4 Reasons Why Professionals Bail On Their Dreams * Why Good Employees Quit Their Jobs *

Hello, everybody. Kathy Caprino here. There's a lot of different coaches, a lot of different change agents, a lot of different millions of people that help people. We all have our own way of looking at how do I intervene and change, help change someone's life. My way is this. I feel that when you are, I say this with every career coaching session, first session, I explained this. If you boil it down to the bare essence, when you are clear about who you are, what you have to offer and what you want, and when you are confident enough to get it, it usually goes very well. Life, it's when you're not clear about who you are, if you're valuable, what you have to offer, how you're special and how you want to use yourself in service of the world. And when you're not confident to go out and speak up and rise up and stand up for yourself in every way you need to in the business world, then things are going to fall down. So I love to intervene there. I think when we can help you understand what you're amazing at and then leverage that, it goes fantastically, like miraculously, if you can see where the energy and the confidence and the self esteem and the sense of worthiness and value are sucked out of you, where you can sense like there's a little crack and all the confidence and energy and vitality and hopefulness gets drained right out, that's a gap and that's what you want to close. So I've identified seven and I did this qualitatively. What I first do is look at all of the qualitative, anecdotal, case study information I have from working with thousands of people. And I've identified seven of those gaps. And I just, I think maybe what was it a week ago, two weeks ago, launched a survey to quantitatively test these seven gaps. And the survey responses so far are staggering, more than I ever expected. And I'll share that in a minute. Power gap, number six, losing sight of your most thrilling dream. Ding, ding, ding. That's the one we're talking about today. And amazingly. Well, I'll tell you the data on this fully in a second. But 24% of the people who've responded to my survey so far have this gap. 24% have losing sight of your thrilling dreams. So I want to talk all about that now. What do I mean by this? Losing sight of your thrilling dream? I don't need these yet. I think that for many of us, and this is not true of everyone, some people who went to college had no Dream didn't want to study what they, their parents made them study. I hear that a lot. Imagine a hearing from 50 year olds who their whole career trajectory was blown because their parents made them study engineering and they wanted to study marketing or communications or philosophy or whatever. Not to blame the parents. They were doing the best they can, I guess. But you really should listen to your children when they say I don't want this. I want to study something I want, I want to be passionate about. But I think most of us have an idea of what we want to do and be as we're turning 18, 19, 20, 21, we have an inkling of an idea. It's not fully formed. We might have the idea of the essence of it. I want to be in the arts. I want to use my ability to sing. I'm a writer. I want to in some way use writing. And then there's the form of it. What does that job look like? I think that if everyone understood the difference between essence versus form, our whole world would change. Parents would stop forcing their kids into work that they don't want to do. And was I mentioning last week about some comments I saw about Mark Cube that Mark Cuban said that really, really upset me. He basically said following your passion at work is the worst idea and you're never going to basically saying you're never going to get rich doing that. Follow. Instead he says the thing that you focus the most time on, the thing that you're good at. And I say bull, bull crap, 100% no, because. And not everybody's a billionaire like Mark Cuban, for goodness sake. But what I see is people become very good at skills they can't stand using. They pursue something that they think is going to make them money and they wake up at 40 or 50 and say I don't. I can't believe how much time I've wasted doing this work that I can't stand that means nothing to me. I became an accountant to make money. I became a CFO to make money. It's usually money that steers us away from. So I don't agree with him at all. Now I'm not a billionaire. So if you want to be a billionaire, follow Mark Cuban. But I help people and I'm doing work that makes me feel proud to be alive and impactful and helping people. And it's, and that's what we want for you, that your work fits you. What I see is there are four top reasons that people bail on their thrilling dream. And some people bail right out of the gate like I did. And you can read about that in my Forbes post, which I'm linking below, right out of the gate. I bailed literally three weeks after starting to apply for a job. Good girl. Kathy does the right thing, gets the first. Takes the first job she's hired for, you know, first job offer she gets. She doesn't think about what she really wants. She doesn't think about what she really deserves. She doesn't think about her amazing talents. I took a science marketing job when in fact I wanted to be a great fiction book editor. Well, from that first job, the trajectory went away that I really didn't want it to go. But why did I stay? Because I was good at it. Because I'm good at marketing, because I'm good at copywriting, because I can look at a spectra spectroscopy journal, a science journal, and I can understand