What are you ‘supposed’ to be doing?

“But I’m supposed to be doing this!”

Say what?

The only two things you have to do in life are die and pay taxes. Otherwise, everything is a choice, including your professional life.

Yet, when I have a new client, usually in our first consultation before they’ve even committed to using me as a catalyst for positive change, one of the first things I hear is that they are “supposed” to be doing the job they have now. They feel that since it’s their destiny, it is their fault that they are not happy.

I appreciate the ideas of destiny, predetermination and legacy. They have helped guide many people to great riches, fame and success. But I can almost guarantee you that the people who have found great riches, fame and success have done so after making the decision to forego other things and follow their passion.

The only thing I think that you’re “supposed” to do is live a high-quality life where you remain true and genuine to yourself. And I think it’s borderline tragic how many people in this world aren’t doing that. Why would you spend one day on this Earth not following your passion? That’s a wasted day, and we only get so many days. Don’t waste them.

I’ve told you my story of coaching, but I want to share a friend’s. He deals more with mental health instead of career transitions, but I think it shows just how much we listen to others and somehow deduce what we are “supposed” to be doing.

Larry is a decent writer. People told him that going back to 12 years old. He admits to not liking 

school and getting average grades despite the fact he knew he could do better if he tried. The only thing he got constant compliments on from teachers, friends and his family was that he wrote terrific stories. He didn’t hear that about anything else. His preteen brain deduced that if everybody agreed he was a good writer, then a writer he would be.

He was lucky enough to get a job at a newspaper at 17 years old and found his niche. But then he found that he loved to also be a graphic designer with newspaper pages. Fast-forward to his first managerial stint at 22 years old as the editor of the travel section of a newspaper and he thought he was on the path to being a top editor and publisher… and he was right.

At 34 years old, after many stops in the journalism world, he took a leap and launched his own magazine and it was an overnight success. Before long, every charity was at his door asking for free advertising, or for him to attend their event. Then, he started hosting and participating in many of these events. He started spending more of his time supporting the good causes of his advertisers than paying attention to what was happening at his job. His soul was telling him that it was more important he bring awareness and raise funds for the Special Olympics or spearhead a campaign to get funds for local teachers who wanted to try “out of the box” techniques they otherwise wouldn’t have money to attempt.

When the pandemic hit, his magazine went out of business. One of the first things he said was that he didn’t know what he was supposed to do because there were no jobs for 45-year-old journalists. I told him that it was only him who believed that, but he also never needed to write another word again. It was like a lightbulb went off. I’d never seen him happier. He took several courses in coaching and now has a steady group of clients he works with, mainly about trauma.

I talked to Larry yesterday and he said to me, “Arnel, I was wrong. This is what I was supposed to be doing.”

I told him that I could tell he was burnt out on running a publishing company for most of the last decade and he needed something to rejuvenate him.

He said that it wasn’t the drop-off of paid advertisers that affected him, but when every non-profit started to cancel their events because of the virus, there was no need for the advertising they once sought and he was very gracious in providing. His magazine no longer helped people the way it once did and since COVID destroyed volunteerism, he didn’t feel like he had a purpose.

He was never supposed to be a writer. He was supposed to use his skills as a writer to help other people. Building his magazine was the way to do that. When it wasn’t needed anymore, he felt no sense of purpose and soon after closed.

We had to cut our conversation short yesterday because he was meeting with a client who was dealing with trauma surrounding her family life when she was a teenager. I asked him if he missed the magazine and if that’s really what he was supposed to be doing.

“Nope,” he said. “This is it. Helping people. Maybe I won’t coach forever, but I know this is what I’m supposed to be doing. I was put here to help others in whatever form that it takes. It feels good to know what I’m supposed to be doing.”

I know what he means. Do you know what he means? 

If you’ve been considering talking to a career development coach but feel like you may be seen as a black sheep or stick out like a sore thumb, I promise you that you’re losing valuable time. There’s a proper track and a place for you out there. The real question is if you want it enough to talk to somebody like me who knows how to help.

