How I Got A Brain That Can Pivot

I didn’t notice it happening all at once.

It crept up on me somewhere between the tram stop outside the business school and the library’s silent floor, the one with the flickering desk lamps that never quite get fixed. I was in my third year at The

University of Birmingham on the kind of campus where concrete buildings sit beside older brick halls, and everyone seems to be either rushing somewhere or pretending not to panic.

I had always been good at coping quietly. Youngest in a large family, first to make it this far academically, I’d learned early how not to take up too much space with uncertainty.

The plan was clear or so I told myself. Graduate. Get a role aligned with my degree.

Move forward. Anything else felt like failure. When people asked what I wanted to do, I answered quickly, almost defensively, as if saying it out loud often enough would lock it in place. What I didn’t say was how tightly my sense of worth had started to cling to that outcome.

The moment that unsettled everything didn’t come from a rejection email. It came one evening in the computer lab, long after most students had gone home.

I was working through yet another application when I realised I had rewritten the same version of myself for the tenth time that week. Same language. Same competencies. Same promise of loyalty to a role that might not even exist by the time I graduated.

I felt irritation first, then resistance a stubborn refusal to consider any alternative. I remember thinking, This is what I’ve worked for. Why should I change now?

That resistance was loud. It showed up as frustration whenever someone suggested flexibility. I dismissed friends who talked about doing something adjacent, hybrid, or unexpected.

I clung to the idea that staying focused meant staying safe. But beneath that discipline was something else — a growing anxiety every time I read about industries shifting, automation creeping in, or graduate schemes quietly disappearing. The more I doubled down, the more brittle my thinking became.

It took a short, uncomfortable chain of events to break that concentration. A visiting speaker cancelled last minute. A module I expected to enjoy felt strangely hollow. A tutor, trying to be helpful, asked me what I would do if my first-choice path didn’t work out. I remember laughing it off — and then replaying the question for days. I wasn’t afraid of hard work. I was afraid of not knowing who I was without a single outcome holding everything together.

That was when I began to notice something I’d ignored before. Despite the pressure, university had already trained my mind in ways I wasn’t giving myself credit for. I could absorb large volumes of information quickly, spot patterns across messy data, plan under time constraints, and project outcomes beyond what was written on the page.

These weren’t minor by-products of my course — they were core cognitive skills. Skills that didn’t belong to one job title.

Around the same time, I came across the idea behind HAPHÈ a Greek word meaning to connect for the good of the whole. It wasn’t framed as motivation or career advice. It was framed as preparation. The idea was simple but unsettling: when emotional investment is concentrated in a single outcome, change hits harder. When thinking is diversified first, opportunity follows more naturally.

At first, I resisted that too. Diversifying felt like diluting ambition. But slowly, almost reluctantly, I started mapping what I could actually do, rather than what I thought I was supposed to become. Consulting-style roles. Problem-solving work. Projects where skills mattered more than titles. For the first time, the world felt larger rather than narrower.

Looking back, the real value of university wasn’t that it pointed me towards one destination. It was that, within a fixed and demanding period, it reshaped how my mind worked. Once I allowed myself to see that, the fear loosened its grip. I hadn’t gone to university for a single job. I had gone to develop a brain capable of pivoting — and that changed everything.

d year when the certainty cracked — not loudly, but in a way that made it harder to ignore. It happened on a damp February afternoon, the kind that settles into the Midlands and refuses to lift. I’d ducked into the student union to escape the rain, laptop under my arm, thinking I’d watch a talk recommended by a lecturer. It was a YouTube panel on "future careers" — something I almost closed after five minutes because it felt vague and overly optimistic.

I didn’t expect it to unsettle me. Until then, I’d been quietly proud of how focused I was. My course had a clear pipeline. Do well, secure the placement, convert it into a role. I came from a tight-knit household where stability mattered — not because anyone said it out loud, but because uncertainty had always been expensive. As one of four siblings, I’d learned to value predictability. A linear career wasn’t just ambition; it felt like responsibility.

The discomfort didn’t come from what the speakers said it came from what I resisted. They talked about roles emerging and disappearing within five years, about skill clusters replacing job titles. I found myself arguing with the screen. They’re exaggerating, I thought. This doesn’t apply to my field. I shut the laptop, irritated, and went back to revising, telling myself that focus was discipline and discipline was protection.

But the resistance followed me. It showed up in seminars when classmates talked about adjacent paths. It showed up when a module shifted emphasis unexpectedly and I felt thrown off balance. Most of all, it showed up as a quiet dread whenever someone asked what I’d do if my preferred route didn’t materialise. I realised I didn’t have an answer — not because there weren’t options, but because I hadn’t allowed myself to see them.