Overcoming Your Own Psychology When Making a Career Pivot

Psychology and our mental state touches everything we do and sometimes it can feel like a rollercoaster. How can we go from feeling confident and on top of the world one day to feeling like a failure and hopeless the next. 

Making a career pivot - even a small one - is mentally challenging. It upends what you thought you knew about the world. You see things through a lens you didn't know existed and it can be jarring. 

Why? Because just when you think you have everything figured out, you realize you don't. Sometimes you weren't even close. 

This is when you're most vulnerable to comparing yourself to others and social media can be the fuel that's added to your self-doubt and overwhelm.

When that happens, a lot of people will quit. It becomes too uncomfortable. Their lizard brain urges them back to the safety and comfort of what they knew before, never realizing what could have been. 

And those are the people who actually gave it a try. The majority of people never try. The thought of pushing beyond their comfort zone is too much for them and they keep doing what they're doing. Which is fine. Everyone has their own levels of risk aversion. Those people have also forfeited the right to bitch about their situations, too. That's the price for inaction.

So, if you push through the discomfort and the worry and the comparisons you get practice at how to do this - because if you want to see what you're truly capable of, it won't be the last time you feel that way. 

This kind of overwhelm used to cause me to quit and go back to what was easy and known.

What changed?

I began to look at the world through the lens of abundance versus scarcity. I began realizing that I don't have to be for everyone. I don't have to know everything about anything. 

I also started to realize that nothing is rocket science- besides rocket science. Everyone I see on social media doing what I do was, at one time, in the exact same place that I am. 

Pivots and learning can be like a flywheel. At first, things are slow and there's a lot of friction, but eventually, everything becomes easier, the flywheel builds momentum and begins to spin faster. Once you've built the base of knowledge and have gotten a view reps under your belt, you can pile on more and more. The things that seemed complex in the beginning are now simple. 

What all of this has taught me is the key to continued growth is to never seek comfort. Instead seek ease. There's a difference. One comes from complacency, the other comes from expertise and practice.