Stages of Creative Career Change: Did I Get It Right?

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been brainstorming ways to help some friends in the Fast Track Your Dream program move more quickly through the process of discovering their calling and transitioning to a new career. It led me to put together information from different fields – marketing and psychology – to think about the stages of creative career change.

I sketched out my ideas then filled in some details. Then I went back and refined things to make them clearer. I wound up with a pretty good framework for understanding the process in general steps and knowing what people might need at each step.

The stages I came up with go from (1) dissatisfaction with work but not interested in finding a calling, to (2) wondering if work can be meaningful, to (3) beginning to investigate creative alternatives to a job-in-a-box, to (4) getting clear about the idea of a calling and seeing how to make it into a career, to (5) developing a plan to start a creative career, to (6) implementing the plan, then to (7) mastery of the new career.

So of course I took a look at my own career transition to see where I am.

Great news! As of last week I’ve started the move from Plan Development to Plan Implementation. I know, I know, I’ve been implementing along the way. In my framework people are gathering information and learning things while they develop their plan. I was learning by trying things out, and I kept getting away from the focus of getting a clear plan. Good thing I didn’t have me as a client. I would have driven me nuts!

Next for me come the stages where I get competent at the basics, then over time master my career. Fortunately I get to add new plans and pieces to my business along the way so I will have variety and new challenges, and I’ll go through many of the stages for each new component.

This framework of stages lets me think in terms of helping other people focus their questions, their research, and their effort. It gives them a way to figure out where they are in the process and focus on the next steps instead of trying to do a lot of different steps that are probably out of order.

If anyone stumbles across this post and has comments, questions, or feedback on the process of finding your calling and designing your life around it, please post comments here or e-mail me. I would love to develop a program that incorporates all kinds of individual differences and possible challenges but still quickly pinpoints where to focus your time and effort.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Good News! I’ve Always Been A Career Mess!

After I tried to find colleagues on Facebook and LinkedIn last week, I started thinking about places I worked long ago. I went in the way back machine nearly twenty years, to a job I had as a therapist and case manager at a Residential Treatment Center (RTC) in Fort Worth, closed down for many years now.

The first person I thought of was a friend I haven’t seen or talked to in years. We maintained our friendship well past the brief lifetime (was it 21 months or 21 years?) I spent at the RTC. His name is Victor. Victor is passionate and lively and a deep thinker. He’s also pretty driven, which can be a little intimidating at times, but it’s one of the reasons I really liked him from the beginning. But the main reason I “clicked” with Victor was because, in spite of being passionate about many things and wanting to have meaningful work, he had a hard time figuring out a path. A kindred spirit! We had many conversations about how to figure out what we wanted to be when we grew up, even though I was already on a general career path as a therapist.

Victor considered social agency work for a while and thought about a social work degree, but that seemed like a fallback position while he toyed with other ideas. When he got married to a wonderful young lady with similar values and life goals, studying in a similar field, I figured he found his career track.

Then he decided to become a minister! Yes, it’s definitely related, and yes, the ministry needs passionate and deeply thinking people who want to serve others. But it was still a surprise. He got involved in setting up a new church in his denomination. Now that made more sense—applying talents to changing and improving the world and not just settling in to a job.

We dropped out of contact within a year or so of children coming into our families, I think. I went on a Google safari and finally found him, or at least a related listing with a person who could find him. He left the ministry a few years back after serving fully and intensely, then relocated and transitioned to being an insurance agent. Now he’s looking at setting up a non-profit agency to start a private school in his new hometown for kids who aren’t being served. He’s still the same core person, still using his gifts and his passions to define his life, but going through different stages of what that looks like.

Then I called my long-time friend Paige, who also worked with me at the RTC. We actually met in college and then were in the same graduate program. We had practicum assignments (that’s internship without pay) together for a couple of years. When I heard about the job at the RTC just after graduate school, I called her and found out she had just been hired there. When I left the RTC after 21 years (or months?) of dedicated service to work in a private clinic, she had just started there, too! We were invited months before at the same time by the same psychologist, but the timing was amazing.

Paige and I have had many conversations about where we are headed in our careers. Would we pursue doctorates? In what field? Would we work in agencies or in private practice? We both went part-time as therapists and tried other careers, and we both eventually left the mental health field for long periods of time. Now she’s staying home with her children and helping one son get the educational services he needs, using her training in a way she could never have anticipated. It’s the right fit for now, for this time in her life based on the needs of her family.

Reconnecting is wonderful. It’s especially good to remember that I’ve been thinking about “what I want to be when I grow up” since before I was grown up. And it’s really cool to realize I will never figure it out, enter that career, and be done. It’s the wrong question!

The right question for me is—

What do you want to do for this season that honors your calling, uses your gifts, engages your passions, and integrates with the values that guide your life?

See. That’s so much easier to answer!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Vocation, Vocation, Vocation

My birthday was this past Wednesday so I gave myself a gift.

Actually, I accepted and moved forward the gift someone else gave me. Gayle Scroggs let me know that a colleague in the Coaching world is accepting new members to a support group for those of us building Coaching businesses.

I contacted the Coach and then she and I had our first conversation Wednesday. I will be “visiting” the virtual group the next time they meet, and if we all agree I’m a good fit I’ll join them.

It will be an important step. Just planning that first phone call got me to move a little bit on thinking about how I want to structure my services and products. Getting a lot of individual Coaching clients doesn’t interest me right now. In fact, it sounds like I would be building my own cage. But planning ways to offer time-limited training groups and time-limited support groups, along with a couple of open-ended support groups, has me excited.

I was reading through 48 Days To The Work You Love by Dan Miller today and was reminded of something important. He discusses the difference between vocation (a calling), career (a path of related work within a field), and a job (one particular instance). I knew for quite a while that I want to honor my vocation, my calling, which I believe is hard-wired into my DNA and into my spirit. But I thought of a vocation as a special level of career, like a more meaningful career. It’s not just his career—it’s his vocation.

But Dan Miller’s view is that career is a subset that can fit under vocation, just as job is a subset that can fit under career. Once you find your vocation, that life calling, you can choose a career that fits with it. Discovering your vocation is not the same as discovering your career. It just helps narrow the choices and points you to the right aisle.

Now I already understood that a person could have a career and not satisfy his or her vocation, and that recreational activities and creative pursuits can help fulfill a vocation. But I had this black and white thinking going on: either your career is your calling or you have a calling that can’t be a lucrative career so you have a career that supports you and you fulfill your calling in other ways.

His notion that a person can discover a vocation and then change careers while staying in the same vocation is transformational for me. My business doesn’t have to be everything in my vocation. It doesn’t have to align carefully and perfectly with every aspect of my calling. It just has to integrate with it.

I know my vocation. I love watching people grow and develop, gain new skills and new confidence, and find out what they’re capable of doing. I love seeing one person extend himself or herself to help another person get the vision and confidence to grow—that’s Mentorship. I love stories because they’re all about personal growth and development in their archetypal forms.

I have to be sure I honor and represent my calling in all my choices. I have to bring it into every aspect of my life. It will shape and help define my business over the years. It will also guide my personal growth and lead me to discover new things about myself that I can share with other people.

This takes some of the stress off of “getting my business right,” but it puts it more firmly on “getting my life right.”

Whew! Clarity and excitement and fear all at once. I must be on the right path again.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey