295: The 5 Biggest Blunders Career Changers Make

What you want to understand here is before you leap, you need to take action to address what is making you so miserable. If you don't do that, you are going to wake up two years later in the new career and you're going to be having the same problems. Hello everyone, this is Kathy Caprino and welcome to my podcast, Finding Brave. I've created this show for everyone who longs to create something bold and brave in their life. To rise up, speak up and stand up for who it is they are and to reach their highest and biggest visions. Each week I'll be speaking with inspiring guests from all walks of business, leadership, entertainment, the creative arts and the entrepreneurial world. And they'll be sharing their intimate stories of Finding Brave and offer their best strategies for building your most rewarding, joyful and meaningful life, business and career. Hey folks, is it finally time to make a big change in your career? But you just can't. You can't figure out how to do it. It's time for help and time to invest in yourself and finally understand and shift what hasn't been working for you. Join me as I coach and guide you through powerful, proven steps that will unlock your fullest and happiest potential. I've worked with thousands of professionals across six continents and the results have been transformative for them for a limited time. Also, take advantage of my 10% discount for you. My amazing finding brave listeners save 10% off my one on one succession career and leadership breakthrough program and my most powerful you video training course that helps you close the seven most damaging power and confidence gaps that are in the way of your ultimate success and happiness. You can work with me in both of these programs for the comfort of your own home, at your own pace. Now's the time. Don't wait. Build the career you're ready for. Check out the show notes below for details and I can't wait to support you. Hello everybody. Kathy Caprino here. How are you? I'm really excited because I'm doing a solo podcast today. I haven't done one in quite some time because I've had so many amazing guests lined up. But I did want to take today's episode to talk about something that I think is so, so very important. And what we're talking about is the five biggest blunders career changers make. I have made all of these and I'm hearing from so many people and I think the pandemic has contributed to this who are in the middle of these blunders and they don't know what to do. They're very lost. And I want to tell you that these blunders are costly. They take a huge toll on your self esteem, on your confidence, on your hope for the future, on your energy level, on your belief that you can actually make this work and have a career that you want, or be the leader that you want and make the difference you want and make enough money. So these are serious blunders that I really want to tackle here. And stay tuned to the end, because I am going to be talking about five steps to take. When you want change, you have to take these steps. And if you don't, if you skip them or you go too fast through these steps, you will make one of these blunders. And the five steps aren't just about careers. They're about whenever you do want a change, take these steps. So there we go. We're going to be talking about that. But let's jump into these five biggest blunders that career changers make. The first is something I call the pendulum effect, which is a term I coined, but I think it's really apropos. And again, I've lived the pain of all of these. But the pendulum effect is basically staying too long in a career and getting broken down in it. And what do I mean by that? You're thwarted, you're passed over, you're sick, you're angry, you're resentful, you're exhausted and drained. And don't feel engaged, don't feel loyal to your organization. The list goes on. You stay too long in either a job or a career. And I call it the pendulum effect. Because what happens is when we stay that long, what we want to do is go like a pendulum swing to the opposite ends of the earth. And we want to chuck the baby out with the bathwater because there's a lot of pain in what we have done and what we're dealing with. So we want to go as far away as we can. So for me, for instance, I'll give you some examples. I was a corporate vp, as many of you know. And when I got laid off after 9 11, and it was so brutal and I felt betrayed in a lot of ways, and I was so fed up that it ended that way for me that I literally could not return to what I had been doing before. It wasn't possible. I really had a breakdown moment and then became a therapist. Now, I do want to point this out. Sometimes the pendulum effect will lead us to the opposite ends of the earth. And for me, being a marriage and family therapist was about as different as you could get from a corporate vp. What I found, however, was, and this is what happens. While it was an amazing move for me and I learned so much, the training was what was incredible. The actual living reality of being a therapist wasn't a good match for me. It didn't fit. So I was dealing with rape, incest, pedophilia, suicidality, drug addiction, and I think you might have heard this story. But a few years into being a therapist, I got a call from a client who