359: Career Change: 13 Steps to Career Change to Meaningful Work

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13 STEPS TO CHANGE YOUR CAREER WHEN YOUR GOAL IS MEANINGFUL WORK (THAT PAYS WELL)

What if your goal isn’t just to make a career change? What if you want to spend your 8-10 hours a day doing something meaningful and that you can get excited about? Oh and BTW, I’d like it to pay me well (and allow me to contribute by helping people in the way I want to)… Is this too much to ask? 

In a world where this is not normal, I can understand how it seems impossible. But it’s far from “too much to ask.” 

This type of career change does however require a drastically different approach.

One of the biggest reasons that finding this type of work is so hard is because there’s not a clear path to making this type of change. At least until now….

Let’s get into this step-by-step process.

Now, I say process a little bit liberally, because, in reality, this is a very squiggly line type event.

It’s forwards and backwards, and up and down, and all over in order to get to work that matters to you – work that’s much more meaningful, more fulfilling, just better for you – all the way around work that fits.

At the same time, still, there are pieces that everyone goes through to be able to get there. It rarely happens by accident.

So, I want you to know what the exact steps are that we use with every single person behind the scenes, but also that people that we’re not even helping go through as well.

Here are the 13 steps to a successful career change:

  1. What’s your goal?
  2. Assess strengths, experience, and assets
  3. Assess what you’d like to keep (address issue of not having to start over)
  4. Assess what’s missing in your career
  5. Create Ideal Career Profile
  6. Design a Career Test Drive to prove that’s the right direction for you
  7. Develop a job search plan (terrible name – need to come up with something better)
  8. Develop target list of Companies/Roles or both
  9. Begin your search/build relationships (networking! yay!)
  10. Interview like a badass
  11. Negotiate your offers
  12. Accept your offer and happy dance
  13. Scrap all your training and join the dark side

I go into detail on each of these steps on the audio above.

Listen now.

Scott Anthony Barlow 00:00
I want you to see what it actually takes to be able to do work that fits you, works that lights you up, work that is so much better and allows you to contribute to other people and society in a completely different way. And actually enjoy doing it, doesn't mean it takes away all your problems. No, absolutely not. There's problems at every single different level. It introduces new problems in fact, but good problems, problems that I want you to have.

Introduction 0:30
This is the Happen To Your Career podcast, with Scott Anthony Barlow. We help you stop doing work that doesn't fit you, figure out what it does and make it happen. We help you define the work that's unapologetically you, and then go get it. If you're ready to make a change, keep listening. Here's Scott. Here's Scott. Here's Scott.

