When you’ve spent most of your working life, working it seems as though there is no other life that you can lead.
You get up each day, travel to work, do your job, come home and rinse and repeat the next day.
When that gets to be something that you hate doing, then you know something is wrong with your life.
That’s where I found myself, after I started yet another new role, back in 2013. My life had been tipped upside down in 2011 with a sudden and unexpected death in the family and back then I went back to ‘work’ as a means of holding my life together.
The two years time buzzer went off, as it had for me in most of my job roles and I moved to yet another job in a large company, with a great paycheck.
Was I happy? No way. I was still met with bullying in the workplace, same as a lot of my other jobs. I felt unrewarded, unacknowledged and taken for granted.
I even had my Senior Manager question me “How dare you call yourself a Change Manager.” Life was full of stress, anxiety and on the other hand depression.
At that time I was learning about self-inquiry, using The Work of Byron Katie, a simple method of questioning your thoughts. So, anytime I became emotional that’s what I did. I questioned what I was thinking.
And you know what, after doing that for two years, on anything and everything that came up in my workplace that set me off, one day I could breathe.
On that day I rang my boss and said “Thanks for everything you’ve given me, shown me and taught me and I quit” She was stunned.
It felt like the most freeing and exhilarating thing I had ever done in my life. I made a decision and it was for me.
Given I was the only one working, in my marital partnership, at the time a little while afterwards I wondered what I’d done, and yet it still felt like the right thing for me.
Leaving the working world where all I could do was follow someone else’s rules, do what others told me to do, and be questioned about it day in, day out, was amazing.
What was great was that I set myself up to Coach other people using the self-inquiry method I’d spent two and a half years learning and doing myself.
It felt so wonderful to be doing something I loved doing, whilst at the same time supporting others to change their life too. Nothing like that feeling.
I wouldn’t go back and change my decision at that moment for anything in the world. It WAS the best decision I made in my life.
I went from being an unhappy, highly emotional person living on their nerves to someone who now loves life, is happier and healthier than I’ve ever felt before.
So, if you’re ever scared to change something because of the big unknown on the other side, my recommendation to you is ‘Just Go For It.’ It too may be the best decision you ever made in your life.
And, if it doesn’t work out the way you planned, it may turn out even better.