Real-life lessons I learned from changing my career
If you’re a regular reader of my blog, then you’ll know I’ve banged on quite a bit about the fact that I changed career from HR Manager to freelance writer. I did this after a great deal of soul searching, procrastinating and deliberating, before signing up with Careershifters’ Launch Pad course early last year.
As I signed up, I knew that something huge was going to happen that year with my career. I just had absolutely no idea whatsoever what that was going to be.
If anybody had told me that just over one year later, I’d be featured as one of the ‘Success Stories’ I’d read and chewed over on the Careershifters site before finally making the decision to do something, I’d never, ever have believed it.
So here’s my story, as told to and by Careershifters:
http://www.careershifters.org/success-stories/from-hr-to-writing
If you’ve read it thinking that you really need to do something but you don’t know what, then the first piece of advice I’d give you is simply, don’t be scared to be scared!
It’s so easy to read my own story back and think it was all quite easy (and it certainly reads like that in places), but it definitely wasn’t. Changing my career has been an often exhaustingly long, hair-raisingly expensive, devilishly difficult and core-shakingly terrifying process, and in fact it still is on certain days.
But if you’re ready, like I was then, even if you don’t know what you’re ready for, you’ll find a way through the lot of it. You’ll do that almost automatically, because there quite simply will be no other alternative. Your old career is already dead, and if you don’t do something, part of you will be, too.
(While all that might seem a tad dramatic, darling! …that was really how I felt, and by the way, if you don’t know whether or not you’re ready yet, then in my humble opinion: you’re not).
So if you’re feeling the way I was – take a deep breath, steel yourself…and then dive right into all the possibilities out there waiting for you. You’ve got nothing to lose but your old career – and who wants that, anyway?
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