Scott Anthony Barlow 00:53
Sometimes behind the scenes, I forget what episode we're on because a lot of times we record... we don't necessarily always record them in the same order. And, you know, we're recording sometimes many months out ahead of time. And it just blows my mind that we've done hundreds of episodes. So the other reasonable is my mind is we wouldn't have been able to do any of this without you. The reason we can keep producing episodes like this, and we have an entire, we literally pay an entire team of people to do this. We have people like Josh, who is our content manager on our team and them and him and the rest of our team are able to keep doing this because of you. Because you listen to the podcast, because you share the podcast, because you spread the word to other people that need this type of help, which much of the world does is it turns out, because when we're doing much more meaningful work, we're more productive, we're happier, we produce better products, we just everything is better in many different ways. So I want to say thanks for 358 episodes, because I don't say thank you enough, and it allows me to pivot right into giving a whole bunch back to you. I want to share with you in this episode, what are the 13 steps to career change? It has worked out to be the number 13, which is kind of awesome because almost everything that's great in my life happens in 13th. This is a part of a two episode series on how to reinvent your career and what are the exact steps. So on episode number one, and by the way, if you haven't listened to that, definitely go back and listen to it. It covers some very specific pieces that are going to be useful to you and different ways to think about how to get to and make this change. In this episode, though, we dive into what are the actual steps. Last time you got to hear a variety of stories and how people actually made their change in one way or another. And now we get into what is the step by step process, if you will. Now, I say process a little bit liberally, because in reality, this is a very squiggly line type event. It's forwards and backwards and up and down and all over in order to get to work that matters to you, work that's much more meaningful, more fulfilling, just better for you all the way around, work that fits. And at the same time, still, there are pieces that everyone goes through to be able to get there. It rarely happens by accident, it's very, very unlikely to happen by accident. So I want you to know what the exact steps are, that we use with every single person behind the scenes but also that people that we're not even helping go through as well. Okay, a couple of things that you have to know in order to really understand these steps, we're going to go through them one by one. And the first part is that you must know where you're going, this is... there's a couple of foundations, right? You've got to know where you're going to be able to get there. It's unlikely to happen by accident, which means that you have to have an understanding of what work that fits, actually is. Also, rarely, even when you know where you're going, rarely do you just immediately find it. Instead, usually, there's a bit of tweaking and testing and experimentation that happens in order to affirm that you're heading in the right direction. And then, the other assumption that we're always making here is that any role, any opportunity that's worth getting, is likely going to happen with an interview of some sort, doesn't mean it's a formal interview, doesn't mean necessarily that it's, you know, like it's going to happen with some type of interaction in person or, not in person, but personal interaction. It's unlikely to just be like, you know, hey, I apply on a computer and I boom job offer sent. That's almost never happened. And I have done workshops all over the world and I've asked that question a lot of times on workshop, "have you ever got a job from computer without meeting anybody, without doing any type of personal interaction, some kind of form of interview?" And two people have said 'yes'. And then the next question I asked him was, "is that a job that you absolutely loved?" And they're like, "No, no, is worst job ever." Okay, so we're making those assumptions as we go through this. All right, step one, what's your goal? We have to understand what your goal is in the first place. Your goal is going to be different than my goal and you need to clarify what it is that your goal is, if your goal is to start a business, that allows you much more flexibility, freedom, whatever that might be, or is your goal to work with a team and company and opportunity that allows you to grow in the way that you want to? Before going on to the other pieces of the puzzle, we need to clarify, "what is your goal?" What do you actually want? Not the, you know, not necessarily all that nitty gritty, like I want to have an office that has tons of like just bathing in and I want to be able to, you know, whatever like we're not necessarily talking about that part yet. But overarching, what is your goal? We have to start with that because that changes all of the other pieces in how you get there. It much like in nautical sailing, how... if you had one degree difference, you're going to end up not just a mile or two difference, but many, many, many miles away from your destination. Also true with flying, also true with, you know, any type of journey. Well guess what? This is going to be a journey, it's going to take a while, and at the same time, much like flying. If you're one degree off, or two degrees or 17 degrees off, then you're going to end up in a totally different place. That's why we have to start wih, "what's your goal?" Okay. Once we have that, step number two, is we need to assess your strengths, experience and assets. Why? Well, let's just use strengths as an example overall. First of all, we know some things about strengths. There's really amazing research out there. We have... I've actually had tons of people, you know, send me questions like, "Hey, I'm not really sure about the strengths thing. I'm not... like it doesn't seem like it's validated." Actually, it is. It