said, I'm going to kill myself right now, going to wrap my car around a tree, and I will never forget that moment as long as I live. And I felt, number one, I am not equipped to help this person. I'm afraid that I'm not equipped because I was really kind of new. And secondly, if I'm brutally honest, I didn't want that kind of darkness to be what my career was dealing with. And, you know, I snapped out of that thought, and we did get her help, and she did much better in the future. But what happened for me, and I wonder if this resonates for any of you, because I had shucked the old career and then spent money getting a master's and being a therapist, the idea that that wasn't right was again, another career that wasn't right was absolutely devastating. And I waited too long to make a change in that career, too. And to end that story, what I found is coaching, which is a beautiful mix of being of service to people, helping people, but not in the way a therapist does. So what I want to talk about here is why we do that pendulum effect thing. And again, it's because we've stayed so long in something that we're almost, I call it, we have an allergic reaction to it. I hate marketing. I hate hr. I hate finance. I hear this constantly in the work that I'm doing, the courses in, the private coaching. So what you want to understand here is before you leap, you need to take action to address what is making you so miserable. If you don't do that, you are going to wake up two years later in the new career, and you're going to be having the same problems. So for me, for instance, some of what I hated about my corporate life all of a sudden started emerging as I launched a private practice with a group of people in therapy. And I thought, how is this possible? I did everything differently. How can I be still having the same issues, the same problems, boundary problems, not being able to speak up for myself, attracting Narcissists. How is this possible? It's possible because I didn't change the one thing that needed to be changed myself. So before you leap, do the work to better your situation. I don't mean forever. I mean, don't leap for two months. So I'm going to give you another example with a client. She came to coaching and said, I absolutely can't stand my job. I want out of it. And when we dug in deep, she couldn't stand her boss. And I said, what do you hate about your boss? And she said, I think she's incompetent and I could do her job. So we got talking, we dug deep into that relationship. But I made it clear to her that your boss knows you feel that, right? Everything is energy. Even if you smile and say you're great, if your energy is that you think this person's incompetent, they feel it. So this individual was not supportive of my client. Why would she be? We don't support people who we think are a threat to us, who we think they believe I'm incompetent and they want my job. So I said, I want you to spend a little time putting yourself in your boss's shoes. She knows you feel this way. Is there a way you can repair this relationship? Is there a way you can not be her enemy? Is there a way you can actually support her? I want to tell you, within four months, things changed so much for my client that she later stayed and she later got a promotion, and she really repaired that relationship. So before you leap, before you quit now, if you're getting abused in any way or there's unfair treatment. Yes. Go to a lawyer. Figure out what's best to do. We don't need to stay being mistreated, but think about how you can fix, strengthen, change what is broken now before you leave. And I promise you, what that's going to do is allow you to be a stronger, energetic match to the better thing to what you want. But you have to do the work on yourself first. Okay? Biggest blunder number two, not developing a sound financial plan that's going to support your transition. So once again, my huge mistakes to look at, I said, that's it. I never want to be a corporate VP or work in corporate life again. Let me be a therapist. Okay, great. So that was two years of a master's. Then I launch a practice, Then I became a coach. There was more training involved than, you know, developing a practice or a consulting business. It takes time. And this is what a Lot of people who come to me who want to be coaches or have chucked their career, for instance, and said, I want to be a coach and got a little training, and they come and they say, I'm losing everything, I'm losing my shirt, I'm not making enough money at all. So that's not uncommon. So what you really need to do is before you make that leap, before you make a huge transition and commit to it, you have to look at the money, you have to understand, and I would definitely go to an outside financial consultant for this, someone who understands the field you want to move into and what it's going to cost and work with you on a financial plan. So the idea that build it and they will come, that is not a business strategy. Right. That can be very dangerous. I do believe we have to have hope and self trust and belief that we can make this work. But the strategy of I'll just throw it out there and then I'm going to replace my $75,000 corporate income, that can be a disaster. That can really be a big mistake. So what you want to do is make sure you have a