But before you talk to me, prove it to yourself. Check out ArnelDuvet.com and take the career satisfaction quiz. Don’t tell yourself you’re just having yet another bad day. Maybe it’s time to consider making a change. Take this quiz and we’ll calculate your score and let you know if you’re satisfied where you are or if it’s time to follow your destiny.

Want to Try Coaching? You’re Less Alone Than Ever

There are a lot of emotions that run through new clients when they sit down with me. If I were to pick one I see more than any other though, it’s anxiety. There’s anxiety in pulling the trigger on making a career change, anxiety of where they will end up if they pull that trigger, anxiety of how to make ends meet while transitioning and anxiety about the entire process. The greatest anxiety I see in many people – which I never would have guessed prior to becoming a coach – is that they are going off the path of those who came before them. 

What I mean is that most people who enter the coaching world don’t know of anybody who has been to a coach, whether it’s a career development coach, a life coach, a substance abuse coach or mental health coach. It’s still a relatively new world, but unlike being the first person to discover a new band or try a new smartphone app, seeing a coach is largely an unknown experience and with some – especially those with social anxiety disorder – they are fearful of what I’m going to do with them, how their friends and family will react and if this will further continue them down the road of an anxious life.

I can show them statistics that reveal people are usually so much happier after seeing a coach and even provide them with testimonials, but at the end of the day they are petrified of the unknown. Unfortunately, that holds them back some of the time, even if we have a great initial consultation. I think that this may change very soon though because I honestly believe we’re about to see an explosion in the amount of people seeking a coach for help.

Why?

It comes down to two main reasons. First, as a society, we’re starting to value mental health and happiness. There are more people in substance abuse disorder programs and more people getting professional mental health help than ever in the history of our world. COVID showed the population that it’s OK to see your doctor, lawyer, accountant, etc. through a Zoom call on the Internet. Why is this a big deal? It opens up the world of practitioners and experts to all. No longer do you have to settle for someone you can drive to nearby. You can live in Michigan and have professionals in your life in California or Texas or in another country. This ensures that you can find the right person for you.

Second, we are in the early days of what the media is calling “The Great Resignation.” While most studies showed that more than half of workers were not fulfilled by their jobs prior to the pandemic, being at home with family and having time to pursue other interests woke a lot of people up to what is possible in life. Why be stuck behind a desk if you want to open a bakery? Why work construction when you want to teach elementary school? Why spend another moment doing something you don’t want to do? People are leaving the workforce in numbers we’ve never seen, but many of them have no idea what’s next.

You may be the first among your friends to see a coach, but if you admit it to them, I bet others will say they are considering it. I believe the legacy of the coronavirus is that we realized as the human race there is more to life than jobs we don’t want. If McDonald’s can’t keep employees because nobody wants to work there for the pay, then McDonald’s has to figure out how to make their employment more attractive. That’s not a bad thing.

Anxiety is normal. We all have it at times and changing careers is a big transition. Using a career development coach is also a big transition – like the first time you used Zoom or Netflix – but you got through that. You’ll get through coaching and you’ll be so happy you did.

If you’ve been considering talking to a career development coach but feel like you may be seen as a black sheep or stick out like a sore thumb, I promise you that you’re losing valuable time. There’s a proper track and a place for you out there. The real question is if you want it enough to talk to somebody like me who knows how to help.

But before you talk to me, prove it to yourself. Check out ArnelDuvet.com and take the career satisfaction quiz. Don’t tell yourself you’re just having yet another bad day. Maybe it’s time to consider making a change. Take this quiz and we’ll calculate your score and let you know if you’re satisfied where you are or if it’s time to follow your destiny.

