True Confessions: I Booty Called My Ex-Career
I used to be a college professor. No, really.
I’ve talked before about It was not only a job I loved, but it was my dream job that I had worked incredibly hard to get. While I've talked about what steps I took to find a new job to love, we need to talk about how fucking freaked out I was!
I was a Humanities Professor at several fantastic colleges here in the Bay Area. As I'm sure you know, education/academia is not a cash cow but I loooooved my job. Like REALLY loved it, so I scrimped, saved, worked weird little jobs in the cracks between classes to make ends meet but it all finally came to a head when my options were a) move across the country for a tenure track position and be struggling slightly less financially (only now in a place far from home) OR b) find a new career.
How did I feel about my options? Like I didn’t really have any.
I was devastated.
It was like a long-term, 'this is it forever' romantic relationship ending! It took me months of soul searching and not a few tears to get to a place where I could even acknowledge that there really were other doors. Wide open doors.
I held on to one or two night classes and took several jobs that I knew I would hate - which I looked at as a good thing because I was still trying to make teaching work and any other job would “just” be a day job that I could leave when I found a way to make teaching work.
It was like booty calling my ex-career
After 2 (yes TWO!) years of drunkenly texting my ex-career, I finally had the talk with myself that someone always has to have with you after a breakup. The “IT’S OVER MOVE ON” talk. The hard truth that your bestie gives you.
But unlike a ‘true’ breakup, nobody was telling me they ‘never really liked my career anyway.’ Nobody understood that I was grieving (forget bringing over ice cream to help me through it!)
After 'the talk' with myself I tried working with a few different career coaches in the hopes that they could magically tell me what the hell I should do with my life (it totally doesn’t work that way btw).
In the search for “The One” I took ALL the quizzes, filled out the workbooks, took the online workshops - in essence I online dated the shit out of my career.
I was convinced I’d be a sad, lonely, old career cat lady.
NOTHING seemed right and, man oh man, did I do some epic wallowing. Then, a coworker who had moved on to another company reached out. She knew I was miserable in my current relationship - uh, day job. I had jumped into yet another one that I knew I would hate out of self-pity or some such nonsense.
She wanted to introduce me to a new job. A new job that she knew I would rock. A job that played on all my strengths. A job where I got to teach people how to work together. Isn’t that always the way? A friend of a friend introduces you to the right thing?
Through this new gig, it became clear to me that I loved (and always had) helping people Find Their Thing and get the careers they were lusting after. The Thing that made them SO. FREAKING. STOKED.
It took another 2+ years for it to all come to fruition and it wasn't an easy or even a direct path but I now teach others how to find fulfillment in their own careers and there's no way I could be where I am without the heartbreak of having to give up being a professor.
I’m in love with my job in a whole new way and I can't imagine not being a coach.
Life’s funny that way huh?
Yours in ‘many careers in the sea’ goodness,
EBS
P.S. Want to know how to finally Find Your Thing? Sign up for Career Change With Confidence and finally get your career in order with my step by step system.