totally implicitly as, if you want some studies on that, email me. I have a literally a Google Doc, where I keep an ongoing set of the most current, most relevant studies that have to do with strengths, career happiness, and a few other areas. Strengths are one of those areas that it is very well linked back to quite a few different things, people who are spending as little as one to two more hours a day, working in areas of their strengths are happier when you ask them at any given moment throughout the day, just at random moments, they're much more likely to indicate that they are happy, they are more productive than their peers who were spending less time working in their strengths. They are, actually there's some really interesting research this some of the research has not been duplicated, and it's very loosely linked to things like heart disease, less instances of heart disease overall. Now, I'm not necessarily sure whether that is causation or like I said that particular research is a little bit more looser linked. However, even the things that are really strongly linked to strikes are more than worth making the change and spending more of your waking hours, focusing on what are your strengths and spending time using them. Okay, when we're talking about experience and assets, that's the other part, you know, assess your strengths and experience and assets. The reason we take into account your experience and assets are because, well, you're going to take those with you. Now, I know so many people think that when we start talking about experience, they're like, well, I don't think any of my experiences transferable, I'm not sure about that. So here's the crazy thing, so many people come to us thinking that they are going to make a hugely drastic change. What we find is in almost 100% of cases, they end up taking an opportunity, pursuing an opportunity and taking advantage of a role or a company, whatever it is, that leverages existing strengths and assets. Why? Well, because those are already a part of you, and especially the ones that are relevant to you, and you want to leverage and sometimes it's a different way, sometimes it's not the exact same way. Like, you know, we had an accountant to the psychi, I hate pivot tables. If I see another pivot table like I'm not, you know, I can't tell you what I'm going to do. However, you know, he was really really, really good at building pivot tables, amazing at building pivot tables. That said, he had a whole huge amount of other sets of experience that he could apply differently to a new type of role. Now, he still stayed in finance. In this particular case, this particular example. However, it was in a completely different way he was utilizing his knowledge, his experience and his strengths in a different way than before. But it doesn't mean he wasn't using them. It wasn't mean... didn't mean he wasn't leaning on that experience that he had building pivot tables, it would didn't mean that all of that just disappeared. That's part of what we mean when we say assets. You have a huge amount of assets and understanding what they are, allows you to begin to think about them in a different way. Because you're going to carry those with you whether you want to or not, you might as well decide how they're going to be most beneficial to you. And just because you have an experience in a thing, does not mean that you have to keep doing that thing. There are other ways to be able to transfer it over. And also, the other thing that I've learned is when we actually go through the process, and I know we're on step two right now, but when we actually go all the way through the process on the other end, where you're accepting an offer, and you're moving into a new role, and you're learning to do work much more meaningfully, then it often has happened differently than you thought it was going to. So one of the best ways that I've learned to think about that is when you're making a career change that experience, your assets, those things are... think about it is like, I'm going to carry those pieces, the really positive pieces, I'm going to carry that with me into my next role. And actually, that rolls right into the next piece. Step three is assess what you'd like to keep. Now, here's the reason why we say it that way. So many people are thinking about this as a starting over type process. No, no way. That sucks. I don't wanna start over, do you want to start over? I am, have zero interest in doing that whatsoever. It doesn't mean I'm unwilling to learn. And it doesn't mean that you're unwilling to learn. And it doesn't mean that you are going to not experience growth. However, it does mean that you don't have to go and take something at the bottom or you don't necessarily have to go and get a brand new, you know, four year degree in order to make a move, and keep the things that you are considering to be great. Whether that is flexibility in your role, autonomy, a salary, any number of other things and the way that we do that is by focusing, this is why step two so important, is by focusing on bringing the experience and strengths and assets to the table that are going to help make you more valuable and more marketable to an organization. Now, step number four is assess what's missing in your career. Okay, step number four is sometimes the more challenging part because step number three, assess what you'd like to keep. A lot of times you can point to say, you know, hey, I'm used to earning $175,000 a year, I would like to keep that. I don't want to go back to earning, you know, $75,000 a year, like, I have very little interest in that. I would do it if I have to, but I don't want to. So like, how do I keep that? Like, those types of things are much easier to point out and say, "Yeah, I have that. I don't want to give that up." The harder part is say, "I know that something's not right. But what is it that is actually missing?" Okay, so that can be a huge number of things. And here's the danger here, when you're going through and you're assessing what's missing in your career, often, it is challenging to sift through it because it might feel like it's one thing, but often it might