There Are Many Who Want to Help You Succeed Professionally

In the last blog I posted, I shared some statistics about how more people than ever are either choosing to remain out of the workplace, have decided to work from home, or are changing their jobs to provide them with a better work-life balance. The obvious catalyst is the COVID-19 pandemic that forced most of us to stay home for the better part of a year, but if you look at some of the statistics I’ve shared in my blogs through the years, the idea of not being satisfied with your professional life is hardly new, especially for those in the medical field.

The irony is that as I write this in early July 2021, America’s unemployment rate is high, yet the number of people voluntarily leaving their jobs has never been higher. As I mentioned in the last blog, in April 2021 alone, over 4 million people left the workplace.

Even if somebody has decided to simply take government unemployment payments and they run out, it doesn’t mean that they are going to return to the job they left in 2020. While the pandemic caused a tremendous amount of international upheaval in almost every system, industry and way of life we knew, it also changed the perspectives of a lot of people when it comes to their professional lives.

Ironically, it probably came at the perfect time for me. I was already looking at an exit strategy from my job as a Public Health Officer with the US Navy when the pandemic hit. It certainly played a role in me knowing that it was time to move on to something else. I admire those people who can stay in the same job their whole lives, whether it’s fulfilling or not. I couldn’t do it and I know most people can’t.

My plan was to transition into a career development coach. Not only did I have a great experience with a coach who showed me that helping people is my core ambition, but I found such a sense of purpose when I was able to mentor mostly young individuals who are either out of high school or about to graduate from high-school. Many came from rough households and didn’t have a shot at a decent life post-high school. After spending time with me and hearing my story of being a Haitian immigrant who came to America with limited English and becoming an officer in the Navy with a wife, two kids and my citizenship, I think it inspired them to recognize that they could do anything they wanted.

How can anybody not love helping others like that? When I realized the only reason I wanted to go to work anymore was to help people see a better future, it was very clear that I was pursuing future planning with others so I didn’t have to do it with myself. It’s funny how willing we are to solve other people’s problems, but we don’t want to address our own.

For some, working from home was a wonderful, life-changing experience that helped them reprioritize what was important in life. They don’t want to return to the way things once were. For others, being at home was like a prison, but when it came time to be released, their professional motivation and ambition had evolved, and they didn’t want to be at the job they thought they loved in 2019.

People change. That’s OK. It’s actually healthier than not changing. But you can’t just want it in your head and leave it at that. You have to go for it, or you’ll be left with regret. The challenge for so many is that they want something new, but aren’t sure what that means. That’s when I go to work. If it’s time for a change, I hope you’ll start considering a career development coach. Even if it’s not me, it’s amazing what a trained professional can do to get you on the right track. There’s no excuse to stay in a rut or do what you’ve always done because you can’t think of the next thing yet. A much better life is waiting.

If you’ve been considering talking to a career development coach but feel like you may be seen as a black sheep or stick out like a sore thumb, I promise you that you’re losing valuable time. There’s a proper track and a place for you out there. The real question is if you want it enough to talk to somebody like me who knows how to help.

But before you talk to me, prove it to yourself. Check out ArnelDuvet.com and take the career satisfaction quiz. Don’t tell yourself you’re just having yet another bad day. Maybe it’s time to consider making a change. Take this quiz and we’ll calculate your score and let you know if you’re satisfied where you are or if it’s time to follow your destiny.

Pandemic’s End Highlights Workers Who Need a Permanent Change

As we start to pull out of the non-stop disruption that has been the COVID-19 virus, yet another facet to the ordeal we’ve all been through has turned political. It’s about how many people are perfectly fine collecting government checks instead of returning to work. I’m not going to get into either side of that debate, but I think from a human nature standpoint, it’s fascinating to see the great shifts in people’s attitudes to where, and how, they spend their professional lives. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the medical field.

One New York Times article from November 2020 said that 15-20 percent of people who work in health were considering leaving because of burnout following COVID. By April 2021, the Washington Post reported that number was up to 30 percent. I guess an international pandemic that gets so heavily politicized can do that to a person. 

