Do What You Love for the Rest of Your Life A Practical Guide to Career Change and Personal Renewal

WHY NOT YOU? A job should not become a life sentence. Ronald L. Krannich We spend too much time at work not to be happy with the work we do. Ed. C, age 62 EE Dan's Story It's difficult to highlight the most challenging, difficult aspects of my career change because so many issues have been part of my decision. I left the corporate world because there was not enough flexibility to allow me to be more involved with my family. An extremely long commute and frequent travel had combined to convince me that I was literally losing my soulsome essential part of me and my life that was vital to who I am. So it was not just the fraying of the connections with my wife and daughter that prompted this leap of faith, but a fraying of something inside me. And I was no longer willing to simply accept the belief that "that is just the way life is." I saw no viable alternative but to start out on my own, on my own terms. The emotional side of this has been very difficult for methe self-doubt, at times the despair, the thinking I was crazy for making this move. Yet somehow I kept finding the courage to move forward and to do what I need to do to get there. I have never been so acutely aware of running up against my own personal shortcomings, and the fear that those shortcomings will do me in. And yet I have characteristics that I've used to compensate for some of those shortcomings, such as tenacity and resilience. And I have reached out to people like yourself who have been willing to help me. In some ways, this has been an exercise in trusting that the combination of my strengths and my shortcomings will balance out so that, on my own terms, I will succeed. Dan, age 43, married with a 4-year-old daughter, resigned from the human resources department of a Fortune 100 company in the fall of 1997. He started his own employee benefits consulting business in western New Jersey, and works out of his home. This is Dan's second major career change; at age 27 he left the ministry to enter the corporate world. You deserve it, you know. You deserve to be not stressed, frustrated, overworked, underappreciated, exhausted, exploited, and unfulfilled. You deserve more meaningful rewards for work than money. You deserve to be recognized as a vital human being, rather than treated as an expendable commodity. You deserve to succeed in a vocation that fills your soul, not survive in one that fills only your wallet. You deserve to feel better physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Your family deserves it as well. So . . . why not you? The only limit to the realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Franklin D. Roosevelt You can't steal second with your foot on first. Anonymous Dan's story is typical of those collected for this book collected from men and women who, like Dan and me, found that we could no longer remain in a career, no matter how financially rewarding, that didn't also reward our insides. Like Dan, most of us experienced the subtle, gradual fraying of family connections, the awareness of losing some essential part of ourselves, the self-doubt, the fears, the gnawing financial concerns. But we also felt that, despite the fear and anxiety, we had no choicethat we had to leave our physically, emotionally, and spiritually draining jobs. As Karen E., 46, remarked: "There must be more to life than this." Some of us went to work for another employer; some of us went into business for ourselves. Dan quipped, "I started my own business so that I knew at least one person who would hire me." Some of us had clarity about our new vocation; some of us only knew that we had to quit what we were doing.[read more]