As much as you’re longing for a career change, and as much as the trends actually favor you, just contemplating a change is a shining invitation for four emotional stalkers who love nothing better than to play a nasty game of team tag at their own expense. When you unmask these bandits, even a little, they begin to lose their emotional charge, leaving you free to further explore opportunities to reinvent yourself.
Stalker #1: The devil you know. Imagine that he is heading to work. You are at the station, briefcase and newspaper in hand, waiting in a narrow sea of gray doubles to catch the 6:10 train. Or, imprisoned in his car, radio blaring, he drags himself down the road, mesmerized by the swinging bumpers up ahead.
You arrive in town, drink your daily coffee, rise quietly in a crowded elevator, and head to your office, drowsy before you even start your day. Job done, you reverse direction, back and forth, each day more effort than the one before.
After ten or twenty years, once the colorful work has faded. How good it feels to know the ropes though! How seductively easy it is to stay stuck in what you know!
To get out of your comfort zone, take advantage of the most inspiring personal benefit that your career change can bring you: a more intriguing and challenging job? Being your own boss? Or, perhaps it’s the luxury of having more personal time to pursue additional interests.
Mentally scan your list of friends and acquaintances who are satisfied with your work. Who has a work life you would like to have? Who is proving that hard work and a flourishing life are not mutually exclusive realities?
Stalker #2: Clueless in Seattle. If you have a passion for a particular job or specialized expertise that you intend to develop, Fortune smiles on you and tells you to keep going. Consider yourself lucky indeed! The rest of us face the thorny battle of believing that there is work for us that we can embrace with our logical brain and our heart brain. Two different animals, worlds apart! Intellectually, there are many options out there, but how do you make the visceral leap that one of these options is right for you?
This was my #1 dilemma in 1999. Objectively, I knew I had good skills that I could use. But emotionally I was not a believer. Since I didn’t know what THE job was, how was I supposed to believe it was possible? I would have given up right then and there, were it not for a friend who suggested that I was trying to achieve too much, too soon. He saw me desperate to “swing from tree to tree” and challenged my need to nail down exactly what I was going to do at work before I even started the change process.
“Finding out what to do for a living IS the process,” he explained. “Answers develop slowly, with diligent work.” He encouraged me to fully and methodically explore my talents and work preferences. And think with your heart. “It’s your heart,” she advised, “that allows you to jump.”
Stalker #3: The Slippery Slope: Money. Our desire for financial security screams in a deafening crescendo and sabotages our willingness to step forward even an inch. Big paychecks, bonuses, spending accounts, paid vacations, and health benefits—perks to stir our hearts and, at times, inflate our egos with a sense of status and independence. The green stuff pays our bills, educates our children, entertains us, and gives us the feeling that all is right with the world.
Because? Mortgage? Health insurance? All of these are completely valid problems. But as long as you’re still getting a paycheck, worrying about financial ruin is completely counterproductive. Spend your energy constructively, working the math deliberately and letting the results dictate your path, not your fear.
Once I “got” this wisdom, I scraped the budgets like an obsessed miser. The results weren’t ideal, but they weren’t devastating either. After cutting expenses and eliminating debt, my savings would sustain me for 11 months. I wanted a minimum of 24 months of cushion to cover a ramp-up period to get my coaching business off the ground. Closing the gap meant sitting still until next year’s bonus was paid, 10 months from now! This put my escape squarely in 20 months from start to finish, longer than I had anticipated, but at least I had a solid target on my gunsite. My departure had become a matter of “when” and not “if.”
Stalker #4: The Mush Factor. Lack of trust is the most subtle form of exit sabotage, but just as deadly as the three stalking friends of him. He crawls, marks and then evaporates like a soft mist. Just when you’re ready to take on the world, it strikes again, melting you into a pool of doubt about your ability to even come close to a career change.
When you feel vulnerable, think about the rewards you’ve gotten from your corporate career: sharp analytical skills, business acumen, process knowledge, leadership, and the strong technical background: law, accounting, finance, organization and human development, marketing, sales: the list is as long and rich as Rapunzel’s hair. These attributes fueled his corporate career; now they will do less for you.
That being said, perfect confidence all the time is also not realistic. Emotional wobbles go with the territory. To stabilize yourself, remember that your journey is one of choice, not strength. You control it from start to finish: the pace, how it unfolds and when. When the level of uncertainty feels too great, accept it. It will happen. When it does, collect the kidneys again. Work with your energy flow, not against it. Before you know it, you’ll have devised a financial plan and strategy that will fuel your confidence, not take your breath away.
Mastering your destiny means rolling up your sleeves and traversing a lot of rocky terrain. It means caging all four bullies into submission, once, twice, as many times as it takes to open up the space for thoughtful career change work. In fact, you know these stalkers well. Even thank them for their guidance, and remind them that you are the boss now, and that you are getting ready to make decisions about your future.
