The Biggest Challenge of my Career Change
A Career Change can be one of the most transformative experiences of your life and the transformation certainly brings a lot of challenges.
By looking back at my own story, I reflected on which was the biggest challenge for my own career change.
As you may have read in my latest two blog posts, I changed career direction early on. I started considering the change at 24 when I was in the middle of my Masters in Marketing and it happened two years later when I became self-employed as a life coach and yoga teacher.
It was a natural evolution for me because I changed and evolved and my values emerged very clearly in my first work experiences but that inner awareness was also incredibly scary and it brought lots of fears and challenges, both internal and external.
In particular 3 challenges came to mind that at the end all go back to a main inner fear I was experiencing.
In the different stages of change you’ll notice different difficulties emerging but when you look carefully they’re often the expression of the same fear disguised in different ways.
For me they were :
The challenge of sharing my idea and decision to change with my loved ones.
I’ve always been a people pleaser and I’ve often sacrificed my own truth in order not to shake another person’s boat. In other words I had such a big fear of judgement and rejection, especially from my family, that I was terrified about the idea of sharing what I wanted to do with my life after studying business for basically 8 years and with a traditional career planned out.
But over time my idea didn’t change and actually it was becoming more and more a reality so I couldn’t hide it anymore from them.
I would say that this was a major learning experience for me because probably for the first time in my life I did something “rebellious” and I stuck to it even without the validation of my loved ones and it opened the door to stepping into my own identity more and more that as a young Italian woman with a very protective family it’s not given for granted.
The challenge of jumping into the unknown for a less conventional job
When I decided that Life Coaching was the path I wanted to pursue I felt both excited and very naive. I didn’t know anyone doing the same job as most of my friends had studied business like me and were working in big corporations, banks and consulting. My tiny business plan seemed so silly sometimes and very airy-fairy.
I was honestly very shy sharing it at the beginning and I would downplay it as a small hobby of a sort and my lack of conviction was mirrored back to me because it made anybody else feel worried about me.
The biggest fear was that I was making a very bad decision and that it was obvious to anyone else but myself!
You know the feeling when there is an elephant in the middle of the room and you’re the only one not seeing it? That’s exactly how I felt.
And I thought that one day I would wake up realizing my huge mistake and feeling like a complete idiot, because there was obviously a reason why I was the only one pursuing a career like that right?
It was my deep self-doubt freaking out and trying to rationalize my decision which it’s completely normal when you’re jumping into the unknown because you don’t have any evidence from your past experiences that support your new choice. And my mind was feeling totally unsafe!
The challenge of stepping with both feet into my new career
I have to admit that the problem of finding “the thing” wasn’t the main one for me. When I discovered the personal development world online I felt a clear attraction and the opportunity of bringing together different passions of mine. Listening and encouraging people 1:1, writing and creating online , using the marketing I learned in a meaningful way and many others.
But owning it and stepping fully into this career was something else.
I stayed with one foot in my academic career still researching corporate jobs and the other foot into this new world for very long, a full year probably. The truth is that my heart had already done the step but my head wasn’t ready yet, so I had to catch up with my belief system to fully step with both feet into my decision.
I find the same thing happens with lots of clients, their heart has already leaped but it’s their head that needs to catch up and that’s where coaching come into place.
The biggest challenge of all was SELF-TRUST
Overall when I reflected on these 3 initial challenges I realized that they all come back to a deeper inner challenge that I struggled with during the whole time : trusting myself.
Honestly self-trust it’s something I stepped in more fully only this year. Trusting myself mean listening to my intuition AND believing in it and taking action accordingly.
I’ve always had a strong intuition and I can recall moments since my childhood where my inner voice was screaming to do something but I pushed it down because that idea sounded too naïve or out of my comfort zone to follow through with it. Also external validation was essential for any step of my path and I renounced to a lot of choices because of it.
As you can imagine having a strong inner voice and pushing it down is extremely frustrating and when I finally started to trust it more than I trusted other people, everything shifted and life became easier.
The difficulty of trusting yourself comes when your intuition asks you to do things which are not in line with your current reality or that would require you to disappoint people, take big actions and change your own usual behaviour to make them happen.
There is no magic trick to bypass the execution of your intuition, the only was is through the discomfort and as humans it requires a lot of strength but luckily there are certainly ways to support yourself during these phases like working with a coach, taking great care of yourself to manage your body to feel safe , regular mindset work to anchor into your new beliefs etc..
Finally I want to live you with an invitation to explore your own challenges :
What are the challenges emerging for you? And if you look a bit closer what is the deeper challenge that connects all of them?
Each time a new challenge comes up, ask yourself “Is it new? Or is it the same old challenge dressed up differently ?
I’d love to hear what’s coming up for you, share below the challenge that you’re facing right now ! We’re all in this together!
NEXT STEPS …
If this article resonated with you and you want to go further in discovering your purpose and find a career that give you joy and meaning it is possible! I coach women every week which are looking for the same thing . I invite you to learn more about my services and book a free discovery call to see if we’re a good fit.
The summer is a busy time for coaching as so many people are signing up to start in September with more clarity and a plan, so don’t hesitate to reach out , I cannot wait to hear from you!
