Break Down The Walls Of Conventional Thinking For Career And Life Change
This weekend I found time to sit for a coffee with my partner to discuss her next step in life. She feels pretty burnt out with her career in mental health.
She has been involved in mental health for over 20 years and has pretty much seen everything more than once in that time.
She is frustrated with the organisation that she works in. She tells me stories that leave my jaw on the ground and repeating that behaviour like that would never have been allowed in corporate business.
Yet she has to face it every day; the negligence, the poor people skills of managers, & incompetent human resources.
If it was just a case of feeling fed up with doing the same thing for so long then she might feel like carrying on whilst she worked through what she wanted to do instead.
However she just feels like walking out most days of the week and struggles to get up in the morning even though she knows there are bills to pay.
She’s made a decision to get out of her career within a year. But she doesn’t know what to do. She enjoys working with people and developing them, although any sign of mental illness will keep her well away from customers.
So we began to talk this through and work out a list of things to consider for planning and preparing for a new career and most likely, self employment.
We began to discuss life coaching which both of us are pretty well qualified to do and would certainly enable her to get out and meet interesting people, and get paid for it too.
But as we started to talk about this I reflected on my own travels and how easy it is to find something safe that is close to what you have done before. For me, the Internet as been a part of my daily life for around fourteen years now.
I have lived and breathed it. So doing something on the Internet was safe for me. What I was going to do with it was another matter.
I thought about my partner. Working in mental health, managing teams of people helping others in the community with mental health.
Well, Life coaching isn’t anything like mental health, although it does have some similarities.
For instance, working and developing people: as a manager in mental health this was what she was doing all the time. Leading them, sorting their panics out and getting them all back on the road when they (regularly) acted like bunnies in headlights.
I then had an image flash into my mind. I saw my partner dancing to salsa or cuban music. I know she loves this style of music and thought to myself, why not take a step back here.
She could do anything she wanted, she could teach people dancing sala, she could organise cuban bands to come and tour, she could join a band, she could manage a band, she could photograph bands… the world, literally is her oyster.
She has good communication skills, works well with people (although at the first sign of mental health she would run a mile, which might not be a bad habit to start).
This is an opportunity to really think about what she really wanted to do with her life. Make as dramatic change as possible to realise something that she could be really passionate about for the rest of her life.
Indeed something that would keep her alive rather than make her life go grey. Moving to life coaching would be too easy. Its almost a career shift or slide rather than a career change.
We thought about that for a moment. How do you break down these barriers of thought and thinking to really understand what you want to do in life when you have for so many years been institutionalised by yourself and by your own culture and society.
What do you need to do to break away from any preconceived thinking about what can possibly be achieved.
For many of us the problem begins to be irrelevant because we need to work out something we can get going on pretty quickly so that we don’t stop the money coming in.
Some of us may have been fortunate to have pre-planned our move and have had the ability to save money to bridge the gap of a period that will for most provide some fluctuations in income as well.
However, irrespective of this, our next thought provided us with the route forward. You see, at a time of needing a change like this we put all our thinking into what is it that we can do instead. The answer is not so obvious.
The answer is to begin a process towards being open enough to understand what it is that will motivate you for the rest of your life.
It is also to be able to walk a path following a passion that does not have such a name or a career role, but is part of a way of life that allows your passion or passions to come out of you along that path as nature, or fate or whatever allows.
So, by questioning your routine thinking and asking yourself why is it that you think that way you will be opening yourself up to break down the barriers of conventional roles and thinking about a career as a job, more a way of life.
My partner decided that the first step she needed to take was to hook up with a psychotherapist to then go through a process of understanding herself without the constraints of thinking that had ruled her life as a western professional career person.
By working with someone to understand yourself in a more pure place, like before the complications that life had thrown at her such as a pressured marriage and parents that tended to expect perfection and were not happy with anything less, she would be able to understand what her core motivations were.
What could she feel passionate about and then learn to take something new on without the issues of being knocked down for trying something new and not instantly being an expert at it.
Her mind would be open to take on anything without worry from external issues, she could get to a pure way of thinking where the only decision was, “am I passionate about this?”
Almost on queue a man walked past happily chatting to himself stopping at people and saying odd incomprehensible things to them, then walking, almost hopping off into the distance.
Maybe we both had more in common with this man who seemed to have some sort of mental problem than those around us at this moment because we three were thinking outside the box in our own ways.
Filed under: Career Change, Life-Style Change
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