A friend of mine tabbed for some career translating recently. She’s well-nigh to make a radical shift: without increasingly than 20 years in the malleate industry, she’s rhadamanthine a detective. She went through a grueling selection process. But she made it through to the other side and is now months yonder from starting a job she’d unchangingly dreamed of.
Now she was having unprepossessed feet. “I’m worried that maybe I don’t want this without all,” she confided.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” I asked her. “If you hate it, you can unchangingly quit. If you frame it that way, maybe you’ll think well-nigh it differently.” It’s the very same question I asked myself three and a half years ago when I started my own business.
I’ve written surpassing well-nigh three mindsets for kickstarting a professional reinvention. Here are three spare mindsets that can help you embrace a midlife career transpiration once it’s underway:
Just Do It
Back when I was just starting out as a communications consultant, a friend of mine who’d started a similar merchantry years older gave me some unconfined advice: “In the beginning, say ‘yes’ to everything and then icon out how to do it.”
I followed her lead. If someone asked me if I offered workshops on X, I’d say, “Oh, sure,” and then run home and unorthodoxy up on said topic.
Fast forward six years, and I’ve now got a suite of workshops I routinely roll out on writing, speaking and professional development. I’m at the point where if someone asks me to do something I haven’t washed-up before, I now say, “No, I haven’t washed-up that yet. But I’m happy to develop it for you.”
Keep Your Upfront Investments Minimal
One of the weightier books I read when I was launching my own merchantry was Marianne Cantwell’s wonderful Be a Free Range Human: Escape the 9 to 5, Create a Life You Love, and Still Pay the Bills. Cantwell’s typesetting is chock full of unconfined tips for anyone looking to start their own business, but two pieces of translating really stuck.
The first is not to spend too much time conceptualizing your new gig surpassing you road-test it. Once you’ve got the skeleton of a merchantry plan, you’ll goody far increasingly from just getting out there and doing whatever it is you want to try. That way, you’ll learn very quickly if you’re any good at it – and, increasingly importantly, if you enjoy it – surpassing you commit too much time and energy.
The second piece of translating is not to get distracted by what she calls “the big shiny things” – i.e., having a fancy office or website – surpassing you’ve unquestionably tried out your idea. The website can wait. Building your vendee base, income stream and reputation can’t.
Be Willing to Experiment
Soon without I launched my business, I was offered the opportunity to work closely with flipside consultancy. I was mainly delivering workshops for them, but they moreover asked me to do some merchantry development. Although I didn’t have a preliminaries in sales, I thought: Why not? This will be a learning experience.
But as the year wore on, it became increasingly well-spoken that I didn’t really enjoy selling. And I expressly disliked cold-calling. So, I finally told them that while I was happy to alimony delivering workshops, I wanted to stop selling.
I learned a lot from that experience. It helped me to crystalize both what I’m good at and what I enjoy –and then focus my merchantry virtually that. In the end, rhadamanthine an entrepreneur is as much well-nigh saying yes to new opportunities when they present themselves as it is well-nigh learning to saying No.
Most of the vestige suggests that our propensity to take risks decreases on stereotype over the undertow of the lifespan. But I’ve unchangingly been of the view that, professionally anyway, sometimes you just need to make the unvigilant move.
So, if you’re on the brink of a Second (or Third… or Fourth) Act, I’m asking: What’s the worst thing that could happen?
Let’s Have a Conversation:
What was your Second Act? Are you ready for the next one? Do you like to take risks and see what would happen?
