With the end of the year on the horizon, many of you are probably thinking about what the next step of your career will be: Should you ask for a promotion? Should you look for another job? Should you consider a career switch? Some of these questions may be harder to answer than they seem, so I sat down with Harvard professor Ethan Bernstein to talk about what motivates us, intrinsically, to take the next step in our careers—a key point in his new book Job Moves, out today. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Ethan, it sounds like at the crux of your book (and advice) is this idea that we should approach job interviews as if you’re also hiring the company as an employer. Why is that mindset switch so hard to do?

It’s a great question because, for more than two decades we’ve been saying it’s fabulous that we’re no longer in the world of picking different prototypes of a leader and instead are in a “chart your own path” type of leadership and self-development. But we, as academics, haven’t done a good enough job of explaining to people how they’re supposed to do that. People really didn’t get the idea of “hiring your next job.” That’s not because people didn’t understand that that’s what they’re doing. It’s just not helpful to frame it that way. We have to give people the process, the framework, the [inner, personal] data necessary to do so. If you say to somebody: “What do you wanna do next?” That’s really hard to answer. But if I tell you there are 30 pushes and pulls that we know typically drive a job move, which of these do you think are operating for you? Now, you have a menu, it’s easier. Without that data and process, I think people were lost and so were we.