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 Sital Ruparelia is a career transition coach, talent management consultant, speaker, writer and last but not least, comedy improvisor(!) living in London. He is also one of my fellow coaches on Careershifters, a UK based online resource for people considering a career change.
I’m delighted to introduce Sital to you and hope you enjoy hearing him speak about:
• the “shades of grey” strategy for getting money AND meaning in your life
• identifying our different needs and how the portfolio approach can fulfil these
• 3 common financial obstacles a career changer faces - and what to do about them
• 2 things you should do if financial management isn’t your strong point.
For 20 minutes of sound down-to-earth advice from Sital, use the player below or click here to download the MP3.
If you’d like more tips from Sital, you can visit his website at www.sitalruparelia.com.
PLUS to access a career change e-book that Sital has kindly made available exclusively to this podcast’s listeners go here
 Manisha Thakor is passionate about personal finance for women. She is the author of two popular books On Your Own Two Feet and Get Financially Naked, has written for publications such as The New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Glamour magazine and appears regularly on national US radio and TV channels.
Hear from Manisha about:
• Why women in particular MUST get financially literate
• The 3 most important words you need to remember
• The percentage of income you need to be saving to maintain your standard of living post retirement
• Simple things we can do to take control of our finances now.
For 20 minutes of money magic from Manisha, use the player below or click here to download the MP3.
If you’d like more tips from Manisha, you can visit her website and blog at www.manishathakor.com and sign up to receive her regular Money Musings.
I’m delighted that Pam Slim of Escape From Cubicle Nation is launching the series.
Pam writes a thought-provoking and entertaining blog about how to transition from corporate prisoner to thriving entrepreneur. With Chris Guillebeau from the Art of Non-Conformity, she recently launched the 100 Dollar Business Forum to help aspiring entrepreneurs start a business for 100 dollars or less.
For 20 minutes of great advice from Pam on starting a business on a shoestring, use the media player below or click here to download the MP3.
Interview synopsis
Listen to Pam talking about
• the types of business most easily started with very little investment
• how to make sure your product or service is something your market REALLY wants
• how working in groups can drastically speed up the creation of your business idea
• her favourite business that started out on a shoestring (and a slab of Red Bull)
• what she would do with a 100 dollar budget!
If you’d like to hear more from Pam, do check out her blog at Escape From Cubicle Nation. Sign up to her newsletter on the right hand side to be kept informed of forthcoming initiatives like the 100 Dollar Business Forum.
 “How can I be sure that this time I’ve got it right?”
One of the fears that keeps would-be career changers paralysed is that the new direction will prove no better than the last. Having got it wrong before, we don’t trust ourselves to be wiser the second (or third) time around.
That’s why I see so many people holding out for an epiphany. That magical moment when all doubt dissolves in the face of absolute clarity.
I like believing in things and epiphanies, like White Christmases and forgotten fivers stuffed down the back of the sofa, do come along from time to time. In fact my brother Chris’s huge life change came about from watching an epiphanetic (what is the adjective?!) TV programme about helicopters.
However, I never got one myself. So I have always found Anais Nin’s words very comforting:
There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.
When I first considered becoming a career coach I was beset with uncertainty. I asked my own coach at the time if she had had doubts about embarking on coaching as profession. “I never doubted my ability to coach” she replied, “though I did have serious doubts about whether I could build a financially successful practice.”
I found this only partially reassuring.
Like her, I had doubts about whether I could build a sustainable practice.
However I ALSO I had doubts about my abilities as a coach.
AND I had doubts about my motivation. Was I drawn to career coaching simply because I myself was at a career crossroads? Would other people’s stories, fears, hopes and dreams prove far less fascinating than my own?
Despite incessant rumination, I couldn’t find a way to answer these questions satisfactorily without actually starting as a coach. So in the end, I just went with it as my best guess, in the absence of any other clues about what I should be doing with my life.
Happily everything turned out well:
- I was less self-absorbed than I had feared (!): indeed other people’s stories were equally compelling.
- Although my first “go” at coaching was toe-curlingly inept, thankfully it was on a training teleclass with only my fellow learners as witnesses. And like everything in life, I got much better with practise.
- The marketing/income generation side has been a learning curve too, but always curving in the right direction.
And if things hadn’t turned out so well, at least that would have been informative. I’d have picked up some extra valuable fragments of the mosaic.
Are you waiting for your career epiphany? Can you start building a mosaic instead?
 Your money or your life? Money - ugh! I’m British and as you fellow Brits will know, money is not something we tend to openly talk about.
It’s very different here in China, where it’s common for a taxi driver/shop assistant/random acquaintance - in fact anyone you engage in casual conversation - to ask you what you’re earning or how much you’re paying for your flat.
