How To Make The Right Career Change Decision
How do you know if you are making the right career change decision?
Or if you’ll even like the new career or business you are considering?
Video Transcript:
How do you know if you’re making the right decision?
How do you actually know if you’re making the right choice when it comes to your career change or to starting your own business?
I often get asked:
“Rikke, how do I even know if I’m gonna enjoy or like that new
career or how do I know if I’m gonna enjoy running my own business?”
“What if it’s gonna be even worse and I’m gonna hate it even more than the job
I’m trying to get away from now?”
If that sounds like you, then make sure you watch this video!
Because here is what I’ve noticed, a lot of the people who ask me especially that last question – “How do I even know if I’m gonna like it?”
They are smart, intelligent people who are right now in professions where they’re paid to think, analyse, and research their way through to answers.
The problem: When it comes to their career transition process, they decide to apply that very same mindset and they think that if they just think hard enough or over intellectualise hard enough, they will get the answers.
That is why they’re stuck.
It’s likely, also, why you’re stuck.
Because here is the deal:
When it comes to the really big questions in life – They are not (just) a purely intellectual exercise.
I’ve been a career transition advisor since 2005 and most of my clients are super smart people in professions where they are taught to do these very over analytical things.
What I’ve noticed is that overthinking, over analysing, and over researching tends to be the very way that those people sabotage their career transition or their own business efforts.
Just have a think right now whether that might be what you’re doing right now too…
Because here is what I know for sure having helped hundreds of people figure out what the right thing is for them:
When it comes to the big things in life, whether it’s falling in love, finding the right place to live, or finding the right job, career, or business for you, it is not just an intellectual exercise.
You need to get out of your head and start test-driving things in the real world !
Just like with love – You can’t think your way to whether you’re gonna fall in love with someone, whether you can love someone.
You need to take them on dates, you need to allow yourself the opportunity to fall in love with them.
It’s exactly the same thing when it comes to career transitions and starting your own business.
You need to start test-driving in the real world.
It is a full contact sport.
There’s a wonderful quote from the entrepreneur who started Tough Mudder, which is the endurance sports company where they test both mental and physical endurance.
He’s called Will Dean. He says:
“Entrepreneurs learn by doing – MBAs fail by overthinking.”
Now, whether you want to start a business or not is irrelevant.
But I will literally translate this quote into:
Whether you successfully discover whether a career or business is right for you depends on whether you’re willing to test it.
Or, if you don’t manage to change careers, start your own business
it’s very likely because end up just overthinking it.
Right?
We want get you to the stage where you get out of your head and you start getting freer life feedback.
How To Test-Drive
So how do you test-drive and how do you get feedback from the real world?
Here’s what I want you to do:
Don’t think of any career or business as fully fledged.
That’s where people normally shoot themselves in the foot, they’re like:
“Oh but there’s this big thing, fully fledged thing I’m thinking about transitioning into – How can I go from A to Z?”
No. That’s not how we do this.
Think about breaking it apart into individual ingredients, elements.
So any career or business is made out of a number of ingredients, pull out individual ingredients and then start test driving them.
Let me give you a couple of examples
from two clients I’m literally working with right now in my own business.
So I have a client and through working with me, we realised that he was
actually in the right field – He is an IT professional and actually he loves
using IT.
The problem was he did not enjoy a corporate environment and he was so tired of just using IT to make more money for rich companies
What he wants to do now is to use technology to solve real problems in the real world with a view to going back to his country to solve much bigger issues later on. So how the heck do you start figuring out whether you’re going to like any of that?
Especially if you’ve only ever worked in a corporate environment.
Now he is thinking about potentially working for a charity or a government organisation.
So we looked at:
How can you start test-driving the culture of these companies to see whether you are absolute going to hate it, or whether you’re going to like it?
This is how he did it:
He reached out to a couple of people on Twitter voluntarily, one charity, one government organisation and is offering just some very quick pro-bono work to solve some of the issues they have, a couple of markup products, things like that, to see if he’s even liking working with people from a charitable background or a government organisation.
That’s the way that he can test drive
the element that is – Will I like working in a very different company culture?
For a lot of corporate professionals, that’s something they definitely want to
test before jumping.
So can you volunteer, do some pro-bono work to get the feel for that kind of culture?
Another clients I’m currently advising originally wanted to start a massive wellness centre in central London for corporate professionals.
How the heck do you try something like that out, right?
But we broke it apart and one of the things I asked is:
Who’s your ideal client for the centre?
How can you start maybe doing a smaller version of the centre, so let’s say a three months programme that you take these people through to get some results and to see whether you actually like instructing people in these things, whether you like working with these women.
In that process of actually going through and test driving that route, she realised she does not actually want that big centre!
She would rather go into corporations and run these programmes and get fitness professionals to take care of the fitness components – That way she is purely focused on the mindset piece and on working with the organisations to help women in leadership.
She would not have realised that if she hadn’t started test driving!
Over to you:
Is there a piece you can pull out right now?
An ingredient or an element?
Can start doing a mini programme to test with your ideal clients?
Is there something you can start writing about?
Is there something you can start test-driving, volunteering for?
Can you learn a skill or do a programme?
What’s really, really important is this:
That you get out of your head and you do something that allows you to create something or to experience something that’s tangible.
That is really the litmus test for whether you truly are getting out of your head or not.
It’s probably involving other people, it’s something that’s being either published in the real world or you’re having the real life interaction.
That my friend is how you’re going to find out if you’re truly in love with this thing.
You’re going to have the full contact sport experience and either you’ll fall in love with it, or you realise it wasn’t the right thing.
Either way you will have the answer to the question we asked at the beginning of this video.
So go out there and get out of your head and start allowing yourself to fall in love.
It is out there for you, you just need to test drive it.