a Substack DM. She told me that she’d made four career pivots in nine years, across four different countries. I wanted to know what it is about her that equipped her to move through so much change in so little time, so I invited her for a chat the following week.

Nadia started out in criminal psychology in South Africa. She told me the work was emotionally heavy, and by age 21 she’d seen things no 21-year-old should have to see. She packed up and moved to China to teach.

While teaching, she met an instructional designer who offered to let her shadow the work. Her employer paid for the certification and she learned an entire profession while still in her existing role.

When COVID arrived, she had to decide whether to stay or leave China. She left, applied from abroad as a South African citizen and landed an instructional design role with a group of private schools in Poland. France came next, then a move into a tech company in Paris, where she ran customer education before up skilling again into product ownership.

The part that interests me most is how she built each next move inside the job she was leaving. There was no dramatic exit and no extended sabbatical.

Jennifer: You’ve made four transitions across four countries on a South African passport. What did the reality actually involve?

Nadia: I always hear expats or immigrants talk about how difficult it is to adapt to a country, the loneliness, the new job responsibilities and the legal terms. No one talks about what it costs you before any of that loneliness sets in, before you struggle with new working environments and wrapping your head around different labour laws. It’s the people you have to leave behind. You build your support system everywhere you land and the friends and colleagues you rely on change each time you change careers. We spend a lot of time at work, and deny it as much as you want, but we forge community there. During career transitions, that’s a real loss. Keeping those connections alive afterward takes more effort than people expect.

Another thing I struggled a lot with was imposter syndrome, right in the thick of a transition. Each career change came with its own flavour of it. I remember my first day at the tech company in France, standing at the train station waiting for a broken down train to arrive, completely overwhelmed and fully convinced I would never understand what multi-physics simulation software entailed. Three months later, I understood it just fine. You have to give yourself grace and space to feel a little lost for a while, and have faith that it’ll pass and you’ll be able to move through it. You’ll find your new people and support network, too.

When I think about what each transition felt like, the first one definitely stands out. Nothing compares to that first big leap! I was running on pure adrenaline. Then later, going from instructional design into corporate product work was a huge shift in organization type and career goals. I’ve been very lucky, though. I have always found people who supported me along the way. Changing countries, industries and structures will always be a bit frightening. You just have to extend yourself the same grace, every time.

Jennifer: Your first career was in criminal psychology. What were you seeing that made you decide criminal psychology wasn’t for you? How did leaving South Africa become part of that decision?

Nadia: I will always love criminal psychology. What I’ve always found interesting is what drives someone to cross that line, and the stories they tell themselves to justify the crimes they commit. I still follow it in my spare time. But my personality and values just couldn’t be reconciled with what the job required. I was getting desensitized fairly quickly, and I remember a distinct moment visiting a morgue and wondering where they bought the candles, instead of looking at the lady on the table. That was the first red flag for me. You need really thick skin, and I didn’t necessarily want it.

Around the same time, some things at home needed my attention, so I decided to step back and re-evaluate. What I realized, once I’d finished that re-evaluation, was that I’d been living a life built on assumptions of how it was supposed to look. If I was going to rebuild, I figured, why not see the world while I was at it, and rebuild somewhere else? My employer promised I could always return, so it didn’t feel like a real risk. Just my first one, with a safety net underneath.

Jennifer: You learned an entire profession while doing a different one, and your employer paid for it. For someone reading this who’s in a job they’re outgrowing, what did that actually look like? How did you ask and what did you offer in return?

Nadia: After leaving South Africa, I ended up teaching English in China, but wanted to move into instructional design after meeting someone in the company who did exactly that. I put in the late nights and went the extra mile. Shadowing the instructional designer, building trust with her and my director, then making my case: what I wanted, how it would help them, what I needed to get there. My director and I refined the pitch for about a month before the larger corporate offices in Shanghai said yes to supporting my further education and working on programs with them.

Then it was proving it. Weekly reviews, feedback, constant showing up. In return, I built them a portfolio, trained their teams, created new courses, and put in extra hours so they knew they’d made the right call. Corporate runs on ROI, so I framed it as an opportunity too good to pass up.

Jennifer: You used a phrase on our call that has stuck with me: middle-class hope porn. What is it, and what bothers you about that category of content?

Nadia: Middle-class hope porn is basically the trend of 30 and 40-somethings burning it all down and starting over. Quitting the job, selling the house, moving to [insert country here]. Stunning, inspirational content, and genuinely fantastic if you’re one of the people who can actually afford to do it. Most of the audience watching can’t. Most people are middle class, upper or lower, and that means mortgages, dependents, visas, savings that don’t stretch that far.

The content sells a fantasy of total reinvention without ever mentioning the safety net that made it possible: inheritance, savings, a partner’s income, no kids yet, a passport that opens doors. It’s not that the story is fake. It’s that it’s sold as something you can easily replicate, when it isn’t, and that gap is what bothers me. People end up measuring their “stuck” life against someone else’s cherry-picked leap, without the full picture of what made that leap possible.

So, be brutally honest with yourself about what is actually on the table of possibilities. You probably can’t take the leap-and-see version, where you quit everything, move continents and figure it out later. Pretending otherwise will set you up to feel stuck.