Once you get used to the directness, it’s actually quite liberating. And let’s face it, money is something we need to look at square in the face when it comes to making a career change.
That’s why later this month I’m going to be launching my 20×20 podcast series: Your Money or Your Life?
I’ll be interviewing 20 money/career change experts for 20 minutes each about money and its relationship to successfully changing career.
I’ve got some great people lined up already who will be talking about how to:
• Develop a healthy relationship with money
• Protect your income as you transition to your dream work
• Be financially successful in your new business venture.
Please tell me - who would YOU love to hear from? What are your concerns around money?
I’ll do my best to interview people you’d like to hear from - and I’ll certainly try to address any and all topics you raise.
Thank you for helping to make this series as rich (no pun intended) and informative as possible!
At the end of last November I caught the flu. Knocked flat for about 4 weeks, my usual joie de vivre vanished and exhaustion descended. I belatedly realised just how manic 2009 had been.
My health and sense of humour eventually recovered, thanks to a restorative Christmas with my parents in the West Country. The snow outside, the affectionate presence (and lingering smell) of two ageing golden retrievers, and frequent recourse to a glass or two of sherry – a strangely comforting liquid – worked their magic.
I know from conversations with clients and from email exchanges with many readers, that I was not alone in getting my work-life balance a little out of kilter last year.
How can we ensure 2010 is different? The key, I’d suggest, is in having time to think.
A little forethought stops us going off half-cocked after every opportunity – developing the interesting-but-not-core-strategy business ideas, responding to the not-quite-right job ads. These “justifiable” uses of time consume far more energy than we realise. Like the hamster on the wheel, we get full marks for effort, but where has all that scampering taken us?
“Our life is frittered way by detail….simplify, simplify” urges Thoreau.
Even ten minutes of focused thinking a day can pull us out of the detail. That precious window can prevent us plunging into unproductive busyness, or help us reach a conclusion on a thorny issue that we’ve been fruitlessly mulling over for weeks.
Here are some of the places I’ve been thinking this year:
On my bike. I cherish the daily cycle home from my daughter’s kindergarten. In just 13 minutes, I can often solve an issue that’s been bothering me for weeks. There’s something about the early morning air and the silent motion of the wheels. Seemingly effortlessly they untangle jumbled thoughts and quietly produce the right solution.
In the bath. Whilst the bike ride is for decision making, my bath is for creating. Ironically, by unwinding – letting go of deliberate thought – intriguing ideas pop out from amongst the bubbles.
Where do you unwind? Where do you feel free? Join me in thinking more and doing less this year.
“I’m very brave generally” he went on in a low voice,” only today I happen to have a headache.” So said Tweedledum in Alice Through a Looking Glass.
The key to successfully changing career isn’t understanding your values, identifying your favourite skills and passions, creating a killer action plan and gathering support and inspiration to keep you on your way.
All those things are very important. But they don’t get us anywhere without courage.
It can be hard to admit that what’s really holding us back isn’t lack of money, time, or clarity.
We know, deep down, that we can overcome these issues if we just grasp the nettle.
As someone who flirted around the edges of my own nettle bed for many years, I know that reaching out and definitively clutching those stingers is easier said than done.
- If you’ve worked in banking for 15 years and risen to the top rungs of the ladder, you have a lot to lose: great salary, benefits, status.
- If you’ve just been made redundant, you may be grappling with rejection and your confidence is likely to be pretty shaky.
- If you’ve hopped around from job to job, never quite finding your groove, you’ll find it hard to trust yourself and chances are you’re not as financially secure as you’d like to be.
We can all identify with Tweedledum. We’ve been brave in the past, but right now it’s January, it’s cold out and frankly we’d rather stick our head under the duvet.
But ignoring our career dissatisfaction doesn’t make it go away.
So how can we be brave, when it’s the last thing we feel like?
1. Burn your bridges!
As the invading Roman army crossed each bridge they would burn it, to discourage retreat. Give yourself no alternative but to move forward. Resign, declare publicly a hitherto secret goal, book a plane ticket, just say yes to something that scares the h*ll out of you and figure out how you’ll do it later.
This doesn’t mean leaving yourself with no security or destroying good working relationships. Make sure you have a safety net, but do ask yourself how much of a net you really need.
2. Ever increasing circles
If the above goes against your core DNA, try the opposite. Build up your confidence gradually by taking tiny steps in the right direction.
Sign up for the newsletter of an organisation that interests you, go to a conference in an industry that intrigues you, or call up the friend of a friend who made a move similar to the one that you’re contemplating.
3. 233, 600 hours
All you 40 year olds reading this, this is how many waking hours you may have left! This is assuming you get to 80, a fairly respectable innings that none of us can afford to take for granted.
