How to Get Your Spark Back

Episode 45: So many people who want to change careers say some version of the same thing: 

"I just do not feel like myself anymore."

 "I have lost my spark"

In this episode, Career Change Coach Dana Stevens explores how that happens, why the obvious solution of just getting a new job is rarely the complete answer, and what actually getting your spark back looks like in practice. She shares the story of a client who came to her after a difficult redundancy, having gradually lost everything that made her feel like herself along the way, and where that client is now. 

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Website: https://www.danastevens.com/workwithme
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danastevens1/

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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 0:51

Hello, so before I launch into today's topic, I just want to apologise if my voice sounds a little bit croaky. Um, I came back from a working holiday in Ireland and there was such a difference in temperatures between the heat wave in the south of England and the rain and the cool air up there. I think I caught a cold and have been coughing all sorts since I've come back, but I've taken lots of throat sweets. So hopefully, if you bear with me, I'm not too croaky today. So, today I want to talk to you about something that comes up with lots of my clients who are thinking about changing careers. Sometimes people talk about it right at the start because it might even be one of their motivations for making changes. And sometimes it's something that comes up once we've started working together already, and it's this. They tell me this. I just don't feel like myself anymore. I don't feel like me. Or they might even say it to me like I've I've really lost my spark, or I've lost my mojo, or I used to be someone who had energy and enthusiasm, and now I just feel flat. And it kind of shows up like I go to work, I come home, I collapse on the sofa, and then I do it all again tomorrow, and I can't remember the last time I really genuinely felt good. So if any of that sounds familiar, then this episode is for you. Because I want to talk about how this happens and why just getting a new job is rarely the complete answer to that, and what actually getting your spark back looks like in practice, including the story of a client that I worked with recently who had lost hers completely and where she is now, and she actually inspired me to record this episode for you. Now, the thing about it is it almost never kind of happens all at once. Nobody likes wakes up one morning and thinks, right, today I'm gonna lose my whole sense of self. It's actually this really gradual process, and that's part of what makes it so hard to see and understand, and even stop while it might be happening to you. And it often starts with work getting busier, more demanding, more consuming, and you respond by being more or thinking you have to be more, working harder, staying later, saying yes to more things, because that's what you do, that's who you are, someone who delivers, someone who doesn't let people down. And the things that make you feel good, the things that restore you and give you energy and remind you of who you are outside of work, those start to slip. Not in a dramatic way at first, right? It's typically more like one by one. Maybe the yoga class you used to go to once a week. Maybe you miss it once because of a deadline, then it becomes easier to just not go. The dinners with friends that used to be a highlight of your week. You cancel one because you're too tired, and then maybe another one, and eventually you might even stop making plans at all because you know you're probably just going to cancel them. Maybe you let go of that walk you used to take at lunchtime, you stop reading the book at bedtime, the things you used to do just for the pleasure of it, just for you. So much of it we let go of. Sometimes we let go of all of it. And here's this pattern that I really see quite a lot. The things that go first are almost always the things that would help us the most. For so many people it's exercise, right? The exercise that gives you energy, or it could be the social connection that reminds you that you're more than your job, or the creative outlet, the creative thing that you do that makes you feel like yourself. We drop those restorative things first because they feel like the least urgent in the moment, and then we wonder why we feel so depleted. Meanwhile, what happens is work becomes everything. Not really as a conscious choice exactly, but more like default. It starts taking up all the space. And because so much of your identity and self-worth has become attached to it, there becomes this kind of like need to keep proving yourself, to keep delivering, to keep justifying your place. And that can mean more hours, more effort, more of yourself poured into something that keeps asking for more. And then after work, you might find you've got nothing left. Not for the people you love, not for the things that you enjoy, not even really for yourself. And so often this ends up with us on the sofa, scrolling on our phones or binge watching Netflix, and that sense that tomorrow we've got to do the same thing all over again. That's how the spark often goes, is this slow erosion. And quite often we think that the obvious solution is just to get another job, mainly because ours might be making us unhappy, but we blame it all on the job. And a new job really might be exactly what you need, and we might absolutely end up there. But here is the problem with just getting a new job without looking at anything else. The patterns come with you. If you're someone who drops exercise when things get busy, you'll drop it in the new job as well. If you're someone who keeps overworking to prove yourself, you're likely going to do that in the next job too. And if you've got into the pattern of putting all your eggs into the work basket and expecting it to provide everything for you, a sense of identity, of purpose, of worth, of achievement, the