Think about what is available in smaller, more doable segments. A night course, side projects, volunteer work, conversations with your manager about what you actually want. Especially with money. I used to be vague about what I was saving towards, but after ten years of being very clear about my savings goals, I’m more disciplined and I know what pace to expect when making big changes. My own move to instructional design didn’t happen by burning everything down. I kept my job, my income and my safety net and built my case slowly.

Jennifer: You’ve described your brother and sister as trailblazers. They’re both significantly older than you and both went abroad. What did watching them show you that you wouldn’t otherwise have known was available? What do you think that says about the importance of role models during a transition?

Nadia: I’m forever thankful for the role models I’ve had. My sister’s courage in 2001, jumping on a plane to London, leaving everything behind, is why I believed I could do it too. She even talked our older brother into going abroad. He spent four years in the UK, then came home and rebuilt from scratch. Both of them taught me the same thing: you can always rebuild, wherever you land.

Every big decision, from moving to China, considering moving back home to South Africa, and to eventually settling in France, I’ve called one or both of them first. They have the wisdom and the experience on both sides of the coin (move back home or not), and they tell me the truth if they think I’m about to do something I shouldn’t.

That’s why role models matter so much during a transition. Change is never simple, even when you plan for it. You need at least one or two people you trust enough to call when things get hard, or when you need objectivity.

Jennifer: Making something messy and complex into something simple has followed you through every role: teaching, instructional design, customer education, product ownership. When did you first notice that was the actual skill, rather than the job title you happened to have?

Nadia: Only recently, actually. In the product owner role, I work with systems every day, and big companies tend to have messy infrastructure. Not from carelessness, but because rapid growth and immense scale make it hard to keep things streamlined. That’s when it clicked. The through-line in every role wasn’t the job title, it was always taking that mess and making it clear for the people who had to work inside the chaos.

Jennifer: You studied psychology, left it, and now you write about how people move through change using applied psychology. It feels like a full circle moment. What brought you back to psychology?

Nadia: Once I realized what the through-line was, I wanted somewhere to actually use it beyond my day job. That’s when Builder’s Debrief was born. It’s built around the idea that most ambitious, high-achievers aren’t stuck because they lack information or discipline. They’re stuck because they’re not equipped to turn the chaos and whirlwind in their minds into something they can actually act on. Systems thinking applied to life, in the same way I apply it to messy systems at work. I have a galaxy of thoughts going on at any given second, so I know what it’s like.

Writing the Builder’s Debrief is my own system that helps me do three things:

1. It puts all the thoughts and experiences I have swirling around, to productive use

2. It keeps me current in a field I will always be interested in

3. It helps other by making the material practical and easy to apply.

I can appreciate complex theories and research, but most people want something actionable, usable. If I can’t translate that, I’m shouting into an academic void, and that’s the last thing I want. Through my Substack, that means taking real psychological frameworks, and stripping it down to practical application for people to use.

Readers get a mix. Some posts are confessional, where I work through my own chaos in real time and share the tools I’m using to do it. Others are systems breakdowns: here’s a framework made simple, and here’s how to apply it.

My philosophy underneath it all is that you don’t have to overhaul your entire life to change it. You need to understand the gap between where you are and where you want to be, and “backwards engineer” it, so you can move forward one step at a time. Sustainable building, not dramatic reinvention.

Jennifer: Looking back at all four transitions, what advice would you give to someone standing at the edge of a change?

Nadia: Things will fall into place when the time is right. You cannot FORCE a square into a circle. You can prepare, you can empower yourself and you can be ready for the change, but you cannot force the exact right moment for it to happen.

When it’s hard (which it definitely will be), don’t mistake hard for “wrong”. That mistake has made a lot of people quit right before things started falling into place.

Beyond that, don’t wait to feel ready. You won’t. Readiness is not a magical moment that arrives, perfectly packaged with a bow that says “NOW!” It’s something you build piece by piece, by moving and getting your skills in order along the way. While I’ve tried my best to prepare, there were always going to be a few gaps I had to accept and deal with whenever I made a leap. I did what I could, and I had to be content with that.

Jennifer: You’ve held a lot of different professional identities across those nine years. What are you sitting with at the moment?

Nadia: Golden handcuffs, if I’m honest, and hot take: I’m super okay with that. The benefits are definitely well used! What I’ve realized through all these transitions is that at the start of my career, I kept chasing a “dream job,” something to make me feel completely fulfilled. I don’t think that exists for me. I have too many interests to ever feel 100% at home in just one thing. Some roles fit better than others, and these nine years of experimenting have helped me get closer to what actually works for me.

What I like about being a product owner now, is the clarity you find working through chaos in systems. I feel like I’m using my skills as a generalist and systems thinker in a way that actually makes sense to me. The real mindset shift I’m working through now is learning to work to live rather than live to work, and to stay as close to myself as possible. I tend to get overwhelmed by everything I’ve done, everything I do, and everything I still want to do.

Brutal honesty and internal value alignment is what fills the gaps where work doesn’t get me to 100%. They make room for what actually feeds my creativity and my sense of purpose, and that keeps the overwhelm away. Most of the time, anyway.

Maybe that’s the real lesson underneath all of it. Years ago, I stood in a morgue and realized I couldn’t get comfortable looking past the person on the table. I still can’t. Refusing to look away from what actually matters, whether that’s your happiness, your family, a place to call home, no matter where it may be, or how you choose to spend a Tuesday, might be the one thread that’s run through all of it.

You can find Nadia at Builder’s Debrief, where she writes about building a dream life slowly and responsibly through practical psychology.