The art of life crafting.

Ever heard of it?

It's about defining what you want in your life, taking that vision, and prioritizing where you put your energy and effort to achieve those goals.

Simple enough, right?

You'd be surprised how many people don't take advantage of the benefits that life crafting can bring into their lives.

Not only will it open doors to everything that is possible for you, but it will also provide a framework to get to the life you want.

Now, let's take a moment and think about what it is that you would like to have in your life.

Think about it this way, in a perfect world, what does your life look like?

In terms of your career, where would you be working? What would you be doing? How does your work impact your personal life?

Life crafting allows you to design your career goals and manage how your career aligns with your overall life goals.

In order to get comfortable with the idea of life crafting, we'll take a look at what may be holding you back from intentionally designing a life you’d be in love with and how to move forward in achieving your career goals to better fit that life you've designed.

As High-Performers, we like to make sure we have the majority of our bases covered before we dive head-first into the deep-end of our career change.

But, sometimes we find challenges where we least expect them.

When we look at career change, we know that taking on this big life change requires a great amount of time, energy, financial planning, and a solid support system to lean on when the career change process becomes overwhelming.

One of the least-talked about topics of career change is our current and ongoing support system.

Today, we have Rebecca Maddox as a guest on our podcast.

Listen in as she shares her challenges in finding the right way to communicate with her support system as she took on her cross-country career change.

Learn ways you can navigate your relationships in order to remain authentic to yourself and your career goals. 

So many questions that plague people that have decided to take the bull by the horns and make a career change for themselves.

The ups and downs that they encounter before they make the official jump to a new job position, organization, industry, or business venture are sometimes glossed over once they find success.

But, people that find that success as they transition to a new stage in their career know all too well the hard work, the endless days and nights they were kept awake at night, and the energy it took to put in the work to get where they are today.

One of those people is Cesar Ponce de Leon.

We had the pleasure of working with him as he took on the challenge to move from his previous job in legal affairs to a role at an organization that spoke more to his heart and true life calling.

Cesar ran into a few stumbling blocks along the way, but with the right tools and resources he was able to find success in his career transition.

His story of hard work and non-stop effort is one to take note of, so we've put together an outline of his biggest challenges and the process that he followed to guide him through to reach his career goals.

Check it out!

In your ideal world, what does your life look like? What kind of work would you be doing?

What is stopping you from achieving that now?

Seriously, what is stopping you?

Here’s a hint: NOTHING IS STOPPING US FROM MOVING TOWARD OUR GOALS, VISIONS, LIVES WE DREAM OF…
…well, except for ourselves.

There’s this interesting concept about “learned permission-seeking.”

We’ve been conditioned by parents, teachers, and society to ask for permission to do things.

Now when it comes to change, as adults, we still wait for that permission to make a change.

We look for someone to give us permission or validate our choice to try a new hobby, go back to school, quit a steady job to start our own businesses, flip career paths, or create any type of change within our lives.

Permission stops so many people from moving forward.

Oftentimes, we find ourselves in these situations where we seem stuck because nobody has given us the green light to proceed with our actions — which is crazy, since these are our own lives we are talking about (!).

But, there are ways to create that permission for yourself to be more, do more, and achieve more of your goals.

Check out the episode to hear more about how you can start giving yourself the permission you need to start living a life you love with MJ Fitzpatrick.

Have you noticed any reoccurring themes in your life?

These themes can range from the habits you form, the hobbies you enjoy, the work you choose, the tasks you hate, the type of people you surround yourself with, and so on.

Just stop and think for a moment.

Does anything stand out?

The patterns and themes that appear in your life are little nuggets of gold that you shouldn’t hastily push aside when you’re looking to make any big life changes, like a career transition.

As much as we emphasize how digging deeper into your own patterns in your career and life is the first piece of research you need to do before you start down the career change road, we know that sometimes it is hard to accept those patterns for what they truly are.

Just ask our guest, Matthew Toy, who avoided accepting what everyone else around him knew about how big of an impact his own passion for practicing yoga had on his life.

Fast forward to now, and you’ll find Matt teaching and practicing Man Yoga (yoga for men) at the Berkeley Yoga Center, re-educating people on what the practice of yoga really is through his Instagram, as well as at events. He is also the co-founder of a bakery.

With a full life, yoga practice, and career, Matt is now able to look back, reflect, and share his path on how accepting his own life patterns led him to where he is now.

Whoever said that hard work and perseverance doesn’t pay off sure didn’t meet Tanya.

What Tanya Malcolm Revell did when she was looking to make her big career change was no easy feat.

Besides being an American looking for work that fit her in London, Tanya is also a Career Change Bootcamp alum and our guest for this installment of our most recent CCB success story.

After experiencing the overwhelm of career burnout from her previous positions and frustration with the job search overseas, Tanya found HTYC, enrolled in Bootcamp, put in the hard work, built strategic relationships, and persevered even after some unanswered phone calls and emails to land her dream job.

Curious how she did it?

Check out the episode and blog to learn:
- The steps in the CCB process that will properly position you during your career transition
- The unexpected benefits of putting yourself out there and networking
- How looking at the positive, rather than getting stuck on the negative, is instrumental in helping you keep perspective on your career goals

When it comes to your career transition, it’s not information you’re lacking. In fact, it can feel like there’s an overabundance of data and research on anything and everything out there, thanks to the interwebs.