So, let’s say that the number is 25% that are strongly considering leaving medicine. That’s one-in-four!! While I know that number really hits home to those of us who have worked within the healthcare industry, everybody can imagine walking into their doctor’s office or the emergency room and suddenly finding a quarter less people working. That’s not a small number.

It’s not a small number across other sectors either. In fact, healthcare is getting it easy compared to the hospitality industry. With hotel jobs traditionally not paying much more than minimum wage and restaurant/bar job workers relying mainly on tips, they can’t find employees. From an economic standpoint, it has become more attractive to many hospitality employees to either sit home and collect unemployment or to find a job elsewhere in the industry that pays better. In April 2021 alone, 740,000 hospitality workers officially left the industry. Overall, that’s a big portion of the 4 million people who left their jobs that month.

Yes, employees are really in the driver’s seat as I write this (late June 2021) when it comes to employment. Companies are needing to raise wages and benefits to convince workers to stay, lure them from other companies or get them to consider a job.

For me, one of the most fascinating aspects to this is that we’re starting to see the fallout of what happens when you force most of the industrialized world either a) out of their job or b) to do their job at home. After more than a year of staying at home, it turns out many people prefer that lifestyle. Some moved on to other business ventures they could run from their house while others have realized that the time they spend at home is more valuable than they money they made being out of the home.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to the country or world economically or politically as a result of this shift but I think it’s fascinating what it says about our attitudes and relationship with our professional lives. In the next few blogs, I’m going to dive deeper into not just the changes happening during the tail end of COVID, but how we’ve always been able to change things, we just never appreciated that fact. We didn’t need a once-in-100-years plague to wake us up… or maybe we did.

If you’ve been considering talking to a career development coach but feel like you may be seen as a black sheep or stick out like a sore thumb, I promise you that you’re losing valuable time. There’s a proper track and a place for you out there. The real question is if you want it enough to talk to somebody like me who knows how to help.

But before you talk to me, prove it to yourself. Check out ArnelDuvet.com and take the career satisfaction quiz. Don’t tell yourself you’re just having yet another bad day. Maybe it’s time to consider making a change. Take this quiz and we’ll calculate your score and let you know if you’re satisfied where you are or if it’s time to follow your destiny.

It’s the Brave Ones Who Seek Out a Career Development Coach

Although I am a proud citizen of the United States who served in the US Navy for many years, I was born in Haiti. This is always the point where I have to say that yes, while the government has had a bad track record and yes, while there was a massively devastating earthquake, it was actually a wonderful place to grow up.

I was middle class by Haitian standards, and learned to balance a solid worth ethic from my father with a large dose of compassion from my mother. I left not long after graduating high school, settling with my uncle in Florida. While I had a lot to learn: the language, how to get a job, become a citizen, enrolling in college and norms of culture, I was struck by one thing that transcended even the language barrier in the beginning. Americans seemed to place an emphasis on mental well-being.

I know the rest of the world is fast following suit and maybe there are countries who are ahead of the United States with this attitude, but I was impressed that it was taken seriously when someone was depressed, or if they had issues that were clearly not physical. I knew that therapy existed, but I had no idea to what extent it was a tool used by so many Americans… and keep in mind this was nearly two decades ago.

While I was serving as a public health practitioner in the Navy, and even before, I saw just how hard the brass worked to include mental health screening, programs and treatment into the culture of the military. We’ve learned so much about things like PTSD over the last 25 years that it would almost be neglectful not to provide as much mental support as physical support, especially to service members in the field.

Yet so much of what was offered went unused. I routinely heard service members (and some others) talk down the mental health offerings. The overwhelming attitude was that mental health support was for weak people. They seemed to believe that while physical injuries were real because you could see them, those who “suffered” with mental distress were somehow less than them – when the reality was, it was often the guys who shamed it the loudest that needed it. 

Why? It was different and they were scared.

