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Ms Pink Musing on Changing Career

G’day Gorgeous…

I want to talk about what happens when you decide you want to make some changes in your career. I had a chat with a client this week saying he wanted to change his career by moving on from his current corporate role and working for himself. I’ve just done a TV series for ENTV in the US and in it, I interview a number of women who have made massive changes to their life and chosen at some point or another to back themselves, leave the role that they are doing, where they’re successful and getting paid by somebody else, to go out on their own.

This is something that I did myself and it’s something that a lot of people decide to do. Usually when they’ve reached the pinnacle in their career, often getting paid a lot of money, but they are not feeling that they are getting that sense of satisfaction, or feeling that what they do in work satisfies them, they don’t get a direct reward for themselves.

It’s an interesting place that we get to. We really want to go out on our own and start our own business. However, we need to remember that people who go out on their own and start businesses, a large percentage of businesses fail in the first 12 months.

I have recently made some changes to the approach and direction I want to move forward in my business. It’s been an interesting time because they are decisions where I have often been wedded to thinking that I must follow a particular pathway, that making a decision to change direction can feel daunting. So, trying to understand when is the right moment to take that leap, but then also making sure that it’s clear and planned out about what it is that you are going to do.

If you are like me, I don’t plan a whole lot ahead – I’m a big picture person. I know what it is I want to do, but I don’t have that written down in stone. Whereas other people, different personality types, are going to want to have all the detail about what they are going to do set in stone and know exactly how to deliver it.

It’s important to understand that in any business we actually need to cover off the quadrants of personality types based on a number of parameters. In any business, out of that quadrant, you’ll have eight areas to cover and you need three people, at a minimum, who deal with those different areas to make sure all the business needs, in terms of the personality approach needed to do that work, are covered. It’s an important distinction to make because if you don’t, you recruit people who all have a similar personality, and it is often like yours! That’s problematic because when we are all the same, the business isn’t going to succeed as the things that I can’t do as a leader, I need somebody else to do. If I don’t accurately map out what I need and who I hire, then I don’t understand what I’m missing and things eventually fall through the cracks and the business can fail.

So, I hope that gives you a little insight into the things you need to consider when you want to strike out on your own. What it’s like when deciding to go into business and back ourselves and what we need to stop and think about.

See you soon

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Ms Pink Musing on Continuous Improvement through Education

G’day Gorgeous…

 

One of the things we often don’t consider in our career is that it’s never too late to re-educate yourself or to decide that maybe you want to have a career change.  For those of you who have read my book ‘Define your Inner Diva’ in Decisive Diva, the chapter on Career, I talk about undertaking a career review. This is quite an important thing to do because often when we reached that point in our lives where we think that we really don’t like what we’re doing in life and you may feel like you want to do something completely different, but we have educated ourselves to reach our career pinnacle, it seems that picking up and doing something different is entirely too hard.

In my book, I talk about our seven-year developmental cycles, the first complete cycle ends around 35.  This is often about the time where we reach a point of feeling a bit like a ‘fraud’ in our working life, we often think “I don’t actually think I like what I’m doing, who I am or what I’ve chosen to be!”

We end up chosen to make ‘something’ of ourselves in response to our negative feelings that come from adolescence.  We don’t like a lot of the things that have happened in our adolescence, who we think we are and we come out of adolescence feeling different like we don’t belong.  So, we decide that we’re just going to be “this” in our career and when we actually decide we are going to to be “this thing” we often make choices based on what we think other people will see value in.  For example, if I become a lawyer then my parents will be really proud of me. Often our parents influence what we decide that we want to do for a career as an adult and so you do something because they want you to do it and not necessarily because it’s something that you’re really interested in, or passionate about.

As a result, by the time we hit that last seven-year cycle between 28 and 35, there’s this feeling that can start to build within us that says “Actually, I don’t think I like what I’m doing.  I don’t think I fit. I don’t think I’m passionate about it. I don’t think I’m really that interested in it. I feel like a bit of a fraud around these people and I don’t really belong and I don’t know what I want to do anymore!

At this point, many of us think “It’s too late!  Bad luck… You’re just gonna have to suck it up and stick with it!”  However, this is often the time that I say to people that it really is an opportunity for you to decide that you want to do something different.

