Episode 13: What We Can All Learn From Taylor Swift's Pivots

You had to know this was coming. There can't be a podcast called "I'm the Problem" that doesn't have an episode about Taylor Swift. But this one will be useful for you whether or not you're a Swiftie. Taylor is, among other things, a master at the art of making a pivot, and there's a lot we can all learn from the professional and personal pivot's she's made over the years. In this episode, coach and devoted Swiftie Stephanie will walk through 4 key lessons from Taylor's pivots that anyone can use as they're making their own big life changes. Consider this one "Pivoting (Taylor's Version)".

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of the I'm the Problem podcast. I am your coach and host, Stephanie Finigan, and this episode feels sort of obvious. This podcast is called the I'm the Problem podcast. I am a Swifty through and through, and Taylor has a new album out. So this is not a surprise that I am going to jump on this opportunity to find a way to work Taylor Swift into my work as a coach.

There's a lot to be learned from her, but what we're going to focus on today is, of course, all of the pivots that Taylor has made and what we can all learn from Taylor's pivots. So this episode will be useful for you whether you're a Swiftie or not, but I certainly hope you are. So look, a lot has been written about Taylor Swift and a lot of podcasts have been recorded about Taylor Swift and a lot of people that have a lot more insight into the music industry, certainly than I do. I can't play a note on a piano. A lot's been said about Taylor over the years, but certainly in the last year or so, given her wildly successful tour and new album, all the re-records, the boyfriend, the whole thing. So it doesn't seem super original to talk about her right now. But again, what I really wanna focus on is all of the pivots that she has made and the lessons that can be yielded from those pivots that can help all of us. So anybody that's looking to make a big change, whether it's professional, whether it's personal, whether it's in your relationship, your health, your geographic location, your financial situation, your marriage, your friendships, whatever it is. There are a lot of lessons that can be learned from Dear Miss Swift.

Okay, so what I'm going to do is start with listing off a handful of interesting pivots that I think Taylor has made in her own life in the public eye. And again, I am not a music person. I am not speaking with any sort of level of education or sophistication about the music industry or any of the musical genres that she's a part of or anything to that effect. This is simply just observations from someone who's a fan and a life coach about what her public persona pivots have been.

So we'll start at the top. So she started off, of course, as a country singer and then made a pivot to very poppy music. So she's singing Tim McGraw and all of these country songs. And then she moves over to this very pop 1989 album and Shake It Off and Bad Blood and all of this. And then it's really kind of evolved past that. So she's no longer this young country phenom. And she's certainly not only thought of as someone who sings like the Shake It Off pop songs. She's now in this different world where she's still singing pop music, but it's definitely of a different flavor. If you've been listening at all to Folklore, Evermore, or the most recent album Tortured Poets, you know, you'll notice that the music is a lot more sophisticated and adult. It's very interesting to kind of watch this evolution and all of those different pivots that she has made and the type of music that she's singing.

The second pivot, we're going from kind of this wholesome good girl image to a more sophisticated grown up woman and she drops a lot of F-bombs in her music and Vigilante Shit has like a really cool chair dance that she does on stage on the Eras tour, which is definitely more like sexed up than her other, certainly her previous performances. So I think it's interesting to watch this pivot from sort of this like sweet, good girl country singer to a real grown up woman who's singing grown up songs, who's dressing like a grown up, who's dancing like a grown up woman. And that's very interesting because it's very hard for people to make that pivot from young star to an adult. So that's another pivot.

A third pivot I can think of with her is that she was sort of famously silent in terms of her opinions about politics or anything in the social, cultural, political realm at all. And there was a lot of pressure on her earlier in her career during election cycles because she really didn't speak up. Certainly during the first election between Clinton and Trump, did not speak up at all about her beliefs or who she was voting for. And now, fast forward, and she is, whether you agree with her or not, you know, she is proudly political and she is not afraid to speak out. And she's also not afraid to sort of acknowledge when she's not, doesn't know enough about something to speak out about it, which is a level of maturity that I wish other people had, certainly some that are running for president right now. But you know, you look at it and it's like, okay, this is a, this is a big pivot and a very deliberate pivot that was made from, I'm not going to say anything, to no, I'm going to try and educate myself and I'm going to think about what I believe in and what I see around me and then I'm going to speak on it and try to use my influence and my platform in a way that I think is positive. And so that's been a pivot.

Another pivot, we can't talk about Taylor and not talk about her love life in the last few, six, seven years with her relationship with Joe Alwyn. And they really did try and stay out of the press and stay out of the media. Fast forward to where she is now, and she's dating a very public persona in the adorable Travis Kelsey, and he is a very outgoing, not... He's not shy of the press and he's not shy of the media, he speaks openly about her, they seem to be living their relationship out in as much of the public eye as they want to, as opposed to really making an effort to be super quiet about it as she has done in the past. The pivot from, hey, I'm going to not be public with my relationship to, no, I'm going to live my life and if you guys want to take a look at it and cameras are there or whatever, there it is, but my boyfriend plays on a football team and the football team is on TV and I'm going to go watch my boyfriend play football. So that's another pivot.

And then finally, the last example I'll give is just as a songwriter, which I don't know a lot about because I'm certainly not a musical person, but as a writer, a songwriter, a storyteller, much of her work prior to really 2020 was autobiographical. And then you fast forward to the pandemic era albums, so Folklore, Evermore, and she comes out with albums that are actually about other people. And she's talked about being inspired by TV shows and movies and books and things like that. And she's just writing really fictional stories throughout those albums. They're not about her or other people in her life. They're actually just, they're fictional characters. And that's been a real interesting pivot in terms of how she creates her work, you know, and then it seems she's pivoted back to more of the autobiographical stuff now. But again, really interesting the way that she was so successful doing that autobiographical songwriting for so long, and then she made the pivot over to being a much more fictional storyteller in her songs. So whether you like her or not, you can't deny she's made a lot of pivots, and they've largely been really successful and certainly been interesting to watch, whether you're a big fan of her music or not.

So what can we, the average person, who is not a billionaire selling out Gillette Stadium, what can we learn from her and apply to our own lives for those of us that are looking to make our own pivots, whether again, they're personal, professional, whatever it is. So I have four key themes that I've pulled out from Taylor's Pivots that I think are helpful to all of us looking to make a pivot.

So the first lesson here is that some pivots, I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but some pivots are a natural part of growing up, but the pivoting doesn't need to end there. This is probably number one for me because this is largely what I have built pivot coaching about, which is this idea that, okay, yes, going from the good girl singing sweet little country songs to kind of this like vixen on stage singing vigilante shit. Some of that is just the difference between being a 15 year old girl and a 30 something year old woman. There will certainly always be pivots that happen as we grow and age and mature. But we have a tendency to think once we hit 30, 35, 40, we're kind of done. That's entirely what I've built pivot coaching to try and fight against is this idea that you just kind of wave the white flag and you're done when you're in your 30s or 40s and you've made your bed and now you lie in it. That's not true. And I think we can look at Taylor and say that just a couple years ago, we would never have imagined that she would be re-recording all of her albums or putting on this heiress tour, going back through her entire catalog of work or coming out with music like Tortured Poets Department, which is so different than the previous pop music she had been singing. So I think you kind of look at all of that and you say, oh, okay, it's a really interesting example and a great lesson of, yeah, there are pivots that are going to naturally happen in life, but also there's no reason in the world that pivots have to stop because you reach a certain age or a certain point. You can keep pivoting.

I'll also point to those of us that are Gen-Xers and beyond out there, that Madonna did something similar. I remember going to her reinvention tour in 2004, where she went through all of her different pivots, and she's continuing to make pivots now. Another musical example, I'm sure we can think of a million more if we stop and think about it, but thinking about the types of pivots that people can make in their 30s, 40s, and beyond, and especially for women. I love the idea of normalizing the fact that you can keep changing no matter what, just because you were a certain way, doesn't mean that's who you have to be in the future, regardless of what age you are. So I love that lesson, and that's the first one I'll give Taylor credit for, although I know others have done it too.

The second is just because people don't support your pivot, doesn't mean those people are right. So I say that, I remember watching the Miss Americana documentary on Netflix about Taylor Swift and her team of people had really said to her, your career's going to be over if you speak out against Donald Trump. But this is prior to her speaking out about anything regarding politics or any of her beliefs. And she said, no, I really feel like I need to. Her team was adamant that she not say anything and that she's going to completely alienate 50% of her audience and that she's going to sell half as many records and all of this other stuff. So she speaks out.