the concepts enough to write great copy. That's a skill. But that's not what I wanted to do for a living. So I have lost sight of my thrilling dream. And I lost sight till age 41, till I finally snapped and said, I don't care what happens. I don't care what I have to give up. I need to love what I'm doing and I lead. I need to be proud of myself. If this is you, if you've lost sight, you had something you thought you might be interested in years ago, even though it wasn't fully fleshed fleshed out. None of our ideas are fully actuated when we have them or fully manifested. That's the process of doing them. What are the top four reasons people bail on their dreams? Number one, you start early on striving so hard for success. And let's not kid ourselves. In our culture, success means one thing. I mean, to the cultural definition, it means making a lot of money. You are striving so hard for success that you keep pushing for that same thing for years until you wake up and feel it's too late to change. So I need to say a few things. It really irks me when people say, gosh, he's very successful, and they mean he's rich. That isn't necessarily success. We know that. Don't you know? I do. A lot of rich people who are addicted to substances, who are miserable, who are depressed, who are suicidal, who aren't happy, who can't hold down a relationship. Money doesn't equal success. Money is awesome. I want a lot of money. You want a lot of money. But I want to earn money to do things that I care about. Not simply so I can say I'm successful. So the very first thing we have to look at is why do only millionaires? Why are they called successful and the rest of us aren't? I mean, it's nuts. There is this need, of course, to make consistent, consistent money to pay your bills, to have the lifestyle you want to live in, the home you want. Of course we want to do that. But do we want to do that at the expense of everything else? Have you ever spent time with people who are dying? They're not talking about how much money they made. I mean, at the end of your life, looking back, what do you want to say? What do you want to have said you've done and been and stood for? That's what I want you to answer here. Number two, why people. People lose sight of their thrilling dream. You didn't identify what you really wanted to learn in college, or you didn't honor what you know you did want to learn because your parents told you it was foolish, or your teacher or your guidance counselor. So right out of the gate, you're lost. What did you study in college? If you went to college, what did your parents tell you about what you studied? Did you love it? Did you want. Did you think that there was some kernel there of what you studied, that you could make a living? And are you making a living doing that? Or did you bail on it? Or did you do the essence versus the form thing? There was an essence there, but meaning the energy, the excitement, the passion. But you took the wrong form of it, like I did. Okay, let me write marketing copy. Yeah, I'm good at it, but I would rather poke my eye out with a stick than write scientific publishing marketing copy. Oh, number three is throughout your work trajectory, you received and internalized negative messages that you're not smart, capable, or valuable enough to pursue the thing that will thrill you. So many of my clients, and some of them are very high level, making a lot of money, you know, up to a million, over a million million in the bank. You wouldn't believe what their family members who, you know, their parents who were broken themselves, some of them alcoholics, some of them just, you know, not successful in any way and hurting. But they tell their kids, particularly the girls, oh, you're not smart enough to do that. I'm sorry, hon. One of my clients coming out in my book, she said she wanted to be a movie director. And her, I think both her parents said, oh, sorry, hon, you're not, you know, movie directors are smart. You're not Smart enough. That makes me so enraged. If you tell your kids you're not, they're not smart, I guarantee you they will grow up not thinking that they're thinking that they're not smart, not capable. It's very sad. You never want to say that to anyone you love. So I'd like you to think about over the years, what are the messages you got about yourself? Are you not valuable? There's another one. You know, only special people have that kind of life. Ridiculous. If you want an amazing life doing work that you love and making great money at it, why can't it be you? Why not? You just need the right kind of help and the right kind. All the other gaps have to be closed. You know how. You have to know how to speak about yourself. You have to get influential support. You have to stop being mistreated and told that you're not smart or worthy enough. You've got to close all your power gaps. Number four, top reason why professionals bail on their most thrilling dreams. You've bought into the cultural myth that pursuing your passions will inevitably make you go broke or be a terrible mistake. I mean, that's Mark Cuban. I read his comments. Boy, that angers me. It's like you're a billionaire. You're not a career coach. Don't give career coaching advice. Yes, pursuing a passion can make you go broke if you do it in an unwise way, in a stupid way, in a not well transitioned way, in a not well thought out way. If you don't know how to fund it, if you just say build it and they will come. Yes, I've done all that. And you know, I. When I became a therapist and left corporate life, I did that. I wanted so much to leave my corporate pain behind that I went and looked