Reinvention Law #2 (from The 10 Laws of Career Reinvention) says that when it comes to career reinvention, your body is your best guide.  And it is true that when it comes to deciding what you want to do, your body often sends the most accurate signals.  But what is also true is that all good decision-making requires an ever-shifting balance of intellectual and instinctual input.  When it comes to career reinvention, you use your intellect to answer the “how” and your instinct to answer the “what.”   But your gut isn’t infallible; it can be prone to bias because it draws upon your previous experiences—good, and not-so-good—to make a judgment call.  The trick is to know when to trust it.

The June 2010 issue of the McKinsey Quarterly contains an article about how to test your decision-making instincts.  Though the piece discusses the issue from the perspective of corporate leaders, their recommendations can also help you when making personal decisions.  Here are their four tests to know when you should trust your gut instincts, along with my analysis of how to use each one for your own career reinvention:

Test #1:  The familiarity test. In this test, you must ask yourself how often you have experienced identical or similar situations.  Familiarity is important because your subconscious relies on pattern recognition.  You need to have enough data to support a pattern, and to ensure that the previous experience referenced by your subconscious is correct!  The way you can judge this is by examining the “primary uncertainties” of a situation, and evaluating if you have enough experience to make an informed judgment call.  In career reinvention, the big question is often whether or not a career will be a good fit.  Perhaps your gut instinct is guiding you to become a coach.  If that intuition is based upon your years of informally coaching your friends, you probably have enough data.  If it’s based upon having a friend who’s a coach and loves it, you probably don’t.

Test #2:  The feedback test. Here, you want to make sure that your takeaways from your previous experiences are, in fact, correct.  As humans, our bias is to tag our decisions as good judgment, whether or not an independent assessment would support that.  I quit my first job on Wall Street because I was desperately unhappy.  At the time I thought it was a good decision—and it did, in the end, work out—but today I realize that it wasn’t so great (I was two months away from qualifying for a pension).  To run this test, have a conversation with a friend or colleague.  Tell them the experience your gut feelings are based on, and ask them for their honest feedback.

Test #3:  The measured-emotions test. Sometimes, your previous experiences are associated with highly charged emotions.  When that happens, you run the risk of making an unbalanced decision.  I had a client who was carrying baggage from a difficult experience with a former boss.  When her new boss once made a similar comment, her gut instinct told her she had run across another boss-zilla.  When you find yourself in these types of situations, you need help evaluating your emotions.  Ask yourself if you are overreacting, or speak to an objective friend about your feelings.

Test #4:  The independence test. Sometimes you have a personal interest in a particular outcome, and that bias will influence your gut feelings.  I see this often; aspiring Reinventors frequently fall in love with a particular company, and swear their instincts are leading them in that direction.  But many times the attachment is based upon other variables like an easier commute or friends who work at the firm.  If you find your gut irresistibly draws you to a single target, turn to a Native to test your assumptions and get a balanced viewpoint.

The McKinsey article cautions that if a situation fails even one of the four tests, you must strengthen your decision-making process to minimize the risk of a negative outcome.  If you find yourself in this situation, turn to friends or an informal advisory board for help vetting your career reinvention decision.

As a part of the proposal for my upcoming book, I’ve been gathering data on the current state of the job market. As anyone who has access to a TV, newspaper or RSS feed knows, the stories from the news are pretty grim. The U.S. market has lost nearly 2 million jobs since the beginning of the year, and economists agree that we are in the middle of a recession.

But the numbers (as opposed to the news) actually tell a slightly different story– there are actually pockets of opportunity in the midst of downsizing. One example: the health care industry actually added 34,000 jobs in November, for a net increase of 369,000 jobs in the past twelve months. Smart people are identifying these pockets of opportunity and are using them to come up with a reinvention plan (we covered the tactics of how to do this in our three-part series, How To Reinvent Your Career in Tough Times– you can still get the MP3 audios & companion worksheets here).

Having a reinvention plan is like having health insurance for your career– should an emergency come up, you are protected. Without it, you court disaster. Economists predict that next year will be even tougher, job-wise. Pull together your Reinvention Plan now so that your career remains healthy in 2009!