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Episode 13: Hate taking risks? You can still change careers  —  here’s how.

Thanks for listening to The Career Clarity Show! Today’s episode is about how to better understand the risks of making a career change — and then give yourself tools to manage the uncertainty and make your move. 

Got a big, scary dream you’re not making headway on? You’re about to find out why.

Take Ariel (a nautical-themed alias), an incredibly talented and well-paid federal employee who’s doing important work that she’s totally bored by. Her heart is in sustainable (sea)food systems, ensuring that labor is being protected and compensated fairly and that seafood farming is done responsibly.

She has a deep calling around this work but hasn’t been able to make much forward progress towards making it happen.

You might be in the same boat. Maybe you read the last article, but full-throttle commitment isn’t your issue. You want it, hard. You dream about it constantly. And yet…you aren’t taking any action.

It certainly isn’t for a lack of desire.

It isn’t because you’re lazy.

It’s actually because you’re terrified.

One of the most common things I see holding high performers back is their deeply held fear of perceived risks.

For Ariel, while she’s got her dream, she’s also got a cushy job that would look dreamy to most people.

Despite how good it looks on the outside, it just doesn’t feel as good on the inside.

But that’s the problem: there’s enough that looks good about it to prevent her from taking vulnerable action on her heart’s desire to change the seafood industry.

It’s almost as if — if there’s anything on the table at risk (salary, vacation time, promotions) — the answer to whether we’re willing to put skin in the game becomes an immediate, instinctual “no.”

(It’s not because what we have is so incredible. It’s because we trick ourselves into believing that unhappy is better than uncertain.)

If you need a risk-managed nudge towards your dreams, keep reading.

Here’s the most important thing for you to know: if you want to chase a dream role, you don’t have to make it there in one leap.

(And, trying to make a quantum leap instead of baby steps might actually kill your dream. You’ve heard the stories of people who quit their jobs to go full-time into entrepreneurship who crashed and burned out, right? We don’t want that to happen to you!)

Just like Aladdin has to hop across hot lava to escape the collapsing cave, you too can find some lilly pads to jump onto instead of trying to make your big career change in a single bound.

Adrian Klaphaak of A Path That Fits refers to this as the “evolution versus revolution” principle.

An evolution is a smaller, incremental shift — it’s what you need if only one of your 4 Pillars of Career Fulfillment are out of whack. But if you’ve got most of your Pillars all akimbo? You might want to revolutionize your career path instead.

Sometimes when you need a revolution, you want a series of evolutions to get you there.

If that strategy feels more risk-managed to you, ask yourself: how can you incrementally move yourself closer to the goal? How do you break off bite-sized chunks?

For one of my clients, a burned out attorney, getting out of the law profession by moving into a new job function and industry at the same time might be too far of a leap at once. Instead, he could become in-house counsel at an amazing company in his desired sector and work on pivoting from there. Or he can start transitioning to a new job function within a law firm to rack up the experience that will allow him to move into his dream industry.

It’s almost never that the dream isn’t available to you. It’s almost always that the leap you’re attempting is too large for your risk tolerance (or for your future employer’s). If you look like a completely inexperienced hire on paper…you make it tough for a future employer to confidently send you an offer letter.

Either way, if you want to uplevel your work, it’s critical to put some skin in the game.

So make the choice to keep the self-doubt gremlins at bay by putting (a little) skin in the game as soon as possible. That way, you’ll stop analysis paralysis from making you feel like you’re stuck in “fine” instead of “fabulous.”

Why? Because life’s too short to suffer in a crummy corporate job because of your fears.

 

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About the Author Lisa Lewis

Lisa is a career change coach helping individuals feeling stuck to find work that fits. She helps people clarify who they are, what they want most, and what a great job for them looks like so they can make their transition as easily as possible. Lisa completed coaching training in Jenny Blake’s Pivot Method, Danielle LaPorte’s Fire Starter Sessions, Kate Swoboda's Courageous Living Coaching Certification, and the World Coaches Institute. In addition to that, she apprenticed with the top career coaches in the country so she can do the best possible work with — and for — you. She's helped more than 500 individuals move into more fulfilling, yummy careers and would be honored to get to serve you next!

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