new job will carry that weight for a while and then maybe start to like buckle under the pressure of it. A new job in and of itself is not the simple reset button for old patterns. And that's why the work of getting your spark back has to go deeper than just finding a different place to work. But the good news is you can do it. So let me tell you about a client I worked with recently. She'd been in the same company for more than 10 years, she'd been working incredibly hard, given a huge amount of herself to that job, to the people, to the organization, and for a long time it felt worth it. She was getting promoted, and it felt manageable. But gradually over the last couple of years, something had shifted. She'd actually wanted to leave for a while, had known something wasn't quite right, that she wanted something different, but she hadn't figured out what she wanted to do next. And work was just getting busier and busier, and it always felt like the wrong moment to deal with it, to make time for it. So she kept going. She kept working hard, going through the motions, coming home exhausted, barely having energy for anything except being on her phone in the evenings on the sofa. She didn't feel like herself anymore. All she did was work and then try to recover from how hard she was working. She'd cancelled so many plans with friends that she'd gradually stopped making them. She used to go out for dinner, you know, every other week, she stopped doing that. She used to go to yoga on a Saturday morning, a regular weight class at the gym, where she even had made some friends and got to know some people, and she stopped going. Because even though those were the things that made her feel good, they were the first things she dropped when she was tired. And that's a familiar story I hear from lots of people. But then she was made redundant. After more than ten years, after all those hours and all that effort and all of herself she'd poured into that company, and for her it felt like a betrayal, like none of that had been seen, like she'd given and given and given some more, and in the end it hadn't really mattered. And when she came to work with me, she was feeling hurt and confused and lost. And she just didn't feel like herself anymore and had no idea what she wanted to do next. So we got to work getting her spark back, right? And the first thing we worked on was actually not her CV, it was not a job hunting strategy, it was not even her career direction to begin with. The first thing we started looking at was her life. Because before you can figure out what you want your career to look like, you need to have some sense of what you want your life to look like. What matters to you, what makes you feel like you, what you've been putting on the back burner, and what you want to bring back. This is what I call the life first approach. And it starts with some important questions about how you want to feel and what does a life that actually works for you look like in all areas of it, not just your working day. And for this particular client, when we started to explore this, something came up really quickly: connection. Connection to other people, to friends, to a sense of community and belonging. It had always been this really important thing in her life, and she'd let go of it without even realizing it. The cancelled dinners, the stop yoga class, the gym friends she'd lost touch with, all of it added up to a life that had become increasingly lonely and isolated without her quite realizing it was happening. So one of the first things we worked on was helping her identify the things that made her feel like herself, to give her life what she actually wants, and then starting to bring them back intentionally, before everything else was sorted, before she had the new job, before she had a plan. Now, because here is something I told her, and I often tell my clients you do not have to wait until you have a new job to start living more like yourself, more like you want to. You can start reclaiming the things that restore you right now, in whatever circumstances you're currently in. And when you do, something interesting happens, something shifts for people, and gradually you start to remember who you are outside of work. And that can be a really useful place to be where you figure out what comes next, and it relieves all the pressure on the job, this next transition, this next job you're going to take to resolve all of the problems in your life, which is often too much pressure, and it doesn't need to be that way. And the second piece of getting the spark back or feeling like yourself again is typically around rebuilding your confidence. And for most people who come to me and say that they've lost their spark, it's because their confidence has taken a knock somewhere along the way. Maybe more than one knock, right? Maybe multiple. And usually it's over a longer time period than they realize. It can happen through a difficult experience at work, a toxic environment where you were never made to feel good enough, a bad manager whose feedback chipped away at how you saw yourself, a redundancy that felt personal even when it wasn't. Maybe a period of maternity leave that left you feeling out of step when you returned to work. Or for you, maybe it's an illness or a difficult time personally that really affected you. And whatever caused it, the result tends to look pretty similar. You stop trusting your own judgment quite as much. You second guess yourself more. You automatically blame yourself when things feel difficult or aren't as easy as they were, or maybe things aren't going to plan. You hold back in situations where you had previously spoken up. You feel less certain about your own value and what you have to offer. And all of that makes it much harder to imagine doing something different. Because doing something different requires you to believe at least a small bit in yourself. And if that's been knocked so badly, it's really hard to do and move forward. But here's the good news: the thing about confidence is that it isn't just a case of you either have it or you