How To Change Careers - Dealing With The Fear & Transitioning Smart

How To Change Careers -- How to deal with the difficult decision of switching careers, how to know when you're doing it right, and how to make the transition intelligently without getting burned.

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Hey, this is Leo for Actualized.org. In this quick self-help segment of about 10 minutes, I am going to give you some practical tips on how to change careers.

This is actually something that I've done. I can resonate with what you're probably thinking if you're thinking about changing careers.

It's a big, bold move. You've invested so much time in your current career. Maybe you've invested a decade or more. Maybe it's been just a few years.

I invested only one year and I was still feeling sad about having to change.

My story is that I was a video game designer and that was something that I wanted to be since I was a kid. When I ended up getting into that position, I found a good job as a game designer, but I wasn't feeling it at that job.

For a multitude of reasons that I can't go into detail about here because they were pretty complex, I found out that that job was not right for me. it It didn't suit my strengths or my values. It didn't give me the lifestyle that I wanted. I had to start my own business and I found that that's what was right for me.

I remember standing there and looking out the window in my apartment in Boston and thinking about what it would mean if I left this job. I knew that if I left that job, there was no going back to that industry anymore. There was no going back to that branch of my life.

I felt like I was at a crossroads in my life and I could go either one way or the other way. I wasn't quite sure which way to go and I knew that if I made the decision to transition out of game design, then my life would be different, for good or for bad, and I would have to grow.

I was taking a pretty big risk and I didn't know how it was going to play out, so I know where you're coming from. That's my main point.

As far as some practical tips for how to changes careers go, I think that in the end, what you have to do is get clear about what it is that you want out of life. Once you're clear about that, then that challenging life decision that I just talked about becomes much easier.

It's still challenging, but it becomes much easier because it takes away some of the uncertainty when you know what you want.

Number one, that means identifying your top 10 values. Figure out what are your top 10 values. I talk about that in some other videos that I have where I go into how to do a proper values identification at length.

You identify your top 10 values and then that allows you to use that as a rubric for making decisions against. Once you know your values, you can ask yourself, "If I go with the status quo and my current career, how well is that going to fulfill and align with my top values?"

Then you can measure them and see and rank them and put numbers to them and see what comes out. Then you can say, "How do I think Option B will align with my values?" Even though you can't be completely sure, you can have a pretty good guess. That will help you make the choice, in one way or another. That's important.

The other thing is thinking about your life purpose. What is it that you want to accomplish in your life? What impact do you want to have?

If you're thinking about changing careers, then you're probably doing it for one of just a few reasons.

Article continues at: actualized.org/articles/how-to-change-careers