Now, as a career development coach, I see the same thing. I see people sitting down in my office, or on the computer screen, tentatively, as if they’re not sure they belong. They sometimes look like a deer in headlights, or ashamed, as if they shouldn’t be there.

When I ask about their hesitancy, I hear the same thing again and again, “If everybody else is happy with their job, why can’t I be? Why can’t I just shut up, go to work, get a check and go home like everybody else? What’s so wrong with me?”

The reality, I explain to them, is that the only thing different about them than the others they observe is that they are doing something about their lack of job satisfaction. Prior to the pandemic, nearly 70% of most surveys and polls showed employees unhappy with their jobs. An April 2021 survey of the medical industry showed that 3-in-10 were considering leaving their job because of COVID-19 burnout.

“Everybody is unhappy at work, but you’re the one doing something about it. You should be proud, not ashamed,” I explain to them. “They’re going to languish, wishing for ‘more,’ but you’re the person who’s going to get it.

“More” can mean happiness, money, a feeling of self-worth, the opportunity to help others. It’s really defined by the client I’m working with, not me.

If you’ve been considering talking to a career development coach but feel like you may be seen as a black sheep or stick out like a sore thumb, I promise you that you’re losing valuable time. There’s a proper track and a place for you out there. The real question is if you want it enough to talk to somebody like me who knows how to help.

But before you talk to me, prove it to yourself. Check out ArnelDuvet.com and take the career satisfaction quiz. Don’t tell yourself you’re just having yet another bad day. Maybe it’s time to consider making a change. Take this quiz and we’ll calculate your score and let you know if you’re satisfied where you are or if it’s time to follow your destiny.

The Problem or the Solution? The REAL responsible why you are still unsatisfied.

A recent survey by the online site OfficeVibe revealed that 75% of people say that they don’t quit their job, but they quit their boss.

It’s easy to criticize our boss. Nobody over the age of seven likes to take orders from a boss, whether it’s mom and dad, a teacher, a spouse, or yes, even that person who is allowed to tell you what to do at work. Now, most of us love our parents and many of us even like our bosses, but we’d like to be in charge of ourselves for once. We’d like to be in charge of our own destiny. I am a proud former member of the United States Navy, but we know who excels there. People who are good at taking orders.

Another survey by Gallup found that just over half of Americans reported that they were not satisfied with their career. The reasons were all over the place, from lack of professional development to not getting decent benefits to simply being treated like a number who can be replaced. Do you feel this way sometimes?

Again, I want to suggest to you that it’s not the company, or your co-workers, or anything else that is making you unsatisfied other than who you see in the mirror. “What do you mean, Arnel?” you’re probably asking. “I’m not the problem,” you say. Well, you are, but thankfully you’re also the solution.

Most of us wanted to be something when we were a little kid. When I was growing up in Haiti, I wanted to be a world-famous soccer player – although we call it football there. But I didn’t practice enough, I didn’t have the work ethic or the passion to become a professional athlete… most of us don’t. But even most kids who have realistic dreams like being a fireman or a teacher don’t end up doing what they dreamed of when they were young.

Why is this? 

We like to say, “Oh well, life got in the way” but that’s not the truth. Maybe you didn’t dream about being a medical assistant or a mid-level hospital administrator, but you can’t blame life. What should you blame? You got it. Time to look in the mirror again.

Life didn’t get in the way, it’s just that it’s human nature to make deals with ourselves, to settle for second-best, or to simply give up. We tell ourselves that being the manager of a chain restaurant like Olive Garden or Applebee’s is almost the same thing as owning our own restaurant or being a shift leader at a pet store is kind of like running a rescue shelter for dogs. But let’s be honest, those things aren’t similar. We just try to convince ourselves they are. Some of us settle for money, some for benefits like health care, some because of the hours, or travel, or one of 100 other reasons. And once you start settling, it’s easy to keep doing it. Do this often enough and there will be times you feel like you’re living someone else’s life.