Fast forward now, the Eras Tour is one of, if not the highest grossing tour ever in the history of music. She's inarguably the most successful she's ever been at this moment by any measure. And so you look at that and you say, okay, all of those smart people that were experienced and well-meaning talking about her future with her, they weren't right. They did not want her to make the pivot. She did it anyway, and it worked out just fine.

And so you look at that you say all right there will be people around you even people very close to you That don't support the pivot that you want to make that's about them That's not about you if you can move forward with the thing that you know you need to do for you That's integrity and if you're moving in integrity you cannot go wrong. Other people get to have their opinions, let them have their opinions, and as I love to say, just let them be wrong about you. You just do what you need to do. And I love that lesson.

All right, so lesson number three, once you start making pivots, it becomes easier. It looked like that pivot from country to pop music, if you look at Taylor's albums, took a while. Her music kept getting more and more pop-ish, and then 1989 came out. But the music was tilting that way for a while, and people were sort of head-scratching a little bit and thinking, is this gonna work, and can she pull this off? Once she made that pivot, then you look at her album since then, and the way that she's handled herself in the press and other ways, and you look at it and you're like, oh, it actually seems like it's easier for her now. Now she can jump from making an album like Reputation to Lover to Folklore to Evermore and then over to Midnights, which is very different than Tortured Poets, and you bounce around. And it's like once she made the pivot once, it just becomes easier to do it. And that's true for all of us.

So you might be somebody who you've spent your whole life doing what everybody else wanted you to do, or your whole life living by the rules that were set out for you, or you spent your whole life doing something in a certain way and now you're like I want to do something differently and I just don't know and that's okay it's like riding a bike you've never made a big pivot before it's gonna feel awkward and clunky and you're probably gonna fall and scrape your knee and it's gonna be embarrassing but the more you do it the better you get at it and then you start doing it faster and faster and it gets easier and by the way once you start doing that the other people around you the naysayers just the volume gets turned down and as you make more and more pivots, it's amazing that that kind of becomes who you are and the people around you are like, oh, there she goes again, making another pivot as opposed to trying to stop you. So again, once you start doing it, like anything in life, it just becomes easier. And I love that lesson from Taylor.

And then finally, lesson number four that I found was you can make a pivot into the future while still embracing your past. And I think that's really important. A lot of times what we tend to do is look at things and think, okay, I've got to make this career change because this whole career that I've had to date as a, you know, as a doctor, as a as an executive, as a teacher, as a whatever, this was a waste of time. Or it's like I should have left ten years ago. I don't know why I waited this long. And we tend to get to a point where we want to make a pivot and we feel like in order to make a pivot, we have to kind of beat ourselves up or decide that what we did in the past was wrong. And that's not the case. You can sort of say, hey, being in that profession was great for me until it wasn't. It was great for me until now. And now I need to move on to something else because I've changed, circumstances have changed, things around me have changed. Because I choose to, just because I want to, whatever the reason is. So you don't have to shit on your past in order to change to something in the future. You don't have to beat yourself up about decisions in the past in order to justify a pivot you want to make in the future.

Where I see Taylor Swift having made that example is she's creating all this new music right now. We've got the Midnight's album, we have Tortured Poets, we have Eras Tour, all of this stuff going on. And also, she's re-releasing her old albums. If you don't know the story about why she's doing that, you don't care, and that's okay, right? So, but she's re-releasing all of her old albums as Taylor's version, and then going on the Eras tour as part of that. And it's really interesting to sort of say, look, like, you can keep moving to the future, like, she can keep making new albums in the future, Midnight's Tortured Poets, whatever, while also being on stage singing songs from her past. It doesn't mean that she's ashamed of that music or that music isn't good music. It just means it's not where she is now, but she can celebrate that music while putting out new music, right? She can celebrate the old music and the old version of herself while putting out new music with this version of herself that she is now. And I really like that lesson because you shouldn't have to feel like you have to pivot away from something. You could just be pivoting towards something new. Nothing needs to be wrong for you to make a pivot. Nothing needs to have gone wrong and nothing needs to be bad for you to make a pivot. You can just choose to make a pivot. You can love your past and choose to make a pivot anyway. You can love where you are right now and choose to pivot anyway.

All right, so those are four lessons that I have seen in terms of making pivots that I thought would be applicable to anybody that is interested in making a pivot right now. Thank you, Taylor Swift.