be several things in a particular area. Here's what I mean, we had somebody that we just started working with not that long ago, where, you know, he in his role, I'm thinking of conversations for us, he and his role, you know. Actually, he, in his past role, had really been able to go through this cycle of learning something very, very difficult and complex, often something systemic. And then be able to take that learning and how he had applied it for himself, and then be able to teach that to someone else or impart that to someone else, and to be able to share that, and then he would get that feedback from that other person and that appreciation from that other person for being able to do that, and help them decipher it in that way, and ultimately, like change what they were doing and add value in that particular way. And this cycle of doing this again and again and again, was very, very fulfilling for him. However, he didn't necessarily realize that out of the gate, he ended up changing to another role, and then, you know, starting a business, and he ended up ultimately realizing that much, much later, that really it was this cycle that was missing, and there were multiple pieces there. It wasn't just that he loves to learn, you know, really complex systems or technical type of things, and be able to, you know, apply solutions to it. It was also getting the benefit of teaching that to somebody else and getting that type of interaction and be able to share that and add value and help someone in that particular way. And that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Difficult to see that, off the get go or feel like, you know what something's missing, this isn't right. But often, when you start to try and address it, you think it might be one thing and really, it's like three things, or 10 things. Okay. So here's, I want to give you a quick tip on what we do with people behind the scenes that can help you assess what's missing, too. First of all, and we have a whole series of things, I would go back to... we have an episode, where we did a replay of a training called the "Six Keys To Career Happiness." And that breaks down the six main categories and pieces that you must have that all human beings need in one way or another. So those are kind of par for the course if you don't have those, then you know what, it's just, it's not going to be a good role. And there are plenty of roles and opportunities and companies out there that just are not going to provide those for you. So they're like starting at a negative. That's said, even when you have those things, at a minimum level, there are some pieces that are specific to you that you have to figure out. So first of all, you can go back and listen to that episode, go way back in your feed look for the "Six Keys To Career Happiness" and, or email us and happy to, you know, point there in the right direction of that episode or you can even go and Google happentoyourcareer.com or search on our site, you know, "Six Keys To Career Happiness", and it usually pops right up. That said, often will help people diagnose some of what's missing, is first of all, try and pinpoint the area. And you can start by identifying the area of unhappiness. And then often we'll use the "Five Why's" problem solving methodology, which this has become really common now, especially in areas of like lean manufacturing or Kaizen, or, you know, six sigma, many, many different areas use the same type of problem solving methodology or root cause methodology is where often will come from. But being able to ask yourself, you know, what is this area? Well, why do I feel like something's missing from it? You know, why is it not making me happy? And then keep peeling back later, ask yourself five why's that often will get you to what it actually is, or at least get you a heck of a lot closer. So worthwhile exercise, that's one way we approach it. Another way, is being able to ask, you know, what would I feel like would be a better situation? And so, here's how that might work, you know, I just talked to somebody the other day where they're like, "you know what, this isn't my tribe." The people that I work with just like, you know, they're really nice people, they're really cool. But they're not my tribe. So, there could be a whole huge amount of things that are missing in there, right? Okay, so the way to begin unpacking that might be say, "Okay, what would it look like instead to have a great situation? What would good look like? What would amazing look like in that situation? And be able to just describe some of the attributes?" Well, if I were working with people that also cared about ice hockey because I love ice hockey, if I worked with other people that were, you know, that cared about their health in the same way that I do. I used to work at a, you know, I used to work at a place that produced, you know, fast food products, and I'm kind of a health nut in many different ways. So as you can imagine, there was a values misalignment there. A ton of great people had a ton of great relationships but we also made french fries. And, you know, most of the people are eating french fries every single day, I didn't really eat french fries or try not to. So it definitely a misalignment in some ways, and definitely different set of values. But you know, that's just one example out of many, what I want you to do is begin to break apart and begin to one attribute one piece at a time piece together, what it could look like, what are some of the pieces? Even if you don't know exactly what it is, just try and identify some of the parts, often some of the parts will lead to other of the parts too. Okay, so that's one way that we do that. Let's go on to, step number five. Step number five is piecing all this together, your goal, your strengths, experience, assets, what you'd like to keep what's missing from your career, and creating what we call an "Ideal Career Profile." And that's exactly what it sounds like, it is a profile of the ideal career for you. Now, I'm not talking about like an ideal career in terms of here's the exact job name and occupation. And here's the nicest profile number, that's not