don't. Confidence is not a fixed personality trait that some people have and others don't have, right? It's something that you can build deliberately, intentionally with the right tools and the right support. And one of the tools I use with my clients is called constructive thought practice. It's a practical, structured way of examining the thoughts that are driving the lack of confidence and not just trying to replace them simply with positive affirmations that your brain doesn't believe, but genuinely questioning whether the story you're telling yourself about your own capability is actually accurate. Finding a more honest and more useful way of thinking about yourself. Because what I find consistently is that the story people are telling themselves about their own experience or their own capabilities, particularly when their confidence has taken a knock, is very rarely an accurate reflection of their real ability. It's a story that was formed somewhere or by someone else, sometimes for understandable reasons, right? Because of circumstances, and then it's been running in the background ever since, quietly undermining things, but never being updated. So taking back control of your confidence means stopping relying on other people and other circumstances to provide it, which is what most of us do without even realizing it. And we take on a good piece of feedback and let it make us feel good about ourselves, and a bad one, bad bit of feedback takes us back to square one again because we're outsourcing our self-belief to external events or other people's opinions, and that's a really fragile place to operate from. Learning to build your own confidence from the inside, from your own evidence, your own knowledge of what you're capable of, your own ability to manage your thinking when it turns against you. That is one of the most important things you can do and learn how to do. Not just for this career change, but for everything that comes after it. And for the client I've been telling you about, this is what we worked on together. The redundancy had knocked her confidence so badly and really impacted how she saw herself and what she thought she was capable of. So as we worked through that and rebuilt her own sense of value and what she brought and learned to see herself through a more accurate lens, it really helped her shift from just seeing herself through the lens of that painful experience, the redundancy. And that was the thing that really eventually gave her the confidence to go after something new. So where's she now? Well, ultimately, the good news is she started her own consultancy, drawing on the expertise and the network she built over more than a decade in her industry. That took confidence, reaching out to contacts, putting herself forward, trusting that what she had to offer was genuinely valuable. And a few months earlier she couldn't imagine herself doing it. But we worked together on her confidence, and now she is doing it, and it's really paying off. And she also started this other thing. She started making cakes again. She used to do it when her children were much younger. It was something she loved, a creative thing that she used to do just for the pleasure of it, making their birthday cakes, making cakes for friends and family, but it completely fallen away when life got busy. And as part of reconnecting with the things that made her feel like herself, she picked it back up again while we were working together. And now she's making cakes for birthdays, for special occasions, and friends and family and people that she knows in her network are paying her for them. Now she's not sure yet whether she wants to pursue it as a business or whether it's just going to be a creative outlet for her that also happens to earn her some money. And the great news is she is not putting pressure on herself to decide yet. She's just doing it, enjoying it, and seeing where it leads. And that last part matters. Letting it be easy, right? Taking away the pressure. Because when you have your spark back, when you're feeling like yourself again, you don't need everything to be figured out. You can let things develop. You can try things and see. You can have the confidence and energy to keep going even without a complete and perfect plan. This is what getting your spark back looks like. It doesn't have to be this huge dramatic transformation. Not everything has to be suddenly resolved, but just a return to yourself, to the things that matter to you, to a sense of your own value and capability, to a life that feels more like yours. And from that place you will find it so much easier to make decisions about what you're going to do next and follow them through and try them out. That's what helps so many of my clients go and start new jobs, new careers. So if you recognize yourself in any of this, and if you've been feeling like you're just going through the motions, if you've dropped the things that you used to do that used to make you feel good, if your confidence has taken a knock and you're not quite sure how to get it back, I want you to know that getting your spark back isn't just a possibility, it can be the beginning of a whole new chapter for you. Because trying to build the next stage from a place of depletion and self-doubt is so much harder. And I want you to know it can feel easy. If you can build the next chapter from a place of knowing who you are, and clear on what you want, and understanding what you have to offer, this is what I help people do with my coaching. And here's something I want to leave you with. What is the one thing, just one, that you used to do that made you feel like yourself? Maybe you stopped doing it a long time ago, maybe it's been a recent thing, but what would it take to bring it back? Maybe bring it back this week. Just to start it. Just to start. That is often where it begins. And if you want help with the bigger work, the career clarity, the confidence rebuilding, the life first redesign, come and have a free consultation with me. The link, as ever, is in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next week. Bye for now.