This year marks 10 years of me coaching!!!

And not only that…It’s also 10 years since my last career change!

For someone who changed jobs and industries (and sometimes countries) every 1 to 2 years, having the same occupation for a decade, feels pretty monumental!

I can’t help but reach for the cliche phrase:

If I can do it, you can too.

All the doubts you are having about whether you’ll find your dream job, I had too. 

I had the stop-starts, the going round in circles, living on job boards, boring my friends to death from talking about the same thing, sending off CVs and not hearing back, mentally balancing timelines, trying a new career only to realise it’s still not The One, months of being unemployed, eating into savings….

Many a dark night of the soul I faced the same niggling doubts:

Will I ever find a dream job? What if it just doesn’t exist for me and I’m being delusional? What if it’s too late? Am I being a spoilt and ungrateful brat by not ‘settling down and knuckling down’ in a job?

And yet, despite all those unpleasant thoughts crowding my mind, I still had one tiny glimmer of hope that I would one day find my dream job. One that would unlock my potential and help me create a life I could only have dreamed of.

And I’m proud to say, all that perseverance paid off and I created that life!

So that’s why, I say you can do it too!

To help you, I took some time out to reflect on what made the difference for me along the way.

10 lessons learnt from career changing my way to my dream job

1) Get off those job boards

That’s the wrong place to start to discover what you want. Look inside, not outside. Do the inner work first, and then go job-hunting. Otherwise, you’re making yourself fit into other people’s dreams, not your own. The square peg, round hole.

2) Dream jobs DO exist. Never. Stop. Believing.

I found my dream 9-5 job and then I left that to create my dream job. So you can find it both in full-time employment and self-employment.

Never give up hope, but always get clear on what it is you want because it does change year-to-year. In 2017, my dream work looked like a 9-5. I wanted the support and security that came with full-time work.

But then, after a while, my dream evolved and what felt dreamy was the freedom you get from self-employment. To help you work out what you want, you can start by doing a spot of….

3) Visualisation (works)

I visualised many a job that way!

How I did it was this: I’d ‘feel’ into what I wanted. So you don’t have to actually see the vision when you close your eyes, you can imagine elements of it or even the feel of the work and the environment.

For example, after working in luxury, I decided that I wanted my next job to have the following features:

• Be in the creative industries. I didn’t know which industry, I didn’t really mind, just anything creative.
• Light: after working in a basement office, I wanted to work somewhere higher up, with a view and daylight!
• Small and free of bureaucracy: I’d worked in a large company with lots of red tape and internal politics, so I felt what I wanted next was to be in a small start-up team full of ambitious people (with good senses of humour) and an open ‘let’s try it and see what happens’ attitude.
• Innovative: whatever the company was doing, I wanted it to feel like we were creating something that had never been done before.

As you can see, these are all external factors of the job: the location, structure, set-up and company focus. Whilst those elements contribute to happiness, they aren’t enough. You also need your work tasks to give you satisfaction. Feel into what it is you want to be doing at work.

For me, I didn’t mind too much. I wanted to be involved in events and travel because….fun. I also knew I was a good organiser so any role that worked on my strength was good, but I also needed growth: I wanted to learn.

In my vision, I could see me working closely with the CEO and being exposed to lots of leaders so I could extract leadership lessons through observation. You know, like a practical, on-the-job version of an MBA but better because it was a free version with ‘money-can’t-buy’ value.

What do you think happened after I got clear on my vision?

I only went and manifested it! Everything I wished for above came true:

• The office was a daylight filled one the 5th floor.
• The company was a super innovative start-up that was working on something that had never been done before. The team was small and made me laugh every day.
• I was an Executive Assistant and I sat in on board meetings with the CEOs of the BBC, Southbank, British Fashion Council, Tate Britain, Royal Academy of Arts as well as other leaders and entrepreneurs….basically the cream of the crop of leaders and I had a front row seat to their decision-making, their honed communication styles and their strategic minds. Exactly the ‘money-can’t-buy’ experience I envisioned!

But I’ve saved the best till last.

Remember how I didn’t know which creative area to work in? I just said ‘I want to work in the creative industries’?

Well, the job was at a company called…. The Creative Industries Federation!!!

Ha! The universe has a spectacular sense of humour.

It was perfect at the time – every creative endeavour under one roof.

But also it was a reminder that vague goals get you vague outcomes. The more specific you can get, the better.

4) Don’t listen to fear mongers

Every year is the worst year to change your job….so the fear mongers will tell you. I have now learnt to ignore nay sayers and fear stirrers – they’re projecting their fears onto you and calling it facts. But really, that’s their fiction. Your reality is yours to create.