at the farthest thing I could get to. And it was incredible, the learning and the training. The thing is, I hadn't closed the other power gaps. So as I launched a business as a therapist with some other people, some of the same challenges emerged as my corporate life. And I said to myself, how is this possible? How am I having the same toxic situations, the same inability to speak up for myself, the same inability to ask questions for the prices that I wanted, the fees that I wanted. How is this possible? It's possible because I didn't close the power gaps. So you might run away and say, okay, I'm done. I'm done with being a marketing director. I am going to run a small business that, you know, a jewelry design business. If you haven't closed your power gaps, you're going to have the same problems. You're not going to make the right money. You're not going to fire the right people that need to be fired. You're not going to hire the right people. You need to hire you. You're going to get swept away by the entrepreneurial gurus who say, you've got to do these 20 things and pay me $20,000 a month to do them. You got to be powerful, you got to be confident, you got to be strong, you have to pivot. You have to say, okay, I started out, I'm a therapist, but I'm not enjoying this and this is not my life's work yet. You got to be strong enough to keep going, keep looking. What can I do to parlay all, everything I've learned From my past 40 years into work that is going to feel like finally I'm doing the work and having the creativity and the flexibility and the control and the influence that I want and making great money doing it? It's not always possible in this moment, like I always say. And maybe this sounds sexist, I hope not. I am a true feminist at heart. But if sometimes I'm working with a person, a woman who's pregnant, she's about to give birth in three months and she's like, I want to start my business in four months, I don't advise that. You're already birthing an entrepreneurial project, you're birthing your child. And so many first time moms and dads don't know what, what they're in for. So I always say, okay, that timing, I'm going to be a consultant here, that's probably too much. I would birth your child first and set the stage. So I always say, always plan. No, no. Do what you must to stay afloat, financially, emotionally, spiritually, behaviorally, but always, always plant the seeds for your future self right now, today. The second thing I always say is, okay, you want to chuck your whole corporate career, you want to chuck your job. What I'm going to ask you to do is stay for six months more and fix the problems you have right now. Go talk to your boss, go ask for a better job or a plum assignment. Say you want to spearhead that cause, start closing these power gaps now, now, now. And I promise you, when you've done that for six months or a year, you are going to be energetically at a much higher level so that you will be able to create what you really want and not be all power gapped. And broken down and crushed and demoralized. And you won't have the toxic people in your life. And you will know how to manage your money and you will know how to speak up to people, vendors, suppliers, contractors who are taking advantage of you got to do the work to have the thrilling dream happen. What I want to leave you with is take my survey below, close the power gap survey. Look at the one gap that is the most resonant, the most powerful, the one that hits you in the gut and take some action around that gap. If it is this one, I've lost sight of my thrilling dream. I want you to take action. You know, first of all, read my book. There's some exercises. Number one, what was the thrilling dream? And even if it's the only the essence of it that you have, be your own coach, be your own spiritual psychotherapist. Who do you want to be in the world? What's one step you can take to remember the essence of that dream? Go back to when you were 18 or 16 or 22 or what's the essence of it? Don't try to come up with the form yet because you're going to blow it. You're going to say, well, see, I love to. I was fascinated about all different kinds of alcohol. What am I going to do? Start a distillery? No, don't go to that place. Just think about the essence of it. And then start exploring. Do some passive income online. Passive income, passive research online. Do start talking to people. You know, what could I do? Exploring different alcohols, different wines, different distilleries, different vineyards. I mean, and then you're going to go through a process and there are five steps to changing your career to something you love. Step back for an empowered perspective of who you are, what you've done, what you want, what you're capable of. Number two is let go of the thinking patterns and behaviors that keep you stuck. Because there are some. If you're stuck, there are repeating patterns that are not random. Number three, say yes to your most compelling visions. And the final step is you've got to create it. Smart, specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely goals. And you need an accountability structure and you need somebody in your corner who's going to advise and mentor. You cannot do this stuff on your own. What is your thrilling dream? I hope, I hope, I hope this spurs some ideas. What is it? And if you only have the essence, the core, the kernel of it, what is that? Share with me whatever you got in terms of. I think I had a thrilling dream, and I've let it go. And I promise you, there are ways to move forward to it. Thanks, everybody, for listening, and I will see you next time.