financial transition plan that either you're going to have a side hustle while you're doing this new thing or you're going to draw on. And again, we want to do it in a smart way. That's why you need financial consulting help. But maybe you're going to draw on Maybe even your 401k or your savings. And we only want to do that when it makes sense. Right? But what I don't want you to do is what I'm seeing a lot of people, they're desperate. The great resignation is here. People are saying, I've had it, I'm quitting, I can't do this anymore. But they don't have a financial plan for that. Okay? So definitely take a good long, hard look and don't be in denial about what you need to earn. A lot of people, I'll say, okay, what do you need to earn every month? They can't answer that question. You must answer that question. What is it? Do I need? Come in every month to pay my bills and have a little extra and then you build a plan around that. The third biggest blunder career changers make is, I call it glomming onto the wrong form of work. So what does this mean? When people want to make a change, they often look at another field or another role and they project some assumptions onto that, but they don't have knowledge about it. So here's an example, someone might say, I'm a financial consultant right now, or an HR person, or a digital marketing person, or a translator. And I'm so fed up with it. But I've done a little teaching and I think I would love to be a teacher. What often happens, however, is they've done teaching or whatever this is, and they've done it in kind of an isolated way. And the way they've done it doesn't mean they want to really embrace the professional identity of that. So another example, I am a teacher and I give courses, but there's a certain way I like to teach and I don't want the constraints, for instance, of let's say being a classroom teacher. And there's a certain population I want to teach. It's people who are mid to high level professionals who can afford coming to work with me, who are ready for change, who are opened to new strategies. It's not everybody, right? So I remember teaching one master level course at NYU in New York University. And while I was so grateful for the opportunity, what I did see is there's certain parameters around teaching at a university that are very different from running your own courses with people who all want to be there. A lot of people tick off, yeah, I'll take that course because it fulfills my requirements, but I don't really want to be there. The long and the short of it is here you don't want to make just an assumption. I want to be a teacher, I want to be a coach, I want to be an author without understanding the living reality, the professional reality of that work. So one thing I'd have you do is feel free to download and I'll link to it in the show notes. My free career path assessments. 11 pages of questions I wish someone had asked me 30 years ago. And if I'd answered those questions honestly and deeply, I don't think I would have made a lot of the mistakes I made in my now 40 year career, 30 year corporate career. So what you want to look at are what are the skills and talents that I would love to use? And if you don't know, then you have to dig a little deeper and understand what are the talents I've used in the past. The career path assessment lets you do that. Every job I ever had, what I loved, what I hated, what I never want to do again, what I want to bring forward, and what were the most rewarding accomplishments, you need to get in touch with that information. What business outcomes do I want to support? So here's another really interesting thing. It's not enough that you like the functional tasks that you do, you know, accounting or graphic design. You're not going to be happy in your career if you're working for an organization where number one, you don't respect the leadership and number two, you don't like the outcomes that that company is putting for. And I had this again in my last job. I felt like a lot of what they were doing was unethical in the way they were marketing things in the sweepstakes they were offering. It felt wrong to me and it felt unethical. Well, if you are not behind the strategies and tactics and outcomes that your company is putting out, you're not going to be happy. Even if you're doing the functional work that you like. What kind of people do you want to work with? What kind of environments? What are the outcomes that you can support? What are the values? What are the kinds of leaders that you want to work for? So it's not just the functional work you're doing. You don't just want to glom on to. I think I want to get a job as a blah blah, blah. It's all of these components that you really want to look at and you want to find if you're going to work for someone else, you want to find a work environment, a culture that is going to support you and help you reach your highest goals. Right? So there's, I call it the essence of what you want and then the right form of it. The essence is the energy of it, the values, the outcomes, who you can be doing that work. Then you find the right form of that that fits the essence. Okay, number four, biggest blunder is not digging deep enough. So oh, there's so many examples of this. You know, even if I talk about marriage and family