It’s a sobering calculation and it’s not my intention to depress anyone. But now and then I think it’s worth reminding ourselves that our time here is finite, and we need to make the most of it.
4. Whistle a happy tune
On a lighter note….! Take a leaf from Deborah Kerr’s book. When faced with a daunting aspect of your career change, fake nonchalance.
An easy way to do this is to pretend you’re someone else. My mother for example is cowed by no-one (except spotty 16 year old bank clerks – a puzzling anomaly). She once gave me some great advice. When you need to make a phone call you’re worried about, don’t endlessly rehearse what you’re going to say – you’ll put the call off for days. Just pick up the phone and dial.
If you’re researching a career shift, don’t let those contacts languish neatly but uselessly on your excel spreadsheet until precisely the right moment (there never is one). Pick up the phone and dial!
5. Mix with the right crowd
The changes you are proposing will stir up strong feelings in those around you. Your family will want to protect you. Friends and colleagues may feel envious and unsettled.
Seek out people who have successfully achieved what you hope to, or who are on that track (you can find networking groups and forums of all flavours through a quick search on Google). It’s easier to be brave in the company of others headed in the same direction.
This is your one life. Don’t be trapped in the gilded cage of handsome salary and benefits, or in the dark cave of self-doubt and fear. Remember Seneca’s words:
“He who is brave is free.”
“We crucify ourselves between two thieves: regret for yesterday and fear of tomorrow.”
Fulton Oursler, American writer
One of the hardest things I’ve seen career-changers grapple with is making peace with yesterday so that they can move on in a new direction today.
It’s hardly surprising that this is difficult. My clients tend to be very intelligent, dedicated professionals who because of these qualities by the time they have reached their thirties or forties have achieved considerable success (if not always the deepest satisfaction) in their fields.
It’s not easy to let go of the status, sense of identity or – frankly speaking – the money that often comes with this success. Despite desperately wanting to change, many want-to-be career-changers are held back by the notion that it’s wasteful to abandon a path they have poured so much time, energy and funds into pursuing. These thoughts lead to those icky feelings of despair, obligation (the dreaded “shoulds”), self-blame and regret – all of which are great at keeping us stuck.
Take Bethany for example. Bethany, now 35, qualified as a veterinarian in the States. She and I worked together earlier this year when I did some contracting for INSPIRED, the wonderful organisation set up by my friend Jasmine to provide life and career transition support for expats and expat spouses in China.
Even though Bethany had doubts about her “fit” with veterinary science from her very first job, she found it hard to let go of the status that came with her profession, and of the feeling that she should continue having invested so much in it.
“If you say you’re a vet, people get an idea about you. They know how much education went in to that. They have a rough idea of what you do each day. Maybe they have a cat or dog themselves, so they find what you do interesting, they can relate.”
Bethany practised for many years before she was able to give herself permission to put her old career in the past. “Not as a mistake but as a part of my life that I had lived through and learned from.”
Now when Bethany tells people she’s a genealogist (her practice www.ancestorhound.com specialises in mid-Western genealogical research), they’re not as enthusiastic as they were about her previous career. But it doesn’t matter, because she’s enjoying herself doing something that’s just for her:
“I love my work. I get a thrill from looking up old Census records and thinking ‘that’s my grandmother – and those were her neighbours’. It goes beyond the facts of the research – it’s about encouraging conversations among families.”
In fact Bethany is so happy with the result of her career change, she now jokes that “divorce yourself from the past” is her new motto – which I find nicely ironic for someone in her line of business!
Here are some suggestions for letting go of the past as Bethany did:
1. Ask yourself, how is feeling bad about the past helping you? It’s not actually serving any useful purpose, beyond giving you the scant comfort that at least you feel miserable about not moving forward.
2. Reflect on what the past has taught you. You will bring a wisdom and richness to your next career that you could not have done as a shiny new blemish-free graduate.
3. Adopt a forward-looking motto. I love the 1961 “je ne regrette rien” song by Edith Piaf, but feel free to choose something less cheesy!
I know it easier said than done. But if 2010 is to mark the start of your new life, this Christmas why not give yourself the present of making peace with your past.
Merry Christmas!
 A few days ago I downloaded a talk from the TED website that has been replaying itself in my mind ever since.
TED is a non profit organisation dedicated to spreading “ideas worth sharing.” TED believes that through powerful ideas we can change our lives, and ultimately the world.
In this particular talk, brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor was relating her experience of suffering a massive stroke several years previously.
