I Didn't Have It All Figured Out Either

Episode 44: One of the most common things that stops people from starting to work on changing their career is the belief that they have to have it all figured out first. In this episode, Career Change Coach Dana Stevens challenges that idea. She draws a clear distinction between having a direction and having a perfect plan, explains why you need the first and not the second, and shares two honest personal stories from her own experience of building her coaching business that show what this actually looks like in practice. 

In this episode you will learn:

• Why the first iteration of your plan is almost always the foundation for the next, not a wrong turn
• How starting is the only way to gather the information you need to find the right direction
• Why a bridging role or interim arrangement does not have to mean anything about whether your longer term plan is working

Book a free Coaching Consultation:

https://calendly.com/danastevens/initial-coaching-chat

Connect with Dana:

Website: https://www.danastevens.com/workwithme
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dana_stevens_coach/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danastevens1/

If this episode resonated, follow The Career Change Studio and share it with someone who’s feeling stuck in their career.

And if you’re ready to design a working life that truly fits your needs and lifestyle, book a free consultation call at https://calendly.com/danastevens/initial-coaching-chat

Special thanks to @Lou_Greenaway_Music for the piano composition and performance.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:57

Today I want to talk about something that stops a lot of people from even beginning to work on changing their career. And that is the belief that they have to have it all figured out first, all the details, that before they can start, they need to know exactly what they're moving towards, exactly how they're going to get there, and be reasonably certain it's going to work out. That anything short of a complete and perfect plan means they're not ready to begin. But this is simply too much pressure, and it's just not how this actually works. And what I want to offer you today is a different way of thinking about this. One that's both more honest and more useful, but also I'm going to share some stories from my own experience of building my coaching business that I hope will make this feel real rather than just theoretical, right? Because the truth is I didn't have it all figured out either. And the fact that I didn't is actually one of the most important reasons that I ended up exactly where I needed to be. And I think it's useful to just at the beginning make a distinction between having a direction and needing a perfect plan before you begin. A direction could be like a guiding sense of where you want to go or even what you want to change, right? The kind of working life you're moving towards, the things that matter to you, a kind of sense of needing or wanting something better, even if the specifics aren't clear yet. And a perfect plan is something different. It's this belief that you need every step mapped out, every decision accounted for, complete certainty about the whole journey before you're allowed to start. The first is useful, but you don't need the second before you begin. And a lot of people are waiting until they've got a complete and perfect plan before they allow themselves to start, when actually having a broad direction is enough to begin with. Because that plan itself, a real and practical one, that is something that gets built as part of the process. In my career change coaching with my clients, it's one of the core things we work on together, but it's built from inside the journey with proper information and clarity that we work on together. It's not constructed beforehand, from a standing start, before any of that work has happened. So don't feel bad or don't feel like you can't get started if you don't have that. So I thought it might be useful if I tell you what happened when I first decided to become a coach. I'd spent years in marketing and advertising, I'd been head of strategy at a London ad agency, and when I decided I wanted to move into coaching, one of the logical things, or that felt logical at the time, was to combine what I already knew with this new direction. So after I trained as a coach and got certified, I set up as a coach for small business owners, specifically to help them with a combination of their marketing and their mindset together. It made sense. I had the expertise, it felt like a manageable transition rather than a complete leap into unknown territory. And I actually think this is an important point because sometimes the first iteration of a plan needs to feel viable and tangible, even if it's not the final destination. It gives you something concrete to start from. So I originally set up my coaching business under a different name with a different logo, different brand identity, whole different website, and it was going well. I had quite a lot of clients, I was enjoying the work, things were moving, but something interesting started happening. Word was getting around that I'd left advertising and set up on my own and built my own business. And people kept coming to me through my network, through friends of friends, who wanted help doing the same kind of thing, not with their marketing strategy, with the bigger question of what they were going to do with their career, how they were going to leave the industry they were in. They'd heard I'd made a significant change and they wanted to work with someone who'd actually done it before them. And I loved helping them, honestly, really loved it. There was something about the work, helping someone open their eyes to what might be possible, helping them believe in themselves, helping them change something significant about their working life, which means it could change so much about how they're experiencing the rest of their life. And one evening, while I was running a group coaching program, I had a successful group coaching program for small business owners, and it was going really well. I was enjoying it, the group were getting a lot from it. And about 10 o'clock that night after we'd finished that training session, out of nowhere, I had this thought, that went really well, and I don't want to do that anymore. Not because the coaching wasn't working, but because I'd realized very clearly in that moment that what I wanted to do, the type of coaching I wanted to do, wasn't helping people with their email marketing strategy, which I think was what that session was about, actually. It was about helping people create real change in their lives. And that's what I wanted to focus in on. So that night I decided to sort of rip up the first business, take down the website, change the name, create a new logo, new brand, completely relaunch with a different focus. And the crucial thing I want you to hear about that moment isn't the drama of it. Because I honestly wasn't in loads of drama about it. I didn't spend loads of time telling myself I'd got it wrong. I didn't decide that the first business was a failure or that I should have known from the start what I actually wanted. Because that kind of hindsight is only possible after you've started. It was the foundation. It wasn't a wrong turn. I was only able to get to where I am now by starting somewhere else, by getting in the room with clients, by getting the coaching reps in, by coaching different people on different things, and then seeing what I loved and seeing what really resonated. The information I needed to find the right direction was only available from the inside by getting started. I couldn't have found it out from outside by just thinking about it, by being theoretical. And what my story shows is something I see again and again with the clients I work with. You take your best educated, informed guest about what might be the right direction, you start moving in that direction that feels right with the information you have available, and then something happens. You start doing the thing, you gather new information, you have new experiences, you find out what you actually love and what you