Here’s the trick: it’s how you organize and use the information you’ve collected over your lifetime that matters.

Jenny Blake, our guest on today’s podcast, figured out how to use her information when she was in a place that you may be able to relate to: she was stuck...trying to figure out what was next in her career.

She’d left college to work at a startup, then left the startup to work at Google, and had just left a job at Google to go out on her own as an author.

She had become the girl that was known for leaving things.

She wondered who she was, how she could have an impact, and what she could build through work that was meaningful. She was struggling to make a breakthrough from all of her career analysis, and she felt completely stuck.

For Jenny, as someone scanning the horizon for her next career possibilities, she realized that all she needed to do was ground herself in her strengths and take a look at what was already working for her.

Career change is about making the connection between the strengths you have right where you are -- and the possible paths towards where you want to go.

And, like Jenny did, you can design tiny experiments to take the pressure off yourself to get the answer to what your next career could be. Stepping back and looking at all of the information about yourself that you’ve gathered from past experiences will guide you through your own career exploration process.

Take a moment to listen to today’s episode, Successfully Pivot Your Career with Jenny Blake, to learn:

• How you can stop holding yourself back from your career change
• How and why creating an Ideal Day Map for yourself will help you see the success you envision for yourself
• Why you don’t always need a mentor...sometimes, you need a “friendtor” (friend + mentor)

Be sure to head over to the blog to learn more about the importance of the “scanning” process during your career change -- and get some new ideas on how you can move forward!

Want to know how to stop trying to combine everything together and start strategically pulling out the pieces of your past and your strengths that will serve you well in your future career?

That’s exactly what we cover in today’s podcast with Avery Roth, one of our All Star Career Coaches and our resident “Strategist” You’ll get to learn all about how she’s done this for herself in this podcast, (before she joined HTYC she got her start in finance then became an aspiring photographer, then changed to a startup strategist).

If you ever get a chance to work with Avery, you’ll quickly find that one of the great things about Avery is the way she uses her own career journey to help dig deeper into her client’s career and business goals in a methodical way to reign in their focus to achieve their ideal results. 

In the episode, Avery teaches you:

• Where to start to find a role and organization that fits your values, needs, skills, and knowledge
• The benefits of building off of your prior work and life experiences to create your career profile
• How analyzing the patterns and trends of the things you enjoy will help narrow down the next steps in your career change

Head on over to the blog and listen the podcast to learn how to find the next step to your career change.

Sure.

Feeling safe and at ease is great and all, but what goals have you ever achieved by staying in your comfort zone??

We’re willing to bet on not many at all.

Nobody ever achieves much by staying in their comfort zone.

WHY?

Well, achieving goals requires you to aim for something just a little bit out of your reach.

Having a goal makes you look forward to something attainable that may not be in your comfort zone (at the moment).

The question of how and when to reach out of our comfort zones comes up.

When it comes to career change, more likely than not you’ll be faced with the choice to break out of your comfort zone to progress down a new path that may be full of unknowns.

You can look at your career change in one of two ways:

1. An exciting opportunity to experience something new and grow your skills and knowledge
2. A big unknown that causes you to feel uncomfortable with the wonder of the what ifs that lead you to revert back and settle in your current job situation

But, the benefits of getting comfortable with feeling uncomfortable far outweigh staying in the little bubble of your comfort zone.

Today, Andy Molinsky - an expert on behavior in the business world and author of the new book, Reach: A New Strategy to Help You Step Outside of Your Comfort Zone, Rise to the Challenge, and Build Confidence, joins us on the podcast. He shares insight on:

• The 5 key challenges underlying our avoidance tendencies when it comes to uncomfortable situations
• How to overcome these challenges to achieve your career change goals
• The surprising discoveries you make about yourself as you continue to face your fears by stepping out of your comfort zone

Listen to my chat with Andy on how to Reach Out of Your Comfort Zone to learn the steps you can take to develop a framework to get comfortable turning whatever you are most afraid of doing and positioning yourself to achieve your goals in your career and life.

There's been a lot of talk recently about resilience.

You know what goes hand-in-hand with resilience?

Obstacles....to overcome.

Struggles....to work through.

Mental roadblocks....to disengage.

We've all experienced setbacks in life, but it's about how we react to them that makes the difference between reaching our goals or letting them fall by the wayside.

When it comes to career change, many people, including High Performers, are bound to stumble on a few things before ultimately reaching their new career.

Now, how is your career transition going?

Is it going nowhere fast?

It was for Sarah Hawkins. That is until she asked for help (when she knew that she needed it!).

Sarah Hawkins -- our guest on today’s podcast and Career Change Bootcamp Alumni, just landed her dream job (that she didn’t even know that she wanted!) as the Operations Coordinator of CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children).

She joins us as our featured success story from our Career Change Bootcamp program.

Check out the podcast to hear Sarah’s story as it explains Why High Performers Aren’t Afraid to Ask for Help and how the CCB program helped steer her in the right direction to land her dream job with an organization and a cause that she was excited about and to negotiate salary for the first time ever.