It's time to stop that by taking on the two things that prevent people from changing their careers.

First, is not knowing HOW. A lot of people don’t know what they want to do, or how to research the path of where they want to go. What does somebody who is a 38-year-old mother of two do if they want to become a veterinarian? What about a 51-year-old man who has decided that the world of finance isn’t for him and he wants to work as an X-ray technician in a hospital? What does he do? If he’s like most people, he does nothing. He tells himself that he makes a good paycheck, that things could be worse and keeps on working his unsatisfied self into an early grave.

The second thing that stops people is FEAR. Much like that guy who wants to work with X-rays, he could also tell himself that his wife will be upset if he changes careers, that he’ll have to start at the bottom all over again and he’s too old for that, or that he simply might start studying and find out that it’s much harder than he thought. Fear holds us back in a million little ways and a million big ways. Not being able or willing to change your career is one of the big ways.

That’s why I’m here. Again, my name is Arnel Duvet and I’m a career development coach. I’ve been right where you are. I took great pride in wearing the uniform of the United States Navy as a public health practitioner stationed both at Camp Lejeune here in America and Sasebo Naval Base in Japan. I know that I made a difference during the early days of COVID-19 to help get protocols in place among officers, enlisted and civilians living and working at those bases. But that feeling wore off, and as the virus continued, I became like 30% of recently polled medical workers who said they became burnt out.

I still loved helping people, but in the end, sitting in a poorly air-conditioned office listening to co-workers’ complaints, with long hours away from family, not doing anything that touched my soul got to be too much. I knew I wanted to keep helping people but I didn’t know how and I didn’t know if either my family or I could adapt to changing careers. 

What does a career development coach, a teacher in Africa and a respiratory therapist-in-training have in common? Not much, but we all face our fears, sought help from an expert and are living testimonials that you can turn around your life and your career. You just have to channel that fear into something positive and believe in yourself.

Need more convincing? Check out ArnelDuvet.com and take the career satisfaction quiz. Don’t tell yourself you’re just having yet another bad day. Maybe it’s time to consider making a change. Take this quiz and we’ll calculate your score and let you know if you’re satisfied where you are or if it’s time to follow your destiny.

Letting the Sun Set on a Chapter of My Life

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I remember the first day I put on the uniform. Here I was, a man who worked so hard, came from meager beginnings in a foreign country, earned two advanced degrees to get to this spot and there I was, looking back at myself in the mirror. I don’t think I would have felt more pride if I was wearing a uniform for the New York Yankees or Manchester United. I was looking into the eyes of Arnel Duvet, an officer in the United States Navy, the world’s greatest Navy. 

I spent two years at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina before leaving for Japan, where I served an additional three years. Despite not loving every aspect of public health, I was well-trained and had always told myself that I would first serve my country and then enter the private sector when my time was done. 

Shortly before I left for Japan, while waiting for my wife and two young sons to leave with me, we discovered that one of my sons had a chronic health condition requiring surgery (or surgeries, we were told). Milande, my beautiful wife, and I knew that the best option for our son was to stay in the United States, so she decided to remain there with the boys while our youngest underwent treatment.

Then, in early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic knocked on our doors. I remember thinking that people were overdoing the hysteria in the very beginning. My wife shared with me the accounts of stores running out of toilet paper back home and schools shutting down. It wasn’t long before that seemed to be the norm around the world.

Life completely changed with COVID-19. I appreciate the once-in-a-lifetime nature of the pandemic, but between that, and not seeing my wife and children, it just felt like this was not what I signed up for. Those little issues I had with public health became wider, the virus became as much a political issue as health, and nothing could replace my family. I became the guy I never wanted to be: the one who didn’t want to get up and go to work in the morning.

I’d hit snooze two or three times. I look at the clock during the day waiting to go back to my lonely home and when I was there, I was depressed.