For me, it was at 28 that I decided to go to University and start on a completely different career path and study psychology.  I started studying when my youngest was one. I then spent 15 years of my life studying part-time, whilst working full-time, to get my degree finished and getting through my internship.  Trying to jump through all of the hoops necessary to get me to a point where I could sit here and have this validity that says I understand human behavior and therefore I can talk about it and work in that space every day.  It was hard!

I’m not going to sit here and tell you that studying part-time for 15 years, whilst working full-time and raising two children, the majority of that time as a single parent, was easy…  It wasn’t! But, it was what I really wanted to do as it was my passion and for me, it was something that I felt that I couldn’t just turn my back on, or I knew that I was going to spend the rest of my life unhappy.

It wasn’t that my career was bad, I was happy enough in the job that I was doing and I had done reasonably well for myself in my work, but it wasn’t fulfilling me.  It wasn’t making me feel that when I woke up every day, that I wanted to leap out of bed and go to work. It was a job and it was needed security for me at the time, and as a sole parent, it was one of those things that I needed to do to ensure I could meet my responsibilities.  Sometimes we have to make those sacrifices, but I really wanted to do something that would change our long-term outcomes as a family.

I did this for my daughters, as much as for myself, and I wanted to make sure that I did something that would make me feel fulfilled.  Something that would make me happy, as opposed to doing something that just paid the bills or made the people around me think I was an okay person.

If there is one thing that I would encourage you to do, it is to realise that it is never too late to decide that maybe you would like a career change, that you would like to do something that really does fulfill you, much more than what you are doing now.  So, if that sounds like something you want to explore, just consider short courses in adult education, no one said it has to be a big commitment to a degree.

I never stop learning.  I’m off next week to do some training and it’s not always about psychology.  I often like to learn about other things, different areas of interest, if I think that it might help me or influence the way that I look at things.  I’m always open to education as knowledge isn’t heavy and it doesn’t cost us anything to carry with us, it is weightless and it’s not a burden to carry…  It is just something that can assist us to move forward.

All right….  See you soon

 

 

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Ms Pink Musing on Passion in Your Career

G’day Gorgeous…

So today I thought I might talk to you about careers. One of the biggest things we may need to consider about our work environment, and why perhaps we may be having some issues in the workplace, is about passion. 

Often when you become successful in a particular role, we have a tendency to just decide we are going to just sit pretty for a while. We acknowledge that we have worked hard to get there and you’re doing great stuff and don’t want to push yourself out of your comfort zone – after all, you deserve the break. 

After a while, just sitting pretty can actually be a disservice to ourselves. This complacency, can lead us to find our situation becoming stale. If you don’t have a continuous input of passion for the work you do, it becomes drudgery and not something that we wake up excited for every day, but instead you find yourself dreading the idea of going to work.  

If you’re in this situation, I would recommend you read through the Career chapter ‘Decisive Diva’ in my book ‘Define Your Inner Diva’. In this chapter I talk about the importance of passion, and what it is you need to do if you’ve lost this passion and want to get it back.  

One of the reasons we end up having problems in mid-life is from problems in the workplace. For example, if one day everything was going great in your project but then something happens, or you feel that there is an issue at work and you got the blame for it, and you suddenly feel ostracised or disconnected in some way from the other people in your work environment. This can have a big impact on our sense of self. 

The main reason this has such an impact on our sense of self, if because of the way we grew up and our negative belief system. Once we become adults, we decide ‘I’m going to be this’, and once I achieve that people will respect me and all my negative beliefs won’t matter anymore’.  

Now this idea works for a while, but after a few years you start to get the feeling that you’re a bit of a fraud and not presenting your true self. You may believe that if you showed people who you truly were, and how you really feel about yourself, that they would pull you up on it and you may find yourself out on your ear. 

It’s really important to understand that when something happens in the workplace, we end up in a situation where we have fallen back into our negative belief patterns because we may have lost the foundation for what we have based our positive feelings about ourselves on our work. This can happen when we find ourselves placing our value in what we do, not who we are as people. 

This is very common, as most people don’t like how they feel about themselves by the time we get to the end of adolescence. At this point we find ourselves questioning what we are going to do with our lives. This can lead to making a decision ‘I’m just going to be (insert career role here)’ and even if you find yourself being very successful at your chosen career path, at the end of the day our career is just what we do. 