therapy again, the training was life changing. And I feel so very blessed to have had that training because I use that training every single minute of the day in every writing piece I do, in every course I teach. But there was something I should have dug deeper about which is am I going to like what it really means in my daily life and all of the parameters around that career. Is it going to work? For instance, I find now a lot of therapists don't agree with me or are fine with this dimension. But I always wanted, especially because I had young kids at the time when I was making this decision. Now they're 24 and 27. But I wanted a well boundaried career life, meaning I didn't want calls at 4 in the morning there's an urgent thing. I didn't want to be in a career where the boss would say actually we've got to move you to Phoenix and you got to go within the next two months. I wanted control over my time, which I never could get as a vice president. And I wanted to be very well boundaried that I can say no and I can say yes to what I want and what I don't want. And if I'm going away for a week on vacation, I have a well boundaried situation. Well, I didn't dig deep enough to understand, can I have that? As a therapist and I spent about five years in the therapeutic world. I never found that I could have the boundaries I wanted. I didn't dig deep enough to understand all of the parameters of that field and that role. Another thing again is I had someone, a client in TV production and she said, I'd like to teach English. I'd really like to just shuck all this. I don't want anything to do with TV production and I want to teach. Now what's interesting is if I look at your career path assessment and people will say in the end it says, what are the top 20 things you've considered doing? A lot of what's in there. There's no clue or hint of a passion for that thing in anything they've written. That's always a red flag. Let's say they've never written a thing in their life, right? Never written a blog, never written an article. And then they say, I want to be a bestselling author. Well, you can't be a bestselling author if you don't like to write. And if you don't write, if you're not writing a word, it's very hard to be a bestselling author. Right. So I will often look at. Now what is making you say that? Let's dig deeper. What is the why beneath what you say you want? And often the why has nothing to do with that functional activity. It has to do with, you know, let's say being a best selling author. I want recognition finally, I want to be valued. Well, you can get that a lot of different ways than trying to write a book, right? Or this TV production person saying, I want to teach English. Why do you want to teach English? So sometimes they'll say, I have a lot to offer and I want to teach people who English is their second language and this means a lot to me. Well, that may be incredibly true, but that may not Be the full time profession you want. Maybe you want to volunteer or teach as an adjunct in the community college. So a lot of people will just make an assumption because I like this field and I've done a little of it. I want to make a full time change to it. You've got to dig deep to look at what do I want in a career, Will it make the money I want? Will the full time profession of it be what I want? Or is this a hobby? So a lot of you have heard that I'm a singer on the side and I was married to a very top jazz percussionist who has wrapped his identity around music. I realized early on, even when I was considering college, I never considered going to music school, which is kind of interesting because people thought I should. And that would make sense because I was a performer and a singer. I think I knew early on I didn't want to make my living as a singer. And I've done a ton of singing at some high levels, been in a lot of gigs and done Carnegie hall things with large groups. Sung on a single with Liza Minnelli and a small group backing her up, Sony Recording Studios. That was an amazing experience. But I didn't want to do it as a profession where I'm negotiating money for it. I sense that I didn't want that. So what you really want to look at is what do I want in my life? What do I want as a hobby? So for me, singing and tennis are really important. If I'm not doing those two things, I'm not really happy. Music enriches my life in huge ways. But what you want as a hobby is not the same as what you want to do for a profession generating income. And also a lot of people have a mosaic where they do three different things for money. So these are things you really have to figure out by digging deep and answering the questions. What are my longings? How do I want to use my time? What are my non negotiables? Do you need to have time boundaries like I did that I want to be in control of where I live and how I live and how I spend my time and who I say yes to and who I say no to. Okay, so you've got to do a little more digging before you glom on to what you think the next direction is. Again, take my free career path assessments linked to and really spend time with yourself about what do you think a meaningful career is and what do you want to spend your time outside the career doing? Okay. And finally, the fifth Biggest blunder is giving up too quickly. You know, one of the