She watched as the practical, individualistic side of her brain shut down and she lost her ability to move, speak or be aware of her self as a separate person. At the same time the creative, holistic side of her brain opened up. She experienced the awe and beauty of merging into, becoming an indistinguishable part of, the life energy all around her.
As she drifted into unconsciousness, Jill faced the near certainty of her death. In her own words, she was struck with the realisation that she was no longer the choreographer of her own life.
How frightening it must be to lose our tenuous grip on life. Meeting our end with peace and dignity - as so many people do - must call on all our reserves of wisdom, faith and courage.
That moment in the video made me think. We have so much power over the direction our lives can take. Yet in the end we have none.
I suppose that thought could support a nihilistic view - that life is meaningless so whatever we do it doesn’t matter. For me though, it just reinforces the importance of making the very most of the time we do have.
Choreography literally means “dance writing”. I love that as a metaphor for a way to live our lives. Jill was a wise lady. Before the stroke, she was already dancing through her life - wholeheartedly engaged in work that she passionately believed in.
But sadly we don’t get up on our dancing toes enough. We too often sludge heavy-footed through the humdrum, literally marching to someone else’s tune. Maybe we work for a company whose purpose seems pointless to us. Or perhaps we have focused so much on our partner or children’s happiness that we have forgotten our own hopes and dreams.
You are important.
In the words of Henry Ford:
“Every new life is a new thing under the sun; there has never been anything just like it before, and never will be again”
What is your unique dance?
Share it with the world. No-one else can dance it quite like you.
Click here to view Jill’s incredible talk
Stroke of Insight,
You can also subscribe to receive regular video feeds of the latest TED talks as they are recorded.
By
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Published
October 18, 2009
 Although we don’t always like to admit it, one of the biggest reasons we don’t always go for what we want in work - or life - is that we are afraid of failure.
Why does the idea of failure hold such power over us? Actually, we recover from failures all the time. Consider this:
How many relationships have you “failed” at?
Unless you married your childhood sweetheart, the chances are that you lie somewhere in the range “less than Madonna, more than Lady Di” (to quote Andi McDowell in Four Weddings and A Funeral). And although it can really hurt, we do eventually get over our past loves and venture back out into dating territory. And let’s face it, there’s not much that’s tougher than that!
At school were you ever REALLY BAD at anything?
When I was 12 my school sports report for the year read simply “Sarah’s ball skills need improving.” A whole page was set aside for comments and I secured just that one damning sentence.
What were you terrible at at school? Did it irredeemably blight the rest of your life?
Ever had an interview but didn’t get the job?
I still vividly recall, 15 years later, two interviews I had for a legal training contract. The partner terminated one after 7 minutes, by asking me if I had any questions. At the end of the other, I reached for a Kit Kat from the plate in the middle of the table. “Take a few” the interviewer graciously remarked “you might as well get something from this interview“. (So I did.)
But when we think about it, we wouldn’t expect to get every job we interviewed for, to get As in every subject or to land the perfect relationship first go. A certain amount of failure is normal.
Reminding ourselves that we are accustomed to failure - that it’s a common and overcomeable part of our lives - is a good way to reduce its power.
What have been the major failures, or emotional low points, in your life?
Take some time to write them down. A very helpful exercise is to think about what you’ve learnt from each one (compassion, patience, forethought?…likely many important things).
But the main point is to notice that you’ve made it past them. You’re still here - presumably relatively unscathed. That is, getting up every day, breathing, getting dressed, eating, able to work, make friends, bring up your children and find your house keys (ok maybe that’s pushing it).
So when you look back at those difficult times, what strategies did you, perhaps subconsciously, use to get through them?
I remember an exercise I did years ago when training to volunteer at a Drugs Project in Bristol. The trainer asked us to draw a timeline of our life and mark the really tough points. Then we recalled what we’d done each time to cope.
I realised that one of my main coping mechanisms is to immerse myself in information. When my friend was diagnosed with leukaemia, I scoured the internet until I became an amateur expert on her strain of the disease. After a painful relationship break-up I read everything I could lay my hands on about the meaning of love, life…you name it…I became quite the philosopher.
What got you through your hard times?
Know that you can tackle any new situation - a business failure, a job loss - with these same strategies. Failure becomes then not something to fear, but as Henry Ford wisely observed “simply the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”
Good places to find out more about bouncing back from failure:
Thank you to Ellie who recently introduced her blog to me. It’s entirely devoted to the subject of resilience, and sparked the idea for this article: www.bouncebackcafe.com/
My new friend Sital has written a great post on the advantages of “screwing things up” - www.6figurecareermanagement.com/cvsresumes/be-average-and-have-lots-of-goes/
And a good book on the subject: www.amazon.com/Resilience-Factor-Essential-Overcoming-Inevitable/dp/0767911903
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