don't, what energizes you and what drains you, what fits and what doesn't fit. Information that simply wouldn't have been available to you before you began, and now you've got more information, more data, more to work with, a clearer picture of the right direction than you could have ever had from that standing start. And if it turns out that you need to adjust, to course correct, to find a slightly different way forward, you can do that. You adjust. You don't need to decide that the whole thing was wrong or you should never have tried. You just use what you've learned to take the next step in a slightly different direction. But this doesn't mean that your plan has failed. It means your plan is working exactly as it should because the plan was never to get everything absolutely right at the start. The plan was to start and learn and adjust and keep moving forwards. Trying to have a perfect plan before you begin and holding on to it, gripping onto it so tightly that you can't adjust when things evolve, that puts enormous pressure on a process that is inherently iterative. Right? You can't think your way to the perfect answer from the outside. You've got to be inside to find out. And there's another chapter of this story that I thought might be useful to share as well, because again, I think it addresses something that stops a lot of people. After I'd relaunched the business with the new name and the new focus, there was a period where I wasn't signing as many new clients as I needed. And I'd been project managing some renovations at home and I'd been kind of slightly distracted, and I hadn't been marketing as consistently as before. And my income wasn't where I needed it to be. So I know this is something people worry about, like what happens if I make a change and suddenly I can't earn the money or I can't pay my mortgage. Well, I made a pragmatic decision. I started looking around for some part-time work that I could pick up alongside what I was building. And I didn't want to go back to my previous role in advertising. Instead, I wanted something that was going to be complementary to the business I was building. And I ended up working part-time for a coaching company for about six months, helping them set up systems and processes, supporting with their recruitment of their coaches, coordinating their coaching team, and it helped me pay the mortgage and pay the bills. Well, I continued to invest and build up my business. And here's the part I want to be really clear about. At no point during those six months did I think, oh my god, my business has failed. Oh, I should never have started a business. What if this never works? Not once I made an intentional decision that I was going to continue to believe in the success and the inevitable success of my business. I didn't make the situation mean anything more than this is a short-term, practical solution so that I could carry on investing in my business, so that I could stay focused on the thing that I was building. In fact, it was actually during this period that I invested even more money in my own coaching, in coaching for myself to help me grow my business, which I know might sound a bit counterintuitive when your income has dipped, but I was holding on to this thought so clearly, my business is going to be a success. Anything I'm doing now is about ensuring that success. I need to find ways to make sure it is, and that conviction is what carried me through. And I had worked very hard to build up this vision of what my business was going to be and the lifestyle it was going to give me and why it was so important to me. So that remained non-negotiable. That remained the thing. Creating that vision for the life I was moving towards became the thing that carried me through that time. And I'm sharing this because I think it's genuinely useful for people who worry about the financial side of making a change. Like the worry's real, I'm not dismissing it. We've got to make sure we're paying our bills. But what I want you to see is that a bridging role, an interim job, some part-time work that keeps things afloat while you keep building towards what you actually want, that's never a sign of failure. That doesn't have to mean anything about whether your plan is working, it's just a practical tool, a way of keeping yourself in the game while the longer-term thing develops. You don't have to make it mean anything more than this. You just have to keep your eye on what you're actually building and keep building it. And also just know that this is available to you in the future. You can be pragmatic, you can earn money while also keeping your original plan dream alive. So, what does all of this mean for you? If you've been waiting to even start working on your career change because you feel like you don't have the perfect plan yet, that's the bit that career change coaching helps with. Helping you figure out your direction. Having enough of a plan, and enough of a plan is the important thing, not the perfect plan, enough of a plan so that you can start moving forwards. I don't want you to just stay stuck because you're worried you might not get it exactly right. You don't need to have it all figured out. You need a direction, you need a guiding sense of where you're going, what matters to you, what kind of working life you're moving towards. And that's what I can help you with, right? Getting clear on that, building that clarity of what you want if you don't know that yet. And then we build a plan, a working plan as you go. The clarity comes from being in it, the information you need to make things better, better decisions, that becomes available to you once you've started working through things together. And then the more experience you have, the more information you have about how you continue to build that pathway for yourself. And if something needs to change along the way, if the first iteration turns out to be the foundation for the second rather than destination, that is not failure. That is the process doing exactly what it's supposed to do. And if even the thought of that feels unnerving to you, that's part of the mindset work that I do with my clients. Helping them to manage their mindset through uncertainty, helping them to overcome any sense of like fear or trepidation. We can work through that so that you can start moving forwards. And if there are practical financial realities that need to be managed along the way, which, let's be honest, are there for most people, we can work them into the plan. They become part of your criteria for how you're going to make decisions, they become part of your plan. And a bridging role, a temporary arrangement, something that keeps things moving, keeps the bills being paid, that can just be a practical tool. You can use it without making it mean anything about whether your longer-term plan is working. You can just keep moving forwards. One of the only ways to find out what's really right for you is to start. Start imperfectly with a direction and an evolving plan rather than a perfect plan. And that is going to be infinitely better than not starting at all. So, whatever you're trying to figure out about your career right now, I want you to sit with this. You're probably not going to have every single detail figured out perfectly when you start. And that's okay. That's even a good thing. You're not supposed to. The figuring out happens in the doing. The clarity continues to build as you move. The right direction gets clearer and clearer the further along the path you get. What you need is not a perfect plan. What you need is a starting point and a willingness and a mindset capable of adjusting, learning, course correcting, and to keep going, even when the path looks slightly different from how you might have imagined it at the beginning. So if you want help figuring out your direction, working out where to start, help with your mindset so that you can work through a process like this, this is exactly what a free consultation with me is for. Come and have that conversation, and we'll talk about how career change coaching can help you move forwards. The link as ever is in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening this week. I'm going to see you next time. Bye for now.