Career Opportunities We Can't Engineer

Every signal we send passes through another person's unique wiring before it lands. That interpretation layer is always present. And sometimes, when others can see us clearly enough to trust what they see, it opens doors we never would have designed for ourselves.

In this episode, Leslie Ferry gets personal.

She shares the career she planned, the one she never expected, and the moment later in her career when everything she had always done stopped landing the way she intended. Not because she stopped working hard. Because a gap had opened between her intent and her impact, and she did not have the tools to close it.

Both of those things, the unexpected opportunities and the hard moments, point to the same place. The career path we define is a starting point. What becomes possible when The Wiring Gap™ starts to close is something no plan can fully anticipate.

In this episode:

• Why the opportunities that change everything almost never come from executing a plan
• What it means to be known for how you show up rather than your credentials or your title
• What happens when The Wiring Gap opens without you realizing it, and how it quietly shapes results
• Why closing the gap is not just about being better understood but about unlocking what becomes possible
• What Leslie learned from the hard moments that the easy ones could not teach her

The thinking in these episodes is designed to provoke a question. Zandra is built to help you answer it — personally, in the context of your own work: zandra.app/insight

Transcript

Welcome back to the Career Edge, where we unpack how work actually works.

I'm Leslie Ferry. This is episode four of the Wiring Gap series,

And this one is different because I'm going to get personal. And whether you're earlier in your career or leading others through theirs, what I'm about to share is really about what becomes possible

when the wiring gap starts to close.

I want to tell you something about my own career, including the parts that didn't go the way I expected.

But let's start at the beginning. I decided I was going to be an accountant during my junior year of high school. We spent the class managing the books of a t-shirt factory. And something about it just made complete sense to me. The logic of it and the clarity. So that was the plan. And for the first several years of my career, I followed it. Then something unexpected happened. About six or seven years in, a product marketing manager recruited me into marketing.

To say it took real convincing is an understatement. Nothing I had done felt remotely close to marketing, at least not to me. Accounting was my path, and I had committed to it early and fully. What finally moved me was something that she said. She told me she had watched me navigate business challenges and present them in ways that different people across different groups could understand.

She saw something in how I showed up that I hadn't even thought to name as a skill. I took the opportunity. I would never have put marketing on a career map I drew up for myself in high school. It wasn't on my plan at all.

but it was the first of many doors I would have never designed for myself.

After that first unexpected turn, some others followed. A former CEO recruited me to a startup to drive growth. I took a step back in title and pay from a well-established company to help determine processes to build something from the ground up, things I'd never done before, and it was well worth the decision. Then a former CFO recruited me into a company to lead the marketing organization. And that role?

eventually led to being part of a team that took that company public. I wasn't sure I was ready for it, but it worked out. None of those were on a career path I defined. None of them were the logical next step on the map I'd drawn. But they arrived because people saw something in how I showed up. Their interpretations of my actions, the way they received my signals through their own lenses, opened doors I would have never have designed for myself. They trusted what they saw.

and they opened doors I didn't know existed. And those opportunities, each one building on the last, gave me the broader experience and the confidence to eventually start my own company and build Brize If you'd asked me in my 30s whether I would have started a company, I would have definitely said not. But here I am. That's the thing about career pathing that most planning conversations miss. The path you can define is always bound

by what you can already imagine.

what you can imagine is shaped entirely by where you've already been. The opportunities that change everything, the ones that genuinely alter the trajectory

Almost never come from executing the plan.

They come from being known clearly enough that others think of you

when something unexpected opens up.

not known for our credentials, not known for our title, known for how we show up. But I want to be honest with you about something else, because this isn't just a story about momentum and opportunity. It's also a story about what happens when the gap opens without you realizing it. Later in my career, I inherited a new team and something just wasn't working. I remember driving home one evening thinking,

I have lost my ability to communicate. And that was not a small thought. It was actually quite disorienting because communication had always been something I felt confident about. And suddenly nothing was landing the way I intended. The team wasn't connecting. Our collaboration felt forced and results weren't coming. I didn't understand what had changed. I was doing what I'd always done. I was showing up the way I always had.

What I didn't see, what I couldn't see from the inside was the wiring gap. I was showing up the way I was wired to show up. And the team I had inherited was wired differently. So what felt natural and clear to me was landing as something completely different for them. The gap between my intent and their experience had quietly opened. And I had no framework for understanding why.

With the help of a career coach, I started learning how people are wired differently,

what they need to feel motivated, and how they process direction, feedback, and collaboration. What shifted was not the work itself, but the relationships.

I altered the way I was communicating from my natural wired process and started paying attention to what each person needed. I learned what motivated them. I adjusted how I showed up for each of them based on what I was learning, not what I assumed. The team connected. Our collaboration became real. The work started moving and the results followed. We achieved our goals together.

That experience taught me something I haven't forgotten. Closing the wiring gap isn't just about being better understood. It's about unlocking what a group of people can actually do together when the gap between them stops creating friction. Here's what I want you to take from this. Having a sense of where we want to go matters. Direction gives us momentum. It helps us make decisions.

build the relevant skills and move with intention rather than simply drifting. But how we get there is almost certainly different than what we're imagining right now. The opportunities that changed my career didn't arrive because I planned for them. They arrived because of how I showed up and because others could see that clearly enough to trust it. And the moment my career stalled wasn't because I stopped working hard. I was actually working harder than ever.

because the work itself had become harder than ever. It stalled because a gap had opened between my intent and my impact.

and I didn't have the knowledge to see it or the tools to close it. Both of those things are true and both of them point to the same place. The career path we define as a starting point,

What becomes possible when we start closing the wiring gap is something no plan can fully anticipate. We can engineer the doors that open when others see us clearly, but we can do the work that makes it possible for them to.

My career started as an accountant. I'm grateful for every unexpected turn since then, and for the hard moments that taught me what the easy ones couldn't. The wiring gap is real. Closing it changes everything, not just in how others experience us, but in what becomes available to us. In the final episode of the series, we'll look at how to do this work, not as a one-time insight.

but as a practice that compounds over time.

The thinking in these episodes is designed to provoke a question, and Zandra is built to help you answer it, personally, in the context of your own work. Thanks for listening to The Career Edge. I'll see you next time.