what I'm talking about. That's actually not that useful to you. Because first of all, you know, on one HR manager for one place is drastically different than what an HR manager does in another place. Sometimes those roles don't even look the same. Sometimes they are the same, but a lot of the times they're drastically different. So and there's so many other ways to cut the dice too, you know, one environment when employer, all of those make things drastically different and have a huge impact on your career. So, what is much more valuable, is essentially building out a checklist of what you need, personally. And that's how we think about the ideal career profile. How do we, in one place on purpose, have all the pieces that are the highest priority for you? Your strengths and experience and assets as you want to translate them over to another role and want to be able to provide and contribute uniquely, what you'd like to keep? What's missing and you must have? And then we divide those into two areas. We divide those into, what would your ideal's be? And, what must you have at a minimum? Separating those into two different categories is hugely helpful because it's really hard to think about both at the same time. I can think that you know what, I need a minimum of $79,000 because that pays my current bills, allows me to meet my goals that I have, etc. And my ideal might be drastically different. I might really be interested in earning $240,000 in order to meet future goals and those can be really difficult to think about at the same time. So the reason for the minimums is because later on, you're not going to consider opportunities that are below the minimum. So this ideal career profile is dual purpose. It actually creates a profile so that, you know where you're going, you know what your destination is, that we talked about earlier. And it also, at the very same time, acts as a filter, a filter for you to be able to consider what you should focus your time and energy on and what you should completely ignore. It ends up helping you save yourself from pursuing rabbit hole time wasters of opportunities. If you have the challenge of recruiters, you know, contacting you on LinkedIn all the time, and they're like, "Hey, I have a role and an opportunity. I'm curious if you know anybody." And you get that type of thing, and you look at it like "Ah, this could be a good opportunity for me. I don't know, maybe I should apply" and it takes that out of the context or I should say it takes that completely out of the mix because then you clearly know what it is that's going to be a great fit, at least with a lot more detail, and what is not going to be even considered anymore. So if it doesn't meet your minimums on your ideal career profile, then you're just like, "you know what, Mr. recruiter, I just do not know that person." Or you can, you know, point them in another direction for somebody else. But step number six is what we call "Designing Career Test Drive" to prove that your ideal career profile is actually the right direction for you. Here's why we do this, we do this because your ideal career profile is a guest that often when you have got to that point, you have put in a ton of work and it's a great hypothesis but at the end of the day, it is still just a guess, even though it is that highly educated guess. And we need to make sure that you're getting some road signs and that you're heading the right direction for you, we need to prove that out. So we take a little bit of a scientific approach. And often we help people behind the scenes, create an experiment, create a small experiment, or test drive to make sure that they're moving the right direction. Because I don't want you to get there and you know, have the honeymoon period wear off and be like, Oh, no, this is the same thing. But the names have changed. Okay, that's no good. Now, after you do this, after you have proven that's the right direction for you. And by the way, I'll say that if you want to see some examples of the most common test drives that we do, again, and again, with people, the six most common in fact, then go ahead and Google Happen To Your Career Designing Career Experiments, and it'll pop right up. Okay, and then step number seven is develop a search plan, develop a plan to get to your opportunity. Now, here's why we do that at this point. Most people are like, oh, shouldn't we start with the plan? Well, yes, I think that would be true if we were just going for a regular job that everybody else has. And you know, is not that satisfied with. But instead, the reason we do it at this point is now we have all the pieces to actually form a plan. Now, we can look and say, "Okay, all right, we've got an idea of what we want out of work. This is probably going to line up with these types of industries. I'm likely to find this and (I'm just making this up) but I'm unlikely to find this in, you know, small to mid sized companies in the tech industry or in the financial industry." And now that I know that I can focus my interests in search there. And I can choose tactics that are appropriate for that industry, that situation, that the types of roles that you might get whatever it is, I can choose and build a plan, complete with tactics that are going to be relevant. So many times when you go on, you know, themuse.com and The Muse is a great resource, or you go on, you know, monster.com or I don't know, pick a blog, pick a website, where they have tons and tons of tactics. And here's the right way to be able to, here's the eight ways to be able to put together your LinkedIn profile. Here's 14 ways to be able to put together your resume. And by the way, you need to use the hybrid approach. Here's why all of those things often don't work for everybody, because there are tactics and some of the tactics are going to be good for certain situations and going to be terrible for other situations. But they almost never tell you that, like it... with go pick an article, read an article and read through it, it's almost never going to tell you that, instead, is gonna say this is the best tactic, you should absolutely be doing this. But really, I would encourage you to