challenges of social media, I think that has been incredibly destructive is that when you're on Instagram, you're on TikTok, you're on even LinkedIn or Facebook. What you're often seeing is a real varnished picture of people's lives. I mean, I'm rolling my eyes if you can't see it. There are so many people, I see their ads on Instagram and I've even read that when you're marketing something, show something aspirational. You standing in front of your boat or standing in front of your Caribbean hotel where you're spending a month so that people can think, wow, I want to aspire to that. Yeah. The problem is when you're seeing all that, half of it, if not more, is fake as can be. These people that are telling you follow me, follow my path, and you'll have, you'll make six figures, seven figures, a lot of them. It's pure nonsense and it's in fact manipulating you. And so what we want to avoid is this idea that we're going to get it instantly. There's been a lot written about what it really takes to be a master at something. 10,000 hours, 50,000 hours, five years as a blah, blah, blah. I think it's quite hard to quantify how long it takes to be masterful in something. But what I do see is people are not putting in the work. They're really giving up too quickly. And I'm sorry to say this if this sounds discouraging, but you're not going to have the success you want if you just throw in the towel when it gets hard. Everybody I know who's making great money in a career or a business that they've built, you're not seeing the hard stuff. Or often they are telling you the hard stuff, like I am, that it takes time, it takes money, it takes effort, it takes study if you want to change careers. For instance, when I was getting the master's in marriage and family therapy, that was not easy, that was hard work. And then I remember I had to, in my internship the first time I had to give therapy in front of a two way mirror with a team of people critiquing me. I truly thought I'm going to either pass out or have a heart attack, but I'm not going to get through this. I did get through it and I passed that program with distinction. But hard, hard. And often when we're pursuing the thing that we want most, it turns you inside and out. It makes you change, it makes you grow, it makes you look at your flaws. It makes you look at your gaps, your power gaps. This stuff isn't easy, but who said it was going to be? Right? What I'd ask you to think about is are you giving up too quickly? Right. I'll talk about new coaches. Really, it's a huge bugaboo for me and I posted something about it recently. People say I'm a coach and they haven't had any training at all. That's unconscionable. How do you say it? Unethical. So wrong. You can't be a coach for people if you have no training. So I see a lot of people say, well, I'll get a three week certificate. I've had people tell me this, I'll get a three week certificate. I don't need training. I was a corporate HR director. I'm sorry, a corporate HR director isn't a coach necessarily, isn't trained in the process of coaching. Okay, so there's a lot of studies that say that 80% of us around the world at least are not engaged in our current work. What that means is there's a lot of unhappy people who want to chuck it and they want to move fast. I don't blame you. Into something else. Well, I would say that to be successful it probably requires more time, more energy, probably a little more money, more commitment than you think. If you're really just trying to run away from a direction. So make sure that if you do change, you understand what it is. Compare yourself to the best of the best. If you want to be a coach or a consultant, what are the best doing? Because what's going to happen is in a lot of cases people are going to search on Google, best career coach for women, best financial consultant, best lawyer for blah blah, blah. And what they're going to go for are people who are in the top two to three pages of Google. And those people have probably been at it a long time and put out a lot of content and a lot of helpful stuff. Don't get discouraged by what I'm saying, but plan for a commitment to making a change and don't underestimate that it will take time and money and energy. Okay, so those are the five blunders. I always start this thinking, how will I ever talk for 30 minutes? And here we go. I almost did it. Yikes. But I want to leave you with something I hope is really helpful and it's a five step process to take. Go through These steps. Don't skip them, don't fly through them. Go through these steps if you want to make any kind of change whatsoever in your life. But this is particularly true with careers. The first is step back for an empowered perspective of who you are. I'm going to read them all five of them. Then I'm going to tell you a little about them. Step back for an empowered perspective of who you are. Number two is let go of the thinking patterns and behaviors that keep you stuck so important. Number three, say yes to your most compelling visions. Number four, explore it and try it on first. And finally, create it smart with specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound goals. And with an accountability partner. So let me go through these a little more. Step back for an empowered perspective. When we want change, most