Thankfully, because I had some experience with life and empowerment coaches, I recognized quickly what was happening. I could have re-upped for several more years. That would have been following the script or the plan I set out for myself more than a decade ago. But I also knew based on the coaching that for me to be happy, I have to follow that little light and little voice inside me – the one I think we all have – to whatever the next adventure was going to be.

So here I am, just a couple of days before leaving the Land of the Rising Sun, one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen on Earth, and I’m ready to leave that Arnel behind. He served me well, but that version of myself is done. He has outlived his usefulness.

I enter the private sector with the calling to also help those in the medical field who are feeling similar burnout, or realize they made the wrong decision entering the healthcare industry. I think there’s a real need for Career Development Coaches who can help guide somebody to the path they should have been on from the beginning. I knew I wanted to help people, but also knew I wasn’t interested in being a doctor or nurse, so public health made sense. After talking to several people who have been in my position, looking to leave the medical world, I realize the help I’ve been wanting to provide people is that I’ve wanted to help people who felt as lost as I did in the field.

I stumbled into coaching just helping a few friends of mine with some of their employment issues and realized I had a knack for this. I took professional certification courses from Japan and will be hanging my shingle upon return to America.

This isn’t quitting. It isn’t saying I made a mistake. It’s saying that what I thought would give me a life of fulfillment isn’t going to do it and I need to move on. Imagine how much happier people would be if they could reach that conclusion… and then do something about it. Now, I’ll help people do that. As I put Public Health Arnel Duvet to rest, Career Development Coach Arnel Duvet is coming to life.

I can’t wait to live this new life. Thank you to all of you who have made my experiences in the US Navy more than I could have imagined and to the friends and family who supported me along the way. It was an honor serving in the world’s greatest Navy. I now feel like I’ve done what I was supposed to do. And I would like to leave you with this verse from Tim. 4 v7 “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith”. Now I look forward to being with my BEAUTIFUL WIFE (can’t wait to taste that Haitian food of hers... legumes, lalo and gombo). And finally, Daddy’s coming home, boys.

A Career Development Coach is More Specialized than a Life Coach

Nobody can tell you what the right things in life are for you. Maybe you’ll want to get married. Maybe not. Maybe you’ll want to have children. Maybe not. And maybe you’ll work the job of your dreams, love every minute, become wealthy and live happily ever after – but likely not.

Some people thrive in marriage while others get quickly divorced. There are those people who seem to have been born to be a parent and others who see their kids as a nuisance and resent having them. And then there are the ones who think they’re in the job of their dreams, the one they worked so hard to achieve, who realize that they’re no longer loving every minute and the wealth they hoped for won’t offset the happiness they no longer have.

We live in a society where, for over 100 years, a coach was somebody who helped you develop athletic skills associated with sports. Very few kids born in the 1960s-1990s didn’t deal with some coach trying to make them better at soccer, basketball, cheerleading or some other activity. The coach was the sports teacher. There weren’t music coaches. There weren’t art coaches…and there certainly weren’t life coaches.

But around 15 years ago, the term “life coach” started to sprout up. Suddenly, there were people who said that they could help you find the balance in your life that you needed. Several years ago, I went to a life coach and while I can understand how that might be beneficial to some, I didn’t need balance with my family or personal life. My finances were in order and I wasn’t feeling confused and depressed about life. I knew the problem. 

This life coach was a nice person, but she didn’t know the first thing about being in the medical profession. She knew what doctors and nurses did, but when I explained I was a public health practitioner in the US Navy, she just looked at me kind of confused. I tossed out a few descriptors about what I did, such as instituting new protocols to ensure health standards were met across the base ranging from sanitation to vaccine storage, and she nodded. I could tell I was talking to the wrong person.

It wasn’t until I met my career development coach that I realized I had been seeing the wrong person all along. In our first session, he learned that my family is my life and live at the center of my heart, but I’m also somebody who wants to help others and needs to feel passionate about his job. I no longer loved working for the Navy, so it was time to move on. Ironically, I recognized fairly quickly, he had the exact job description I wanted.

