S9E11: Strategizing Your Career Pivot with Natina Hill

At a career crossroads, by choice or by circumstance? Natina Hill, affectionately known as the Pivot Muse, joins Laura with a real strategic framework for making your next move, especially urgent in a moment when over 600,000 Black women have been economically impacted and AI is reshaping what our skills are worth. A serial entrepreneur, ed-tech founder, and self-described polymath, Natina is candid that she is one of the 600,000, having lost significant contract income to the DEI rollback. She and Laura walk through the pivot she teaches: start with the heart work of naming the grief and fear (because fear restricts movement), then move to the head work of taking honest inventory of your mastered skills, skill-stacking them into new roles, and using AI tools as your free personal strategist. It is a grounded, hopeful, practical roadmap for anyone who got the rug pulled out and wants to turn this season into a strategic one.

In this episode:

Why every strategic pivot starts with a mindset shift, and how to sit with the grief of a layoff before you try to move (heart work before head work)
The inventory-and-skill-stacking method: naming what you have mastered over your career, and what actually energizes you, then repurposing it into your next role
How to use AI as a free strategist to research how your industry is changing, translate your experience, and find the roles you are missing, plus how to protect your kids by learning it yourself

About Natina

Natina Marie Hill is affectionately known as the pivot muse, a perfect name to describe her life and career journey. She attributes her success to learning how to strategically navigate in and out of life’s most challenging and rewarding situations. She’s a Rochester, New York native and an Atlanta transplant since 2000.

Although she’s ventured down many paths, her career has been rooted in business and tech advocacy. Hill is the EdTech Founder of AI STEAM Lab and Future Hackathon™, innovation labs supported by Microsoft that advances AI literacy and fluency in underserved communities. With more than 25 years of experience and through her nonprofit organization, Hill Innovation Learning Labs Foundation, she is developing training and workforce development solutions to help individuals and organizations thrive in a digital world by confidently navigating emerging technologies and preparing for the future of work.

Hill is also a serial entrepreneur, speaker, and creative. She owns Hill Consulting & Strategy Firm, PenHaus Media, and melanin muse®, where she directs and produces everything from films, global travel journeys, to large conferences. Hill is proud to serve as an advisory board member for the Women Entrepreneurial Opportunity Project (WEOP).

Connect with Natina

Website: https://aisteamlab.com/

LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/natinamariehill/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/natina.marie

BWL Resources: