Here successful senior leader in the content and digital media industry, Joanne Hopkins, shares her story, in her words, of her leap of faith from successful career into the unknown.
On the surface, most people appear settled once they get beyond 40. Firmly on a career path after a huge amount of effort to get there, a solid - and probably growing - income, a few steps up the property ladder, married, children . . . Success personified.
If you’re mid-life, the likelihood is that you tick many, if not all, of these boxes and are therefore settled yourself - or at least that’s the perception. So why can’t you shake off that nagging sense of dissatisfaction? The feeling that being ‘settled’ is not enough?
What if keeping alive this societal perception of where you should be at your age is making you feel trapped, unfulfilled and, frankly, pretty miserable? What if you long to do something more in your career, something that chimes more with your values, interests and skillset? Be more true to yourself? What if you could take back the control you had in your twenties, when you made the decisions about your career, not others? What if you were able to do something real?
The problem is, those two little words - ‘what if’ - for all the dreams they help us conjure of how our lives could be, are likely the very same words that are holding us back from fulfilling those dreams. From taking that leap of faith we yearn to do.
What if I change course and it turns out to be worse than my current situation? What if I lose the flexibility I have managed to secure in my current role? What if my income falls? What if this is simply as good as it gets? What if my friends and family think I’m completely mad or, worse, a failure? What if I’m risking my family’s security?
The list of catastrophic ‘what ifs’ is endless. Believe me, I’ve spent years ruminating about them. When I was at secondary school, my form tutor told my parents they should have made my middle name ‘what if’, such was my tendency to worry about worst case scenarios. And this tendency has remained in the years that have followed - once a worrier, always a worrier . . . But I have learned - through experience, expert coaching sessions and reading professional material on the subject - that fear has a tendency to override our logical selves and very rarely do these worst case scenarios actually manifest themselves.
Instead, they hold us back from being true to ourselves and achieving our vision and life goals. As Nelson Mandela said: ‘There is no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.’
With this in mind, I stopped trying to drown out my ever-increasing desire for change and I tuned into it, mid-lockdown last year. For me, this meant closing my eyes and holding on tight as I left a company at which I had developed a successful career over 18 years, at which I had grown into a respected leader of a successful team using a cutting edge technology, had made many friends and met my husband.
At the age of 40, I took a giant leap of faith, not sure what would come next and with no employment in the pipeline but certain of the factors that would be at the heart of my future-career decision making. Factors that I had considered carefully before taking that leap.
Indeed, this was by no means a rash decision, despite it possibly holding all the hallmarks of the start of a mid-life crisis at the peak of the pandemic. No, it was the culmination of years of consideration, research and, last year, supportive career coaching to tie it all together. It was a decision made with an understanding of what makes me tick, my strengths, weaknesses and values. An innate sense of what I wanted to achieve and believed I was capable of achieving in my career, if given the opportunity.
Fear was still at play, but instead of a fear of what would happen if I disrupted my settled state, it morphed into a fear of how I would feel if I didn’t. And I think this was perhaps the most profound change - a mindset that took an awful long time to reach, but one that ultimately won out. The fear of feeling regretful as I reflected on my story in years to come, pondering what could have been because I had played safe and remained ‘settled’ in the status quo.
And so I jumped into the unknown.
The journey since has not been without turbulence - it would be disingenuous to say that my tendency to catastrophise has not reared its head once or twice, that I haven’t sometimes considered how my decision must seem to others, that I haven’t worried about the concept and financials of ‘starting from scratch’ in a new career after working so hard to build up my last. But I’m lucky to have a fantastic support network as I take some pretty bold next steps and I’m excited about what my future holds.
If you’re struggling to shake that feeling of not being true to yourself, of believing you’re capable of more in your career but are terrified of the disruption acting on it may cause, it may help to talk it through with friends, family and an expert if you can, such as a coach. Although I made a pretty big change, I’ve learned that this doesn’t have to be the case - that even a small change can help you take control and edge you towards where you want to go. The first step is knowing where and what that is. With that clarity you begin to feel empowered to live the life you’re capable of.
If you’d like some support with your career change check out the Kick Start Your Career Change mini course designed to help you right at the beginning when you’re feeling stuck and unsure which way to turn.