think about it much more intentionally, much more strategically, otherwise, you're gonna end up in the same situation that you're already in. So the way that you can do that is begin to think about, "okay, what's my goal? Where would I like to go? That's an ideal career profile. And I've already validated that I'm heading the right direction for me." Okay, now, how do I build a plan, complete with tactics that are going to be appropriate for that industry? Appropriate for that role, appropriate for those types of companies, appropriate for whatever it is that aligns with what you actually want? Because in some cases, it's going to be really very relevant for you to go and spend some time redoing your resume and writing a variety of different cover letters and, you know, that's going to be perfectly useful for you. In other cases, and we've had many cases actually where people that we've worked with have, not even touch the resume and had multiple job offers. All opportunities that they don't even, you know, better that line up with what they actually want. Okay? So, point B now that is you've got to choose the approaches that actually fit where you want to go. And then next step, we need to come up with a target list of companies or roles or both that fit what you want. Why companies or roles? Why not, you know, job titles or occupations or something else? The way that we think about it slightly differently is, we find that for some people who place a huge priority on things like environment or culture or whatever else it might be that our company influenced, then you should actually start by focusing your efforts on finding the right company for you. For other people that are very focused on what is the specific work that I do, and that is a main driver for them a higher driver. It's not that either one is unimportant, both are important. But you have to start someplace. So focus on which creates the higher priority for you, if you are very work focused or task focused, like what I am spending my time on matters to me a whole lot the exact tasks that I'm doing and how I'm doing them and everything else that matters a whole lot to me, then I'm probably going to encourage you to focus on roles, what are the right roles for you first, and explore those and then develop a list of target roles that you can begin focusing on. Vice versa, if I want to work with the right set of people, and or, you know, it matters to me a whole lot that the organization that I work with just has insane amounts of integrity all the way up and through, you know, that is a case where I'm going to focus on companies first. So, either way, I'm going to begin to develop out a target list. Often when we're working with people behind the scenes, we will have them start with, you know, just three, or five or seven. And then, especially on the company side, we'll grow that to 15, or 20, or 40 organizations. On the role side, when we're focused on roles, we will usually, not go more than four to five at a time and explore those first, and then we're going to begin your search using those tactics, whatever, those are going to be appropriate. So if it's building relationships and doing that in certain ways, then that's going to be what we're going to focus on and your search begins at that point. Then from there, your goal is to get into conversations. Now the reason I say conversations instead of interviews because, you know, step number 10 really is interview like a badass. However, a lot of times those don't necessarily happen always as formal interviews. And many times we find that when people are focused on building relationships and going in through the back door and more unconventional tactics, as opposed to applying from the front side, like you know, on indeed.com or LinkedIn, then you get into a lot more informal situations. And it becomes more important to be able to not just present yourself well in those situations, but also be able to learn through those situations for yourself too, because interviews in our mind, here at Happen To Your Career, go both ways. It's not about whether or not they like, it's not solely about, whether or not they like you. Although that must happen for them to get to a job offer standpoint. However, it is also about are they right for you? And both has to be waited just as equal. If you're waiting, if you're giving them more of the weight, then you're probably going to end up in a situation that isn't right for you. It has to be weighted just as equal, which means that you have to do your share of interviewing as well. Okay. I mean, we literally have, we have an, in our career change boot camp program, you know, every single one of these steps is, we have, you know, many hours of content and teaching and all kinds of things where people can choose what's right for them and their situation and go through that. So we're not gonna be able to go into every aspect of interviewing, but I wanted to just acknowledge that one of the things that we teach is interviews have to go both ways, way more than you think that they do. Which means that you completely own the interview, not them. Step 11, once you are getting into those conversations, if you're doing a great job with those conversations, those interviews formal or informal, then that is going to result in offers, eventually, it's going to result in offers. I say offers just because so many people that we've worked with, they will get not just one but multiple offers, or what has a tendency to happen, especially when you're going into a much more unconventional type of approach. Often it's not an off the shelf or stock job offer. Like for a post a job that's already in existence, but often it is a modified or a created job offer. That happens a lot. And guess what, with things like Coronavirus, and pandemics and your recession, there's even more opportunity for that than there ever was before. So negotiating your your offers. And the reason why this is such an important piece here is because this is also just as big of an opportunity to customize what offer you're taking. Just because they've set up the offer, doesn't mean you have to accept it as is. We have, and