Career Change-Whats stopping you?

If you don't like where you are then change it, you are not a tree!

The work that you do to make a living takes up a large portion of your time and energy. Day after day, the average human works for years, logging in hours upon hours of labour.
That’s not a bad thing, if you love your work.
Unfortunately, too many of us can barely even tolerate our jobs. We long to do something that manifests our true purpose in life.
Once you identify the fears behind your excuses for staying put, you can then find the courage to make the career change that you already know you need to make.

The Obvious Fears

Most people will have no problem identifying the fear of change and the fear of living in poverty as two main reasons people decide to stay in a career that doesn’t make them happy.
But I encourage you to dig a little deeper and find what’s really keeping you trapped in your current job.
When I decided to change careers, I realised that it was the more visceral, less apparent fears that really kept me stuck.
I’ll describe them here. Maybe they’ll be familiar to you as well.

The Deeper Fears

Disappointing Others

I pursued Engineering long after I realised it might not be the right path for me , I studied Production Engineering and made a second class upper from the University of  Benin, I strongly believe anything worth doing is worth doing well,because I believed people were counting on me to be a successful engineer. I’d gotten everyone’s hopes up, and I wanted to make them proud.
Finding a job in engineering was not easy,so I applied to work in a bank and I got the job, unfortunately I was assigned to the marketing department.Everyone was happy for me,but was I?
It could be your parent’s longtime dream for you, or it could be the pride you see in your partner’s eyes when they tell people what you do.
You don’t want to lose that. People you love seem happy about your career choice, but it doesn’t make you happy.
I decided to leave banking after 5years  because I realised that the people who really mattered to me would never want me to live a lifetime of misery. They would be more elated to know that I was happy

Losing the Status Symbol

Some careers are more prestigious than others. It sounds superficial, but if we’re honest, it really matters to a lot of people, and if we have a bit of prestige, it can be hard to let that go.
The label of “banker” was sounded interesting. The way people responded when I told them I worked in a bank.
The same can be said for lawyers, doctors, and engineers, etc.

Being Judged by Others

“So, you couldn’t handle it, hunh?”
“Not everybody’s cut out for this work.”
“It’s a lot of hard work to be successful in this marketing career.”
“Some people wish they had your job.”
“You should work to live, not live to work.”
The implication is people believe that you’re merely quitting because you’re incompetent, weak, lazy, afraid of hard work, not so smart after all, ungrateful, unrealistic, and foolish to think that you deserve to make money doing what you love.
In the words of Steve Maraboli: “People who lack clarity, courage, or determination to follow their own dreams will often find ways to discourage yours.”
Others will have their opinions and criticisms, but unless they’re your children or life partner, they don’t have to live with the consequences of your decisions. You do!
People gave me lots of advice when I decided to quit marketing, but I was the one who had to wake up before dawn, spend hours looking for clients to open accounts, face trashing in meetings for not meeting my targets, get home late from work without any strength left in me to attend properly to my kids, all while neglecting time for my kids. They couldn’t do it for me. So I respected their opinions, but relied more on my inner knowing.

Starting Over and Wasted Time

Even though I’d only spent a couple of years in the wrong career (as opposed to decades), I still felt downright sick at the thought of all that wasted time, effort, and money.
Not just my time and money, but that of all the people who helped me along the way.
I’ll admit that it left me bitter for a while, but I eventually saw that it wasn’t wasted time. I had gained valuable knowledge and expertise that actually helped me in the pursuit of my dream job. I just had to re frame my prior experiences.
Dr. Noelle Stern says in her book Trust Your Life: Forgive Yourself and Go after Your Dreams that “at every stage, each of our experiences is exactly what we’ve needed.”
The fears listed above were all internal barriers to change. They emanated from and could only be pushed aside by me. After much of that proverbial soul searching, I finally recognised what my real fears were and was finally able to cultivate the courage to make the career changes that essentially saved my life.
So, are you trapped in a career that you know is not the best fulfilment of your life’s purpose? What’s keeping you from changing your career path?