EP.13 - Season 1 Review: How to Make a Career Change
In this season’s final episode, we’ll review how my guests went about making career changes. How do you know when it’s time to change something in your career or try something new? Listen to find out the two main reasons my guests have made career changes. You’ll get a taste of each interview from this season and if any of these clips spark your interest, go back and listen to the full episode. Links are included below.
Transcription
Transcription created with DeScript.
Karen: I’m Karen Styles and this is the Intentional Career Podcast. I talk to all kinds of people who take all kinds of paths to work they love. I'm a career and life coach and owner of Flow +Fire coaching. If you’re ready to create your intentional career with the support of a coach, schedule a call with me. There’s a link in the show notes or go to intentionalcareer.co and click the blue “Schedule a Call” button.
Welcome to the Season 1 Review. This is the final episode of Season 1 of the Intentional Career Podcast. Thank you so much for being here. Over the season and through these interviews, I've noticed some themes and patterns that I wanted to highlight and share with you. I'm a person who notices patterns and it helps me as a coach and just as a human when I'm learning from people.
And in particular, I've noticed some patterns from the guests that I've had on this season and how they went about making changes in their careers. In sharing what I've noticed, I'm definitely going to jump around as I share clips from each of the interviews. It won't be in chronological order, but hopefully, you'll see the thematic connections.
When you're considering a career change, how do you know when it's time to change something in your career or to try something new?
What I heard from my guests in our conversations is that there were two things that spurred the desire for change. First, there were internal messages that told them things weren't quite right. And second, there were some external signals or invitations that they responded to. First, the desire to change can come from an internal place and inner voice, inner knowing, sometimes even from emotional turmoil.
In episode 3, Broadway Dreams to Business Coach, I spoke to Michelle Ward. She had always wanted to be an actress from the time she was a little girl. She knew that this is what she wanted to be when she grew up. She followed her dreams to New York City to pursue acting in theatre. And she spent a few years there in the performing arts, but then things started to change.
Michelle: Once I was in my mid to late twenties, I finally started listening to the voice that started off as very, very, very tiny in the back of my head. Very quiet that said, Michelle, you don't want to do this anymore. You don't want to do this anymore. You're not going to do this anymore. And I was just, shut up, shut up voice. What are you talking about? It was... such a huge part of my identity was being a musical theatre performer, pursuing acting that it just was so ingrained with who I was that it was like...Once I started questioning that it wasn't only, well, what do I do if I don't do this anymore?
But, who am I? It was that sort of existential... It felt like an existential crisis. And it took me probably a year to take that voice seriously. And it just kept getting louder and louder and louder.
Once I came to terms with that, there was a grieving period... feeling like you've lost your best friend and your right arm kind of at once. Um, and I said, okay, well, I'm not going to be pursuing acting anymore.
Karen: So go back and listen to episode 3, to hear the full story about Michelle's journey from letting go of her dreams of becoming an actress to becoming a business coach for creative female entrepreneurs and the owner of the 90 Day Business Launch.
Nisha Harichandran was also hearing an inner message. In episode 10, she told me about her successful career as an international lawyer, but inside, she always knew she wanted to be a writer.
Nisha: I really enjoyed my legal career. It took me to many countries. I practiced in India and then thereafter, I also joined in-house and worked as a lawyer there. But there was always this writer within me. Because anytime somebody asked, what is your dream job? What do you want to do? Like where do you want to go? Like, where do you see yourself if you didn't have this law degree?
And, I'm like, oh, I want to be a writer. This voice inside me was just nagging, really nagging, you know, like, are you really going to do this? Why do you keep saying these things if you're not going to do it?
Karen: So, if you haven't heard it already check out episode 10, From Lawyer to Writer with Nisha Harichandran. Nisha talks about her career in law, how her skills as a lawyer connected to her new writing career and the writing projects she's been working on. .
In episode 11, I spoke to Wanda Deschamps about her mid-life autism diagnosis and how that affected her life and career. Wanda mentioned that there was always something internal gnawing at her as she was growing up and throughout her career, even though she appeared to be successful.
Wanda: Outwardly speaking, I guess you could say that my career was linear and it was successful in the sense that I was in the charitable sector for 25 years. I guess I say successful because I did progress and because I did enter senior roles.
Now I use the word outward because inside, it was a very different story. I struggled. There was always something gnawing at me from elementary school through junior high, high school, university. It lessened. And there were ups and downs. I would say my sense of self developed around my late twenties and thirties. In fact, I say, if you ask some people who knew me around that time, they would say from the outside, looking in, Wanda and her husband had everything.
Karen: Wanda's inner knowing or gnawing as she described it, is what helped her ask her family physician for an assessment and that led to her being diagnosed with autism. She called her diagnosis, the missing piece that made everything else in her life. Makes sense. She has since started a consultancy, which is focused on increasing the participation of the neuro-diverse population in the workforce. She also regularly advocates for disabled and neurodiverse communities. Check out episode 11, How Learning I'm Autistic Changed My Career to hear the full interview with Wanda Deschamps.