this is a very rough percentage, and don't hold me to this. But if I estimate and this is a gross estimation here, I would estimate that probably someplace between 30 and 40 45% of the the people that we work with, ended up getting their job offers modified in some way that is not salary related. Almost everybody that we work with gets their job offer modified in salary in one way or another but there's so many more pieces to a job offer than just that. And we've had people that have been added team members to their team because they were really focused on one of the things that they wanted was moving into a leadership role. What had that was a reporting leader. And we have had people that have completely negotiated all different kinds of flexibility than negotiated in breaks. I've done that myself, like, one time where I switched, you know, we had our my third child, and I negotiated I was switching like one month before he was born, and so negotiated right into it that I would take basically about a month off, even though I would didn't qualify for paternity leave because I was brand new, and a whole bunch of other things, it wasn't supposed to happen, still negotiated it in and was I against policy? Yeah, probably. I mean, I was an HR, I can definitively say that it was against policy. Did we still figure out a way to work it out? Yeah, absolutely. And was it a great thing for them and me? Yes, absolutely. I ended up staying with that company for five years. Okay, so, step 11, negotiate your offers. Step 12, accept your offer and happy dance. Okay, this is an important one. It's an important one, because it is difficult to get there. So we want to acknowledge it as its own step. And at the same time, it's a milestone, but it's not the only one. Step 13, is all about learning to do meaningful work in a way that works for you. Step 13 is a beginning of a whole new process in many different ways. Learning to do meaningful work that fits you is that behavioral part of it. You know, I mentioned that on episode one here. But the most important part is to be able to have that opportunity and learn to behave differently and interact differently with work in a way that's really good for you and good for the organization, but requires absolutely behavior change, it requires you to be able to draw boundaries and do so in an effective productive way. It requires you to be able to have often conflicting conversations to be able to come out with a better end product, it requires skill development, it requires you getting better at many different things that are good for you and good for the organization and good for the people that you work with. And yes, there is many different ways to have that happen. But I wanted to acknowledge it as a step in this process. Because like I said, on episode one, well, you know, if you do all of these other pieces and get there and you haven't learned to do meaningful work in a way that is good for you and good for your organization, then it can actually make another wise amazing situation a lot less amazing and turn it into potentially a bad situation or you might find that the same things are still happening even though you have this great opportunity. You know, if you find that, you know, people are still taking advantage of your time, but you know, everybody there is really respectful, you may have accidentally trained them to do that, without even realizing it, that's behavioral related. There is a way in many different ways to be able to not have that happen. But first, you have to get the right environment. First, you have to get the right situation. First, you have to get the right role or company or opportunity for you. So I hope this was helpful. The reason I wanted to go into these 13 steps are because I want you to see what it actually takes to be able to do work that that fits you, works that lights you up, work that is so much better and allows you to contribute to other people and society in a completely different way. And actually enjoy doing it, doesn't mean it takes away all your problems. No, absolutely not. There's problems at every single different level. It introduces new problems in fact, but good problems. Problems that I want you to have, problems that are far, far better than where you might be at right now. Okay, here's what I would encourage you to do. If you feel amazing about going through those steps, I want you to, whatever step you're on, be able to move on to the next one, just, you know, pause this for a minute and declare, "hey, what am I going to do next? That's going to get me there." Make a decision, and move through it. And then if you're not sure where to go next, that's where I would encourage you to reach out to our team, you can email me directly even scott@happentoyourcareer.com put "Conversation" in the subject line. And I'll connect you with my team, my director of client and student success, and you can have a conversation with my team and we'll help you figure out what is the very best way that we can help you through every single one of these steps, in the way that it makes sense for you and your situation. So no matter what, I want you to have a way to go. If you want to see all of these steps in order, and because you didn't write them down as you're listening to this podcast totally okay, if you didn't, you can go to happentoyourcareer.com/358 happentoyourcareer.com/358. And you'll be able to get to the blog post and the transcript and you'll be able to see these steps in action. Hey, I so appreciate you taking the time to listen to this. And if there's anything else that you want to hear on the Happen To Your Career podcast, you can also email me about that too. I really appreciate you listening. And most importantly, I appreciate you making the commitment to yourself in making this type of change, doing work differently because we need more people like you to love their work and enjoy it. And that creates such a better society to live in on so many different ways. Hey, we've got so much in store for you right here on Happen To Your Career next week. Until then, I am out. Adios.

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