I graduated in the recession when there were apparently ‘no jobs’. Yet I found a great paying one.

Back in the day, when part-time jobs weren’t really a thing and I was looking for a 4 day a week job, my friends told me they didn’t exist and I would never find one. And yet, I did.

5) Don’t do everything alone, work with experts

Of course if you don’t have a lot of spare cash, you have no choice but to figure things out for yourself. But as soon as you do have some money, save yourself time and angst and hire a professional to work with, or even join a membership (usually lower cost than working 1:1 with someone).

Not only is it more motivating and fun, but it’s such a shortcut to results! They tell you exactly what you need to pay attention to and what you can do without, saving you hours of internet-based learning and helping you make decisions faster. Coaching in particular also helps your overcome blocks, limiting beliefs and the dreaded inner critic. Don’t take my word for it, hear it from Oprah Winfrey: “Coaching helps you stop the crazy mind chatter in your head that tells you all the time that you’re not good enough.” (Forbes, 2022).

6) Bad hires and wrong choices are part of the journey

I’ve hired the wrong-fit therapist before, brought a course I realised I didn’t need, joined a membership I didn’t use, and hired a copywriter that cost a lot and didn’t get me the ROI I had hoped for. But every one of those delivered a necessary lesson to me. Just not in the way I expected it to come!

It happens. You don’t always know what you need until you take action.

But you need to take action to get that clarity. So err on the side of hiring, buying and investing, rather than delaying, over-thinking and under-acting.

7) New faces + new places = new ideas

If you’re stuck, novelty is the answer.

Change your room, your workplace, your environment , your routine.

Even reading a new genre of books or listening to a different type of podcast can give you the breakthrough moment you’ve been desperately trying to get.

But the best things to do is change to talk to people outside your normal social bubble.

8) Envy is a clue not a condition

If you’re jealous of anyone in your circle or in the media, don’t waste time despairing about how bad of a person you are for feeling this perfectly normal human emotion.

In fact, see envy as the first step in you getting to know your intuition.

I think we’re not all tuned into our inner guidance, but we are tuned in to our emotions. Especially the common big ones: anger, jealousy, lust etc. And so I think our inner guidance, the one that’s trying to get our attention and tell us which direction to go in in life, has given up on communicating to us in nudges and whispers, and is shouting at us through envy.

It’s saying ‘there’s a reason you’re envious of Jane it’s because you want that life or elements of that life for yourself, now go get it.’

I was always envious of anyone who was self-employed. I used to think be jealous of their freedom and tell myself I could never have it. My fate was to be a green eyed monster forever. But I had never actually tried to attain that life. When I did, I got it!

9) If you make networking fun, then you make it easy

I love meeting new people, but I wasn’t always so bold about approaching strangers. Back when I entered the world of work I was too shy and intimidated to go to after work drinks! And that was with people I knew!

It was a combination of my then boss and my dad that made me work on getting over my fear. I’m so glad I did work on it because I learnt that your network is one of the most valuable things you can have.

It’s where some of the most incredible opportunities, inspiration, support, information and collaboration lies. Not Google, not AI but people. Real life people.

All you need to do is make networking fun for you. That way you won’t dread it.

I always went to events that I thought were interesting and networked there, rather than those dry corporate ‘we’re here for business card exchange, not fun and laughs’ events. So that could have included talks, seminars, book launches, walks and talks, conferences, charity events.

So try different things, debrief afterwards, reflect on what you observed and experiment until it’s fun.

10) Aim higher than you think possible and don’t underestimate yourself

I was thinking about how I communicate this learning.

First, I wanted to write ‘don’t make moves solely based on your transferrable skills’, but it felt too practical for what I meant. Then I wrote: ‘believe in quantum leaps’ but then I thought it sounded like an Insta post from 2018. So I’ve gone for one in the middle, but here’s what I mean…

A lot of people who want to change careers focus on their transferrable skills as a means of getting into the new job.

Whilst that’s not a bad tactic, it does mean you may be making a side-ways move. A safe move. Which could sometimes be what your nervous system needs, especially after a job that caused you to burn out.

But, to get to your dream job, you need to believe in your potential, not your past.

My career change into coaching was a quantum leap.

I did not know how to sell or market myself, how to write copy or newsletters. I’d only worked 1:1 with people in a teaching English capacity (so yeah, technically that’s a transferrable skill, but teaching is different to coaching).

I’d never done my own taxes, never created a website, given a talk to an audience…basically anything you need to be a self-employed coach: I had done none of it before.

And yet here I am, 10 years later with all those skills and more under my belt!

If I never challenged myself like that, I’d never believe that I had it in me.

So aim high.

Believe in yourself and your dreams!

Let me know which one of the ten stuck with you.

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