Get unstuck from your career box

What if...you won nearly every argument with friends and adults alike since you were in high school, killed it in debate tournaments through college and everyone you ever met told you, “You should REALLY be a lawyer!”. You work your butt off in law school and toil away in a firm to become partner. You get to the destination you’ve dreamed about since those feisty teen years and all you want to do is take the first flight out of this life into something more fulfilling.

What if...both of your parents were teachers and all of their friends were teachers and it seemed like they enjoyed their work and it was meaningful. And hello summer adventures! Becoming a teacher felt like an inevitability – even though you were a bit suspicious about why they were counting their days to retirement. You march forward into the teaching profession. It’s fine, but you’re already counting your days til retirement in year four.

What if...you’ve been doing the same damn job for ten years – with little bumps in title and pay to make you feel like you’re growing – but you fear this is the only role in the entire professional universe that you can do. And so you stay. You wonder, but not enough to take action.

These are the boxes we learn to lock ourselves within.

The safe paths.

The roles we know and can see.

They may be the only possibilities we’ve imagined for ourselves. Often others have told us these paths are part of our identities.

The only way out is owning our stuckness. Admitting same, same is not enough. Acknowledging you want more or different or in many cases – less.

It’s flexing your imagination (remember that part of you?) and dreaming up a hundred scenarios of what else this could look like without judging yourself for thinking any of them.

Then, you act.

This isn’t about manifesting or meditating or even hoping these things are possible.

It’s about test and learn. It’s experimenting and gathering the data to see if they’re possible.

Some of these potential paths will not be the right ones for you. Sometimes that bad news can take you down for a while – so expect that.

Yet – some of them will be right.

And finding that new right path isn’t even the most powerful part of this process.

It’s that you’ve learned how to extract yourself from your own rigidity and fear.

Because you’re human, you will find yourself within those boxes again and again and again.

Until you remember your ticket out.