708: Career Advice for Busy Professionals: How to Make a Career Change When You’re Exhausted and Have No Time

[00:00:00] Scott Anthony Barlow: By the time you finally have a minute to think about work that you actually want to be doing, you're already exhausted. You know, between 9 or 10 hours of your current job, you've got family that needs you the minute you walk through the door, and you've got a whole other set of obligations that really don't care how late you've already stayed up.

[00:00:17] There's no energy left for figuring out how you want your work life to look. So how do you actually make a career change when you have no time and energy to give?

[00:00:25] This is Happen To Your Career. Most people let their career happen to them, falling into jobs by accident, staying longer than they should, and wondering if this is really all there is.

[00:00:35] But a few people decide to stop settling and do something different. This podcast is for you, to take control, get intentional, and design your career to fit the life that you want to build. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow. Welcome to a special Q&A episode where we're tackling some of the questions that we get regularly, and the answers that even smart, talented people all over the world really struggle to figure out on their own.

[00:00:58] Joining me today is our executive producer, Micayla. And if you don't already know, she's behind the scenes making everything work, putting the story together, making sure that what we're trying to teach is what actually gets out. So if you've loved any of the past episodes, chances are she's had her hands on quite a few. Welcome to the front side, the camera side, Micayla.

[00:01:20] Micayla Robertson: Thank you so much, Scott. It's a pleasure to be here. Super excited about today's Q&A episode because many of our clients, they spend years trying to figure out their career, they're Googling at midnight, they're asking their friends- who basically are just as lost as they are.

[00:01:34] And so we really wanna hope that some of these questions that we ask today click with our audience. And so I just wanna dive in with one of the biggest questions that we've gotten this week, and I would love to get your take on this. The question is, "What can I do when I have limited time and energy to actually make a career change?"

[00:01:53] Scott Anthony Barlow: Yeah. I think in many ways this is the question that so many people not only get stuck upon, but really just keep coming back to over and over again. Not keep coming back to in terms of pondering the question, but keep coming back to in terms of, you know, "I go to my work, I experience my job. I know deep down that it's not something that I want to be doing forever. You know, maybe it was great at one point, however, now over time I've outgrown it, and also I have all these responsibilities."

[00:02:23] I think the really interesting thing here is the same person that is stuck in this cycle of, you know, trying to find time in order to make a change, trying to find the energy in order to make a change, is the same person often that feels quite a bit of responsibility to perform well in their job, responsibility to their team, responsibility to their family.

[00:02:43] And even if their ultimate goal is to leave the work, you know, do it zero hours out of the day and move on to something else, it feels really, really challenging to be able to make even a small amount of time and space to do even, you know, step one and step two for that work, that career change type of work.

[00:03:01] So what do you do when you're in that situation? And that's really what I hear you talking about. A couple of things that have been really successful as we have helped clients all over the world, you know, it doesn't necessarily matter whether in the United States or in other countries. This is a human problem. It's not necessarily a, "I have this situation problem."

[00:03:19] So thing number one, so much change happens in the margins. You know, I'll give you a couple of different examples here. One, literally from this morning, my wife and I have some really specific goals. We've been struggling to figure out where and how do we make the time to do this.

[00:03:35] We literally got up early this morning in order to have a conversation about some of our financial goals and what we're going to do about these pieces. So, turned out it was not enough time, but we were able to chunk out, you know, that first step and second step, and we could have said, "Oh my goodness, it's not the perfect amount of time. We're just not gonna do it at all."

[00:03:54] Was it really challenging? Yeah, it was. But we're now, you know, even one tiny step closer to being able to have agreement for ourselves about how we're going to move forward. Let me give you a client example. As I'm thinking about, and we've had a lot of people in this situation, but, yeah, somebody who might have their current job require 9 or 10 or 11 hours a day sometimes.

[00:04:16] That can be pretty extreme, but that can certainly be the case. Well, I'm thinking about one situation from a while back where Eric, he was engineering, you know, that was his role in the organization, and they had a lot of projects going on, and he was spending at least 10 hours a day, sometimes upwards of 11 plus.

[00:04:35] It was a lot. It really was. How do you navigate through that? Well, if we're going with in the margins, then, you know, one idea there was we literally worked with him to develop a conversation script so that he could talk to his leaders and, you know, get just a little bit of time away. And, what he was doing was, you know, taking his lunch break, and then that's where he was spending approximately one hour per day just moving things forward.

[00:05:03] You know, at first it was one hour per day that was reflective type of work, and later on it evolved into that's the time where he would take an interview. You know, that's the time where he would connect with, you know, somebody that he was curious about their role at another organization.

[00:05:20] Either way, like was it perfect? Absolutely not. There is no perfection. But that one single hour per day, he knew created the constraints of when he needed to get that done. So he's super productive during that hour because he knew how much it meant, and simultaneously, you know, he could have said, "You know what? It's probably unlikely that people are gonna be able to do interviews during this single hour, so I guess I just won't do it at all. It's too hard."

[00:05:43] He didn't do that, and miraculously was able to figure out, like how does he get all of these pieces to happen most of the time in this hour? And we got to some of those later stages. We found that, hey, we could take certain days off, and he could utilize those times in order to do longer stage interviews.

[00:06:02] It was all doable, but the real key was identifying how does he get started and start to make momentum forward? Okay, so this is not a perfect solution for everybody. Another way to think about this, instead of just finding time in the margins, is where do you do your best work?

[00:06:16] Now, for me, I don't know what it is for you, Micayla. I've actually never asked you this question, but what time of the day do you do your best work? Oh, no, we have had a little bit of conversation about this. But what time of the day would you say?

[00:06:26] Micayla Robertson: As you and the team knows, I do my best work between the hours of 12:00 AM and 4:00 AM. So when you get all of the messages in the middle of the night, just know, I promise you I sleep. It's just when I have the most energy to get things done.

[00:06:39] Scott Anthony Barlow: And by the way, this is why I don't have notifications on my phone at all, so that you can send me messages at any time of the night, and I'll get them when I get them, and it allows you to be able to do your work when you do your best work.

[00:06:50] But I think that that's really powerful. Not just the notifications part, but the... if you know that you do your best work at a certain time, how can we leverage that in order to get more done with very, very limited time? So again, in my case, I don't do that well at the 12:00 AM time. Like, I'm not getting anything done, right? And to each their own.

[00:07:09] But I do very good work in the early mornings. I've found that there's a certain percentage of the population that falls into these different categories. So first and foremost, focus on where you're doing the best work. If it happens to be in the morning, one of the things that we've heard over and over again is people feel like they're gifting themself this time and space, allow themselves to make progress on something that matters to them as, you know, the first thing in the morning. But also similar pieces too.

[00:07:36] If you do your best work, you know, late in the evening or, you know, after the kids have gone to bed or whatever it might be, then that still can feel much more like a gift where you're setting aside that space to work on the things that you need. So that in itself can make it more powerful in addition to leveraging time where you're already doing your best work.

[00:07:55] So I'd give some consideration to that. So overall, I would say in order to get this started, just ask yourself these two questions, "When do I do my best work?" "Where can I get work done in the margins overall?" It's not gonna be easy, but it does give you real actionable places to be able to get started.

[00:08:12] Micayla Robertson: Love this, and I hope that you listening were able to take something away from this, whether it be not doing your best work at 12:00 AM like myself, but utilizing the time that you do have, finding where you have the most energy throughout the day, and really just maximizing everything that you're already given in order to get what it is that you desire in life and work. Thank you so much, Scott, for answering those questions.

[00:08:34] Scott Anthony Barlow: If you loved this style of episode, I would encourage you to email me directly, Scott@happentoyourcareer.com. Put 'Question’ in the subject line, and you might just see your question on a future episode.

[00:08:45] By the way, if this episode helped you in any way, I would encourage you to share it with someone who's in the middle of figuring all of this out, somebody who needs to hear exactly this right now. That helps us be able to spread the word and get more people into work that fits them. I'm Scott Anthony Barlow. Adios. I'm out.