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Are you ready to leave your corporate job? If so, how much time have you spent deciding what you will do next? How have you decided what you will do?
In this episode, I’m sharing why I believe starting with finding and being sure about your passion is the best approach to a career change. I’m also talking about how being playful with your passions, diving into learning and trying out different career options for size can set you up for success.
Why start with passion?
I get it. You finally make the decision to leave your job, to break free from your corporate career and go and do something with more meaning, more impact, or just something you actually enjoy for once. And you want to make it happen. Now it can be also very tempting to latch onto the first idea, because you're desperate to make the move or just plain excited about moving forward into a new life.
Maybe you've seen someone else leave and do something that's worked for them, or you've read about how a particular career or a business could be lucrative, or maybe you have a hobby that is something you enjoy doing and you think it could become something more. You may also have been thinking about that one day dream you've always fantasised making happen.
So you hear someone has done well being a coach or a photographer, opening up their own online store and you think, Hmm, maybe I can do the same. You think you found a gap in the market and can make a killing, and it doesn't matter that you don't really know much about the topic or that you're not even sure you'd like to work in that field.
You grab onto an idea and decide that is what you're doing and move on with your plans. Intent on making it. Particularly if you're a personality like me, which is action orientated and thrives when you have a goal. I hate being in that indecision state and just want to get into action. But I learned quite early in my career that leaping before looking really can waste time and energy in the long run.
The main things I learned were:
- To start with your passions, things you love that have meaning and purpose.
- What works for one person may not necessarily work for you;
- following the money, your lifestyle, something can bring you,is a recipe for unfulfillment;
- not to focus on one thing too early to take your time and have faith in the process.
- And when you've narrowed down your passions, play with them, research and explore.
PLAY, RESEARCH, EXPERIMENT, REPEAT
Yes, finding your passion is key and is the first thing you should consider. But the next most important step is getting absolutely clear and sure it's the right one, and what is the best way to harness it, to help you have the lifestyle and income that you want.
Playing with your passions means exactly that, playing with them, having fun with them. We sometimes put our hobbies last, dismissing them as not important or less important than everything else in our lives. If you have a hobby you've not been making time for. Then make it a goal to take some time out to do it. For example, if you have photography as a hobby, and you're thinking of turning that into a career before you even start thinking about monetising it, enjoy it, spend more time with it, indulge your passion for it, and simply delight in the time, spent doing what you love, let it grow and see how it blossoms.
Then if after putting more time and focus on it, you still have the same passion and love for it, your heart and soul is in it, only then start researching potential ways you can make money from it. When you do have one or two passions, hobbies, or things you love to do (whatever you want to call them) you can move on to the research phase.
Researching is time for you to learn the different ways you could use your passions or hobbies in a career. This is particularly important when you're multi-passionate, you may have many, many, many potential directions you could go in. So researching what will be best in a job or a business will help you make this decision.
Learn as much as you can, so you can make an informed choice. Taking the photography example again, you could specialise in something like being a portrait photographer or wedding photographer. You could have a blog about photography or write a book about photography. You could teach others particular techniques, freelance, or have a podcast or a YouTube channel or a mix of one or more of those.
Get into the detail, the nitty gritty, and only when you have a good grounding move on to experiments. Experimenting is when you take your potential new career out for a test run. It's where you check to see if it really is something you can do long-term. If you have a service-based idea, you can do this by getting work experience in that arena, shadowing people freelancing, practicing with friends and family. If you have a physical product based idea, then get in front of people, get feedback, see if there's an interest in it before you think about making them on a larger scale.
This will take time, so utilise the weekends, consider using some of your holidays, drop down to part-time or take a sabbatical. All the time you use to experiment with your new career is really well-spent.
Now I know this can seem like a lot that you just want to make a move and this is time consuming. Well, it can take as long or as short a time as you want, depending on how committed you are and how much time you have. But unless you could afford to take a leap and potentially find out later it was the wrong one, then really invest in this process.
Once you're as sure as you can be, you can push the speed button and make it all happen as fast as you want, with a hundred percent confidence it is the right decision and the right direction.
THE BOTTOM LINE IS….
Playing with your passions and hobbies, learning as much as you can about your potential paths and really investing in time to experiment will set you up for success and make the ride towards your ideal life far smoother.
This is THE most important part of the escape process. So learn from my mistakes and be clear up front about what you're getting into and whether it's really what you want.