Speaking of internal turmoil in episode 2, Kristine Miguel talks about her traditional career path in accounting and how her career progression actually led to some emotional turmoil.
Kristine: I kind of fell into the accounting path, mostly due to my love for math. All accountants, somehow we just fall into this career path and then we are told what to do, what the next position is what the pay is for that position. And we just follow. So accountants are very good rule followers.
So when you're in the path, like when you're in the assembly line, you basically get given, like they dangle a carrot stick in front of you, where they're like, this is the next promotion with this price tag. And you're essentially rewarded for your efforts and for showing up in terms of positions and money, which are all prestigious, they're all like things to aspire to. I'm not really talking negatively about those because it really does work. But many days I woke up and I was so unmotivated and I thought to myself, okay what am I working for here?
I still remember those days very vividly where I'm just like... I've cried to my husband and I'm like I don't want to go to work anymore. And it's so weird because once I was at work literally, no one could tell.
Karen: So to learn how Kristine took that turmoil in her traditional accounting career and started her own business. Listen to episode 2, Trading Traditional Accounting for Love with Christine Miguel.
In episode 8, I spoke to Teresa Wong. She's an experienced copywriter who always wanted to be a creative writer as well. After having three kids, her hopes for creative writing were all but gone. But a new creative idea came around in the form of a graphic narrative.
Teresa: When my youngest was one year old, so I got out of the craziness of having a baby again, a third baby. I finally sat down and thought, you know, there's a story I want to tell here, about having my first child and the depression that came with it and just all the confusion around being a new mother. And I thought, well, you know, there's a story there. I think I'd like to get it out of me. And then at the same time when I had kids, there was no time for writing, but I started to draw again. I'd always doodled as a kid but never thought that I was any good at it. And so I never pursued anything art-wise.
But you have a bunch of little toddlers running around, they like to draw and they like you to draw things for them. And so, that kind of was where I restarted my interest in drawing and trying to depict things in a cartoonish way.
And so those two things happened at the same time. I had a story to tell and also I liked drawing and wanted to maybe try my hand at doing a graphic narrative. And so, I sat down and did it I guess. Yeah, I had gone back to work after my maternity leave and on my lunch hours I wrote out the script or the words for Dear Scarlet, the story.
And then over the next few months, I bought a sketchbook and tried to sketch out my vision for it with the full intention of hiring or partnering with an illustrator, someone who could actually draw. And when I finished my first draft, I asked a friend who was an illustrator whether he would do this project with me. And I gave him the draft and he went away and a few days later we had lunch and he pushed the book back at me and said, "No, I'm not going to do this," and said, "You have to do it because this story is so vulnerable and so personal and it has to come from your own hand.”
Karen: To hear about Teresa's journey of publishing her graphic memoir, Dear Scarlet, and the creative projects she's had since then, listen to episode 8, Navigating a 9 to 5 and Publishing a Book with Teresa Wong.
While some guests had an internal voice they were following, there were others who responded to external opportunities. That's what happened with Hope Mirlis. She started out in the performing arts, but now performs weddings. I interviewed her in episode 7. After leaving a theatre company, she had founded in Atlanta, Hope decided to pursue further arts education.
Hope: So I started looking for MFA programs, masters of fine arts programs that were mid-career because I wasn't right out of college. And then I was brought out to the University of California Davis for their program, which was a super small program that I then got into and then decided to attend.
And then one of my classmates asked me to officiate her wedding out of the blue. She's like, hey, what are you doing on December 30th? She asked me this probably about two months prior.
And I was like, wait, what? No, no. And she was like, what do you mean? No. And I was like, well, why, why me? Like, why I don't understand. And she wore me down cause she, I kept like throwing all these roadblocks in her way. I was like, legally, I don't have this. I don't know what to do. I don't know how to do this.
And she's like, oh, we will figure it out. And I was like, oh, oh, you totally will. So I was able to get a permit from the county to perform one ceremony on one day. And we gathered on a beach in Sausalito, California and I performed my first ceremony. I realized that I had to take my ego out of it, that it wasn't about me. I really needed to step in there and be there for my friend in whatever way she needed me.
So after I performed that first ceremony, I was like, whoa, what is that? I was like, that is super freaking cool. It felt to me in a way, like this culmination of a lot of things that I've already done. I felt like I started stepping into a calling and I couldn't describe it. I don't think I would say those words at that time, but I was like, huh, that's cool. I'm good at that. And even the couple was like, we knew you were going to be good at it. We didn't know you were going to be that good at it.
Karen: So Hope originally said no to performing a wedding, but now she's a wedding officiant in New York City, go figure. There were other things she said no to before she said yes.
In this review of season 1, where we noticed patterns in career change, I'm pointing you to an episode where we also saw a pattern in behavior. Very meta, I know. Anyway, if you haven't heard it yet, check out episode 7, From Performing Arts to Performing Weddings with Hope Mirlis.
In episode 5, I interviewed KDC. She's a mindful relationship coach. And we talked about her multiple jobs and how she handles them all. From the beginning of her work-life, she always knew she wanted to teach and work with kids and started the traditional path of an education degree and teaching in the classroom. During that time, she was also dealing with addictions and the decision to get sober.
