By Jim Malone

This post was written on July 31, 2020.

The hardest thing to do is keep those voices of doubt outside your mind. Who am I kidding – changing careers at my age? How will I convince anyone to pay me? Will I be able to earn enough money? Why don’t I just go back to what I know – it might take some time, but at least I can step in and earn decent money. These thoughts are escalated by the uncertainty provided by the COVID-19 response, or if you are me, having a young family. For clarity, my preferred path is what is being called today a “portfolio career”. Not just a single 9 to 5 job with benefits. The name of the game is flexibility, quasi-entrepreneurship and doing things I like. Sounds great but when you start to dig into it, it is really scary.

So how do you avoid these negative emotions that turn into sleepless nights? There are several things that have helped me stave off a panic attack.

It’s a bit cliche, but it is important to have someone to talk to at a personal level. Someone that can professionally assure you, but that you can also confide in. That is, it can’t be someone that is going to listen to your fears and then get fearful themselves…so your spouse might not be the best choice. Although their reassurance is certainly helpful you don’t want your spouse constantly adding to your blood pressure levels if they turn fearful. What is best is someone that has been there before or that knows their way around career change. For me it is my coach, who deals with this subject matter all of the time. It could be a mentor you’ve had in your career. In any case, when the aforementioned negative thoughts go into overdrive – get on the line with your transition therapist, whoever he or she might be. They will help walk you from the edge. If they don’t, find someone who can.

The next thing that helps me is to just take a day of two off after I have a particularly heavy bout of negative thoughts. The suffocation happens to me because I am tackling too much at once, and not progressing as quickly as I would like. Then my wife or someone makes a comment about my plans for finding work and I feel like I am drowning. Telling myself there is no rush and to take some time to recharge has been helpful. If I rush, I know what I’ll do. I’ll be making PowerPoints again for the rest of my life. At this point it is important for me to disclose that I have cash on hand and can afford to go at a slower pace at the moment. It has been four months since getting the ax and time is starting to become an issue. I had given myself three months of a “time-out” it should be noted, so I have only been thinking about these things for a month now.

The other thing to do early on is general research in the public sphere targeting some real life examples of others’ experiences (mainly for some assurance that you aren’t a whacko for wanting a new-age “portfolio” career before you are about to have a baby). Two websites that have been helpful for me to browse:

• https://www.careershifters.org (I only browsed the success stories, there are a lot of them and highly useful. I do not use them as my coach so I can’t comment on their services)
• https://puttylike.com/about/ (a network of people looking to do more than one thing – probably something I will join, but haven’t as yet)

Some books that have been recommended to me (I can follow up with my thoughts on any of these after I have read them):

• What Color Is Your Parachute? 2020: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers                                                                                                                                     by Richard N. Bolles
• Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career                    by Herminia Ibarra
• Getting Unstuck: A Guide to Discovering Your Next Career Path
   by Timothy Butler

Additionally, there are two other types of people that can give you more information. These people fit into what I like to think of as two brackets. The outside bracket (those that are easiest and most likely to get in touch with you in return) are those you have worked with in the recent past and have a pre-existing relationship with. The inside bracket are those that are actively (or close to) doing what you would like to. They might also be members of your outer bracket, but more likely it could be a friend of a friend or an old and forgotten contact. If you’re lucky, you will know someone already doing something of interest to you right now. The outer bracket doesn’t give you much in the way of concrete results or evidence, but they keep you social and acting professionally (to get out of the routine of slouching around with buddies). The inner bracket is more relevant for generating ideas and giving you important contacts.

If you are like me you have had a career of continually jumping vines. Essentially I have been a monkey that would only let go of one vine once I took hold of another. A career monkey, that’s me. Never taking the time to settle on the ground and think about where I am going. So it is important to remind yourself of this monkey. You don’t want to be a monkey. My scenario isn’t relevant to everyone, but for anyone who has always wondered about freelancing or a portfolio career, then I hope my experience resonates and has some effect. Right now I am in the process of shortlisting companies I would like to target. I can get into more of the actions I am taking in the future. However, headspace has been really important lately and that’s what I am trying to address here. Negative thoughts can hit you out of nowhere when you are unemployed.

I do believe the future is a workforce of freelancers, entrepreneurs and free agents. I believe the corporate working model we know today will die off and become unrecognisable. Today we look back 100 years and see labour in the Western world as close to a form of slave labour, and a century before that looks like feudalism compared to today. What will they say in 100 years? It is quite possible people will not be harking back to a time when workers were housed in temperature-controlled offices, sitting in  an open-top box while being forced to look at a screen for 8 hours a day or more in turn for declining real income, underfunded pensions and a few weeks of holiday.

If you believe in progress, then recent history tells us what is coming will provide more freedom, independence, choice and flexibility. The system will eventually encourage and support people to take risks to increase productivity, while robots handle the mundane stuff that people actually used to do. I do believe this, I just think we are in the beginnings of the transition. It will likely accelerate upon a major crisis or invention, or the latter having been enabled by the former. As you begin to conduct research, you will realise just how many people are in the same boat as you and how much opportunity there actually is. There has never been so many freelancers and career variety as today. The so called gig economy is not just Uber drivers. I am only beginning to discover this now and believe me, it helps. But you must continue to talk to people, research and stay away from those negative “comfort-seekers” who always talk about how they hate their job, yet they keep going back to the well. It doesn’t mean you can never do the same as them, but keep it at the back of your mind as the fallback plan. Keeping away from them will keep it at the back of your mind. It might mean distancing some friends, but if they can’t shut up about it your only other option is to be straight with them.