often we're moving away from something. And often that's because we've broken down in it. We feel, holy crow, I can't succeed, I can't make the money I want. I just got passed over for a promotion or someone 20 years my junior, just took my job or I've interviewed 20 times, 20 places and I don't move forward. That's the mindset we're coming from. I want to remind you, you are amazing. Every one of us is. Every one of us is like a thumbprint, absolutely special and unique. And you have talents and amalgam of gifts and abilities and passions that no one else has. But you have to have an empowered perspective of yourself to realize that. So get some outside help. Ask some people that love you, that have given you a recommendation on LinkedIn. Ask your friends. What do you think is special or unique? Ask an old boss who is a big fan. What do you think I bring to the table that other people don't? Get that empowered perspective before you try to move forward. Because if you're coming from a place of disempowerment, the whole process isn't going to go well. Number two, let go of the thinking patterns and behaviors that keep you stuck. One way to find what that is is look at the thing that repeats and repeats and repeats. No matter where I go, I have a boss who's awful. No matter where I go, I get passed over. I'm not listened to when I speak at a meeting or I'm pushed aside or whatever repeats in your life. You are co creating it. It's not random. If it were random, it wouldn't be repeating, it wouldn't be happening over and over. So you have to look at where am I attracting It? Where am I allowing it? Where are my boundaries? Not strong enough. Where is my confidence? Not strong enough. And let go of that. If you need help, there's coaches, there's therapeutic help. But you have to let go of those patterns that keep repeating because they're going to repeat in the next job, in the next job, in the next career. Number three is say yes to your most compelling visions. What I find fascinating is so many people, especially if they're not happy where they are, can't even articulate what is the vision. And I know this was me when I was broken down after corporate life. What do you mean, what vision? I'm 41 years old. I don't have a vision. I have no idea what I really want to do, but I know it's not this. Take some time. Do the career path assessment. Listen to a few more of my podcasts of inspiring people. Try to figure out who do you want to be in the world? What talents, what passions do you want to leverage? What outcomes? Do your best to say yes to that compelling vision as clearly as you can. It's okay you don't have it all fully baked, but try to bake it a little so you understand. Who do you really want to be when you're 90? Looking back, what do you want to have done and achieved and contributed? Okay, the fourth is explore it Smart. This is what I was talking about. Don't leap before you've tried something on. That means you're shadowing people doing this thing. You're interviewing people who have succeeded at it and people who have left it. So for instance, I interviewed a few therapists to make sure I was on the right track when I wanted to be one. Yeah, well, I only interviewed three who were making a ton of money and best selling authors. Well, that's not the majority of therapists. Don't be in denial and only look at the people succeeding. Look at the people who are struggling in it. People who aren't making enough money, who have to take insurance and don't want to as therapists, really explore it. Shadow people. Interview as many as you can. If you can do a little volunteer work where you're literally trying on the professional identity, that's how you're going to know. And what's going to happen is you're probably going to say, holy crowd. Half of that works, but the other half doesn't. I don't want this. I want this. And that's great. You're going to refine it and refine it and refine it. Okay, finally, create it smart. A big change in your life, a career change, even getting a stretch job, it doesn't just fall in your lap. We have to build a plan for it with specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound goals and with an accountability structure. If you want to change your career or launch a new program or launch a new business, you really need help in your corner. That could be your little board of advisors or somebody who's going to call you on your stuff, who's going to say, listen, I got to give you some thoughts. Who is really helping you and an accountability partner because the going gets rough sometimes. That's it. And sometimes we need someone to lift us up and say, come on, don't get discouraged. Yes, that was not what you saw coming, but look how far you've come. You need that in your corner. I hope you find this helpful. And don't forget you are an amazing individual with so many gifts and talents to share. The question is how to get on the path to sharing what you want to share, leveraging your talents in ways that are going to fit authentically who you really are and what you want. And I hope this helps. Thank you everybody and see you next time. Thanks so much for joining us today. And please don't forget to check out finding brave.org for more programs, resources and tips. And tune in next time for your weekly dose of Finding Brave.