Career Makeover Wednesdays: Daycare Duty to Writer Extraordinaire

Love it. Love it. LOVE it!

Gina is starting to talk to other people in her profession (helloooo, networking) and is enjoying a positive response, not to mention building a supportive community that will pay dividends as she continues to fine tune her business. Also huge is the fact that Gina put down, on paper, where she can see it, a list of what she is good at. If you haven’t tried it, this truly is an amazing exercise, especially when stuck at a crossroads in your career, in life, or in Gina’s case, starting a new business.

Worries? Low confidence? Doubts? Thoughts of “Am I really cut out to do this?” All of these thoughts are totally, TOTALLY normal during times of change. However, the trick is to not dwell on what you might NOT accomplish, what bad things MIGHT happen, and what failures COULD lie ahead.

Instead, the trick is to change your thinking.

A great way to start is with the post-it note exercise: putting down on paper what you are good at, why you are valuable, what makes you unique, what you CAN do, etc. etc. Keeping this in front of you on a daily basis is even more powerful, for as your brain absorbs those words day after day….lo and behold you start changing how you act- and changing what travels through your brain.

Now that Gina has sampled different types of client projects (and different types of clients) and has gathered more information from professionals who have built careers in her desired field, Gina and I have begun preliminary conversations about the type of work she wants to focus on in order to fulfill an even greater goal when it comes to her new business: following her passion and writing about the subject matter she cares about most.

As an example, Gina was recently nominated as a Role Model and Virtual Mentor for Women and Girls from the Hot Mommas Project (www.hotmammasproject.org). Interestingly, Gina’s research on a client project led her to interviewing the "Chief Hot Momma" of this project, Kathy Korman Frey, at which point Kathy began following Gina on Twitter. When Kathy read about Gina’s career reinvention on www.trueprofessions.blogspot.com, she nominated Gina!

What was Gina’s response? Well, let’s use her exact words “Let me tell you, Ellen, when you ask what I want my career to look like, this is exactly it - to inspire others through the things I have learned and am doing. It is thrilling to me that I get the chance to do this!”

Wow- what can be better than that?