KDC: It felt normal to me to have more than one job. I don't know if it was because I'm a firstborn generation Filipino-Canadian. We're just like taught to work really hard and helping support and, you know, just living life.
And I just knew that I wanted to teach, but I wasn't sure what that would look like. Traditionally? Classroom. And I thought that would be the only way to go. And once I got to school and tried it, I'm like, nope, this is not for me.
And as I've been learning more about myself, like being true to myself is one of my most important things. And so I went through a lot of different jobs. But I just knew that if it didn't feel good for me, I wasn't going to do it. And so, I started finding what I loved, and there was a common thread.
It always involved children in some fashion and it was always to do with, I think because it was with children, teaching them and some, some just anything. And I feel like maybe because I was the youngest in my cousin group for a long time and an only child until we started taking in foster children.
I just wanted to have fun. I want to talk to kids. Maybe also because I'm a small human, so they're more my size than full-grown adults. And so I just kept looking for opportunities to do that.
I went to school. I finished. I taught and had my first... I was going to say midlife, but life crisis. Well, maybe like my second life crisis, after becoming sober. That was the first one for sure.
Yeah, I was realizing, okay, this isn't what I thought. This doesn't feel good. I don't want to teach what they're telling me to teach. I knew that I wasn't showing kindness to myself and it was because of my addictions for sure. And I was like, just at the beginning of my sobriety when all of this happened. So I was so confused and lost and I felt super alone. And so I started relying on mentors and outside sources because I knew that I couldn't keep going the way that I was by myself. And I knew that the people that were closest to me, yes, had my best interests at heart, but I needed more help in a way, you know? Like it wasn't just love and affection and acceptance from my family. Like I needed more than that, you know?
And so I needed to talk to people that had careers, that seemed interesting, even just interesting to me. And I started finding humans that I could talk to that have lived more life than me. Because I finally realized that I didn't know everything. And so that was when I started showing more kindness to myself. Just changing my mindset in that way that I don't have to do it alone and that's okay. And I can choose again. And that just felt so relieving. And so, yeah, I just started to find people.
Karen: Listen to the full interview in episode 5, Kindness Drives Career Change with KDC.
So for multiple jobs, we go to multi-passionate creatives, D'Ana Joi knew that a traditional career path wasn't for her. In episode 4, Joi discusses how she started sharing her multi-passionate creative interests on her blog, Joi Knows How, she explored a variety of different subjects rather than niching down and she paid attention to how people responded to what she was putting out in the world.
Joi: So as a multi-passionate, what I realized pretty early on was that there probably was not going to be a career that I could just fall into that felt super aligned and that I would need to carve out my own path and create my own way of doing things and allow that to be correct for me.
Then naturally what happened was I talked about a lot of different subjects and as I started to write about more kinds of self-development I noticed that those blog posts were getting the most traction.
And then when I specifically wrote a blog post called, "It's time to start celebrating multi-passionate creatives," that is when I realized this is what people want to hear from me. This is what people are resonating with. I still get emails about that blog post. People find it and feel for the first time that someone's actually acknowledging their experience. And so, that was kinda my green light to say, hmm, okay. How deep can I go into this subject?
But our desires are so intelligent. And if we can make space to listen to them and be more unapologetic about that, then we start to create business models that are authentic and genuine.
Karen: Listen to Joi’s story in episode4, Celebrating Multi-Passionate Creative Entrepreneurs with D'Ana Joi.
There you have it. The overarching theme of Season 1, the two ways that career change comes about either prompted by an inner knowing or as a response to external events.
Since this is the Season 1 Review, I also want to mention the four solo episodes I released as well. Episode 1, What is an Intentional Career Anyway? I share my definition and I do encourage you to come up with your own.
Episode 6, Metaphors Cars and Jobs, thinking about your work, using the metaphor of a car. If your career was a car, which one would it be?
And why Episode 9, 3 Steps to An Intentional Interview. So if you're planning, some kind of career change in the near future. This is a great one to support you in your interview preparation.
And finally, episode 12, Moving Forward With a Bridge Job. It's a live class I hosted earlier this year.
So that's it. Season 1 is in the bag. I'm curious, were there other patterns or themes that you noticed? If you've got insights that you want to share, feel free to send me an email at podcast@flowandfire.com.
Once again, thank you for being here for Season 1. If you haven't had a chance to listen to all the episodes, I hope this season review has shown you, which ones you might want to go back and check out.
Season 2 is coming soon and it's going to be quite different from Season 1, so stay tuned for Season 2 coming soon.
Thank you so much for listening. It means so much that you spend part of your day with me. If you enjoyed this episode go to Apple Podcasts and leave a 5-star review. It helps other people find the podcast, and my hope is that if more people find the Intentional Career Podcast, then more people can create their Intentional Careers.
If you’re ready to create your intentional career with the support of a coach, schedule a call with me. There’s a link in the show notes or you can go to intentionalcareer.co and click the blue “Schedule a Call” button in the top right corner.
Episodes are released every 2nd Wednesday, so I’ll see you in 2 weeks for more of the Intentional Career Podcast!
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