This is the story of Maggie, a 36-year-old public relations
professional with a zest for life. Day in and out working her a** off to meet client deadlines, work on
campaigns, attend board meetings and all this while looking pretty and fresh as
a daisy. She manages to do it all.
Right! ‘Manages’, that’s the key word.
So there’s a hitch. She drags herself out of bed every day, wanders
around in the kitchen dreading another high pressure, unchallenging as hell a
job. Brushes her teeth expecting it to brush her stress and negativity too... Surprised?
Well don’t be as most of you reading this go through it every day. Heck what, I’ve
been guilty too.
Maggie always wanted to be a drama teacher. She loved
decking herself up, standing in front of the mirror and reciting movie lines
which a normal brain wouldn't even remember. After high school, she completed
her education in Public Relations and never for once looked back. Now the
problem was she always desired to look back and change things but didn't...
We can’t undo what has happened but we can always start
afresh. “Changing careers at 36 is like taking 30 forks and stabbing yourself
possibly to death or worse to an incapacitation,” she had said. Today, at 47
she is a famous drama teacher. So what happened in 11 years? She enrolled into a
theatre teaching course and worked her way into the career. Simple! No, it didn’t
work as planned. Maggie put in her
papers and picked up a casual job at a cafe all this while wondering what the
hell she’s got herself into. She lost the cafe job because she clearly couldn’t
give a rat’s a** to cleaning dishes and making coffees. She was always served
coffee not the other way round. A few months down the line, she picked up a
weekend job at a hotel’s front desk and started going for her classes – drama teaching!
The money had started to deplete, friends had started to make fun of her, she
lost her confidence quite a number of times but what she didn’t lose was her
focus. Maggie did have self doubts, lapses of depression, but she only
understood one thing – “If at 37 I am already finding it a chore to go to work
and look forward to Friday evenings, I am not far away from an early retirement,
which is great but it would be a retirement without any money and with lots of
relinquished dreams.” Most of us would pass it as mid-life crisis, crazy brain,
lunatic thoughts; but that’s because most of us don't have the guts to do something
like this.
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| Source: Figandthistle.blogspot.com |
Should we work at a job that we don’t like much just because
that suits our qualifications and it’s the one that will pay our bills? You might
debate with “I want to change my career but it isn't the time right now. I need to save up money and then think
of taking a risk OR I have to feed my kids first or I have a mortgage to pay.”
All valid excuses! I say excuses because
many of us want to make that change but we keep waiting for the conditions to
be “right.” Let’s get this clear, the conditions would never be right. You will
need to find the courage to make that change regardless.
I urge you to get a pen and paper and draw a picture of you
doing what you love the most. Below it
write a timeline of a perfect day. (Well, don’t include holiday itinerary).
Does it even match 20 per cent? If it doesn’t, time to zoom in and stop
performing your work on autopilot.