Had I never left the life coach, I probably would still be sitting at my desk, wondering why I wasn’t happy and what my future held. Her guidance was simply a bad match, but thankfully, my career development coach came along.

If you’re currently spending time with a life coach, or even a career development coach and it’s not working out, consider changing things up. Too many people try to find the answer with somebody they just don’t “click” with and that’s a shame because it’s almost impossible to get at the correct answer in that case.

If you’re dragging at work, dreading each morning as you face another day, it’s probably time to do something about it, but if you’re having issues figuring out how, drop me a note. If we don’t mesh well, I’ll suggest a few names of other people, but if we do work well together, imagine turning everything around. That’s the balance you’re looking for.

Need that extra push to convince yourself that you’re not imagining things? Check out https://form.jotform.com/211381778897473 and take the career satisfaction quiz. Don’t tell yourself you’re just having yet another bad day. Maybe it’s time to consider making a change. Take this quiz and we’ll calculate your score and let you know if you’re satisfied where you are of if it’s time to follow your destiny.

Find a Coach Who Has Been Through What You Have

It’s a day that so many of my clients tell me they dreaded and I remember it well. You know it’s coming, you wish it wasn’t, but one day you simply wake up in the morning and realize that the job you’re in – which you may have thought was a lifelong career – has to change.

Before that day arrives though, there are the red flags. You catch yourself looking at the clock to see when it’s time to go home, which is something you never did before. Then you start to realize that the little changes that your superiors institute are more frustrating than they once were and you may even start to lose some respect toward them you once held. The pride you carried at first about creativity and problem solving within the parameters of the job just isn’t there anymore, despite the fact you’re doing the same thing. Soon, the snooze alarm becomes a friend of yours because you’re staying up later, not really caring if you get to work half-asleep because that’s the way your mind feels all the time.

And then it hits you like a bolt of lightning: I just can’t do this anymore.

It’s scary because you realize that’s the bottom line. You tell yourself that you worked hard to get where you are. You tell yourself that the money is good and you tell yourself that starting over at Square One is not something you want to do.

But it doesn’t matter. You know you’re in the wrong place.

Some people stay. And in the words of Henry David Thoreau, they experience lives of “quiet desperation.” For whatever excuses they can muster, they make a deal with themselves to have a miserable existence at least 40 hours per week. It’s a tragedy in some ways.

Some people know exactly what they want to do, leave, and transition seamlessly into their new career, and new life.

Most of us, though, end up somewhere in the middle. I was there. Being a public health practitioner in the US Navy was something I worked hard for a decade to achieve and I am proud to say that I helped coordinate the efforts to battle a once-in-100-years-pandemic for our overseas troops at a large base in Japan. I know my work made a difference, but it no longer spoke to me and I had to get out.

I had time when I reached this revelation, because I still was contracted to be with the Navy for another year. But I had no idea what I wanted to do or how to get there. I know in my soul that my mission in life is to help people, but I didn’t know what that meant.

A friend suggested visiting a life coach. I didn’t need any great philosophy change with the way I saw the world and didn’t need to work through childhood trauma, but I needed to figure out this job thing. I found myself wishing we focused more on what I was meant to do so much, I eventually left them and found a career development coach. Much like someone who walks into a temp agency and realizes they want to work at the temp agency, I recognized that my calling was looking right at me: I needed to become a career development coach.

So when a new client sits down and feels like they’re the only person to have ever felt like they made the wrong choice with a career, I can look them in the eye and say I’ve been there, and that you never know where the solution will come from, but it might be looking you in the eyes.

Are you there already? Check out https://form.jotform.com/211381778897473 and take the career satisfaction quiz. Don’t tell yourself you’re just having yet another bad day. Maybe it’s time to consider making a change. Take this quiz and we’ll calculate your score and let you know if you’re satisfied where you are or if it’s time to follow your destiny.