Many of us work very hard and throw ourselves into our work fully, we approach things with an amazing work ethic to prove ourselves to anybody who will take notice and get upset when people don’t notice how much we truly put in, because through our work is how we are defining ourselves and our value. 

At this point, if things aren’t going well in the work environment, then we start to feel flat and low. Sometimes in our careers, we aim for a pinnacle and then when we reach it we experience joy, but then the feeling of ‘now what’ sets in. Inside we feel like we still need to do something, or work towards something more. This can leave us feeling like we are never happy with what we’ve done. This is why it is so important to acknowledge we are good at what we do, but our work doesn’t define us as a person. 

Once you can understand who you are and resolve how you feel about yourself, you can get full acceptance of yourself. Then what you do in your career will not become our defining point, but just something else we do that makes us wonderful.  

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Ms Pink Musing on Financial Independence

 

G’day Gorgeous! 

I often talk about financial management as a single woman.  Interestingly, I find that as an independent, self-employed business owner, I find that banks don’t think I have any real value.

I find that extremely frustrating.

In a recent dealing with the NAB, five months after being promising that all of these things would get sorted, even to the point where I was being given “yes everything is ready to go ahead as agreed” and then, I get an email.  No real preliminaries just saying, “We’ve changed our mind about the way we want to do this”.  Now they’re still going to proceed but as a women I will need a guarantor!  I have not had a guarantor since I was 17 years old for my very first car.

There was not really an explanation they just seem to make a determination that said they thought I should do my consolidation in a different way than what we had agreed.

Now, please remember I have been dealing with these people trying to resolve this for five months so my immediate solution, find a new bank!  I was tempted to walk away from the big four because quite frankly, I have never found them to be supportive of women.

I have said on multiple occasions that two of our four major banks ANZ and the Commonwealth Bank that both have a focus on women.  However, the ANZ’s approach is more at the lower end, they make the assumption that all we do as women is nurture children, and that our financial needs, in general, are less complex.  So, they focus on superannuation products and life insurance and number of other things, but they don’t really look to empower women.

Now the Commonwealth Bank, on the other hand, have a program called Women in Focus which is specifically about supporting business women.  So I wanted to see if the Commonwealth Bank would put their money where their mouth is and actually look to provide financial support to a woman in business.  I’ve been to a number of their lunches, talked to some senior management, and they are really nice people.  I used to work for the Commonwealth Bank many years ago, but were they really going to come through? 

I had a conversation with a number of people by telephone and was put in touch with what they call a ‘Business Personal Lender’, so this is somebody who specialises in assisting me with my personal lending needs, but they have a good knowledge of business and they take the time to understand my business.  So, when I was contacted by Leah (my local Business Personal Lender) and I was able to have a conversation about what had happened with the NAB for the previous five months, she was able to assess my business and my personal situation and she came back to me and said “Actually Kerry, there is no reason that we can’t do all of this and more.”

 

Maybe, just maybe, there IS a bank who is really supportive of women in business, that will actually put their money where their mouth is.

I wish to absolutely maintain my financial independence, I haven’t got this far being reliant on a man and there is no reason that I should ever have to be reliant.  It would be different if I choose to go commit myself with a man to do something that I wish to do and we wish to do that together, but that is a very different proposition to somebody telling me that I need a man to give me value in this world.

Yet – that is exactly what the NAB did, which is why they are history, written off, never again to be considered! 

In fact, I really must give kudos to the young man from the NAB who was doing all of this work with me over five months, when I told him exactly what I thought of his approach in an email, he rang me to apologise.  So, I then told him again, over the phone, exactly what my concerns were, what I thought the problem really was, and advised him to learn from the mistake (Thanks Matthew).  That might be one lesson he needed to learn on his life path.  Hopefully, he’ll remember next time how he should speak to a strong empowered woman who manages her own business, and has built an asset base without his help in the past and without the help of any man.

I hope that this highlights the benefits of maintaining your independence as a women and encourages you to take charge of your own finances.  Inspiring you is what I am aiming to do here and I am really glad that you are still reading and I hope this inspires you into action.

I hope that was helpful, until next time Gorgeous….