Top Three Must Haves when Working Through a Career Transition
One thing this life guarantees is that it will be full of transitions — small ones, large ones, daily ones, personal ones, work ones. There is no way to avoid them but you get to choose how you move through them. For a while, I believed that there were people who were good at change and then people who were not. People who gladly accepted a new beginning and those who go through those doors kicking and screaming. But what I know now is that it’s not that simple: we are not programmed at birth to be good or bad at change. Instead, we choose how we want to move through it — if we want to seek out help, if we want to avoid the reality, if we want to lay down in protest.
Four years ago, I remember feeling deeply unsatisfied at work and I called a dear friend while haphazardly throwing dinner together one night. After sharing everything that was going on she said, you know, I have heard recently from a number of women in the same boat. Would you like to meet them so we can all figure out what we want to do? I jumped at the chance. When we all gathered, I learned that these other brilliant women across the design, energy, technology, and education fields were also experiencing an awakening in their current professional situations. It didn’t matter that our work varied; we were all in a similar moment — restless and unsatisfied. We were not living the life we had dreamt about despite all of our massive success and we felt stuck. We were at the precipice of transition, and a big one at that. For me, I was facing a realization that I had been putting off for many years — feeling ready to transition out of the K-12 education industry and focus my energy on leadership development and coaching, the kind of work that just lit me up. So, in community with these women, I began a journey that 3-years later has resulted in a new career trajectory and unexpectedly, I became the co-founder of a small business.
This community of women was critical to my own transition and I know I would not have had the clarity and confidence to move forward in the way that I have had it not been for this circle of women. Here are my top 3 must-haves when working through a life transition:
Find your Transition Cheerleaders: These folks may not be your current closest pals. In my transition circle, I initially only knew one of the women. But through our common professional awakening, they became my weekly cheer squad and this momentum propelled me forward faster than I could have ever done alone.
Define your Personal Core Values: Take the time to reflect and write down your core values and post them somewhere you look everyday. Ask yourself, what do I want in this next stage of my life? How do I want to feel? What types of people do I want to surround myself with? My personal core values are to live a life of courage, adventure, freedom, joy, and harmony. Knowing your core values will help you to decipher your future opportunities and determine which ones are actually right for you.
Free your Mind: Allow yourself to untether from your previous identities, assumptions, and binary thinking. Spend time in reflection on what excites you, what you are curious about, what seems wild to you. By opening my mind during this major career transition, I became an entrepreneur for the first time, an identity I never knew could be mine. Now, not only do I have a successful corporate career in leadership development, I also own an apparel business with some of these amazing women. Wild, right?
