Posts filed under ‘Follow Your Bliss’
I want to follow my heart, but I have to pay my bills.
“I want to get back into fashion, my first love.” The voicemail from a potential client thrilled me. She obviously had a bold, heart-led plan for her next career move, and I hoped I’d be able to help her.
By the time we spoke the next day, she was in panic mode. Afraid the fashion market was not robust in her new city, she was thinking of pursuing hospitality instead. After all, her recent experience as an event planner would be an asset, and she was facing a hefty mortgage payment for her new dream house.
Fortunately, this was a case where she could have her cake and eat it too. I love those!
I suggested that it wasn’t an either/or choice. She could pursue both. If the job in hospitality worked out first, she could look for an opportunity in fashion from the powerful position of an employed person.
If you have a dream, it’s there for a reason. In the process of pursuing it, good will happen to you and through you. You might not get where you first envisioned going, but you’ll arrive right where you’re meant to be.
Have a dream you haven’t realized yet?
The best way to pursue it is directly correlated to your risk tolerance. I know I took a lot more risks when I was single than I do now that I have a husband and two kids. My dreams now look more like a slow and steady evolution as my career takes shape and I discover more and more about how to best help my clients by expressing my joy for writing, marketing, and cheerleading.
Ideas:
- If your dream and your work don’t seem to be in alignment, make them more so. There’s a great example in Career Distinction by William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson, about a sales manager whose first love was sports. He challenged his team to come up with the best sales presentation using sports as an analogy. Sales went through the roof and he was re-engaged with his “day job.”
- Start a business that’s related to your dream while keeping your current job. Once the business gets big enough, quit. That’s exactly how Movin’ On Up Resumes got off the ground. A good family friend and playwright, Evan Blake, was a paralegal for years until he was able to make a full-time living writing plays.
- Set up some informational interviews with people who are doing what you would love to do. You’ll get the chance to learn more about next steps and start the process of creating new opportunities.
- Check out www.vocationvacations.com. They can help you with information, set you up with a mentor, and give you a real-life taste of your dream.
You can be pragmatic and true to your authentic self. It takes courage, but most worthwhile things do.
How to Make Your Own Breaks: Use Chutzpah to Kill the Middleman
Today, I’m thinking about chutzpah. Just about everything I’ve accomplished has been the result of it. Chutzpah solves the old career catch-22: “How can I get experience if no one will give me a shot?”
You have to give yourself the shot.
- I backpacked alone across Thailand and India, meeting the love of my life who is now the father of my two children and a wonderful husband.
- I got representation for my first novel by pitching it to a famous poet whose wife was a budding literary agent. The chutzpah part here is that I was at their home giving them an estimate for relocating across the country.
- I landed the biggest sale ever for my employer, a residential moving company, by approaching commercial accounts—something I was clueless about until I immersed myself in the very different world of industrial transportation.
- I moved from transportation sales to driving an 18-wheel moving van across the country. I had to lie and tell the company financing my new truck that I had already a year of over-the-road experience. I also had to change companies because my employer told me that this intensely physical job, which also involved maneuvering a huge truck in small residential areas, was not one a woman could do well. At my new company I had the top safety record and the best customer service rating. I also got to spend two years being paid six figures to travel the country with my new husband.
- While driving truck, I hung out my shingle as a resume writer, building my business on my cell phone and via truck stop Wi-Fi connections. After two years, I went full time. I accepted the position of certification chair of the National Resume Writers’ Association, mentoring writers with much more experience than I had. Though I have no degree, I help people with MBAs and years of business experience to express themselves in writing.
Everyone I know who is successful has this kind of fake-it-till-you-make-it approach. And if you fake it, you’ll quickly come up to speed and be the real deal. If you are passionate enough to take a chance, you probably know more than you think. Perhaps it’s time to own that knowledge or special talent.
Though it’s been years since I moved to Los Angeles at the age of 20—another act of chutzpah—I still remember my tour of Universal Studios. The tour operator described how their relationship with Steven Spielberg began. He went on a tour just like the one I was enjoying, hopped off the tram, and set up shop in an empty office. By the time people realized he didn’t work there, they were so impressed that they let him stay.
Where could you apply a bit of hubris to make a leap in your career? To help you answer that question, I’d like to leave you with this quote from Seth Godin’s Poke the Box:
Imagine that the world had no middlemen, no publishers, no bosses, no HR folks, no one telling you what you couldn’t do.
If you lived in that world, what would you do?
Go. Do that.
