You're not starting from nothing
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If starting over feels like lighting your entire career on fire, I want you to slow down for a second. Because I don’t think the scariest part is always the change itself. I think it's the fear that everything you already did will stop counting. The degree. The years. The job titles. The version of you who was so sure this was the plan. And then suddenly you’re sitting there thinking, “Cool. So what now?” That's the part of career pivots people love to skip over. They’ll tell you to update your resume, network more, follow your passion, build a bridge, all of that. Fine. Useful enough. But before any of that works, you have to stop treating your current career like a closed room you’re walking away from with nothing in your hands. You’re not leaving empty-handed. You’re leaving with evidence. In this week’s episode of The Balanced Badass Podcast®, I talked with my grad school friend, Kelly Wuest, about her career path from higher ed to nonprofit work to running her own training and learning design company. And what stood out to me is how easy it is to look at a pivot from the outside and think, “Wow, they just started over.” But that’s not what happened. Kelly didn’t randomly become someone who could build training, connect people to purpose, work with leaders, understand organizations, and design learning that actually helps people. She’d been building that skill set for years. It's just that the setting changed and the work evolved. Basically, she switched up the container. But the deeper skills came with her. That’s the part I want you to steal for yourself. Because if you’re burned out in a field you thought would be your forever home, your brain may start doing that awful little thing where it tries to convince you your experience only counts if you stay in the exact same kind of work. Like your skills are only real if they keep living under the same job title. False. If you’ve spent years managing projects, calming chaos, reading rooms, translating messy ideas into clear plans, building relationships, training people, solving problems, making decisions, or keeping under-resourced systems alive, that doesn't magically disappear because you change industries. You may need new language or proof. And you may need to learn how to tell the story differently. But you're not starting from scratch. You’re starting from experience you haven’t fully translated yet. Before you decide you’re stuck, do a skill translation audit. Pick one role you’ve had. Then write down what you actually did in that job.
Then strip away the industry language. If you worked in higher ed, don’t stop at “student advising.” Look at what was underneath it. Maybe you were helping overwhelmed people make decisions with incomplete information. Or you were designing a process that made a confusing system usable. Perhaps you were building trust fast with people who were stressed, embarrassed, scared, or unsure what to do next. That is skill. If you worked in nonprofit leadership, don’t stop at “volunteer management” or “program coordination.” Look at the real work. You may have been motivating people without formal authority, building systems with limited resources, managing competing needs, or holding a whole operation together with way less support than the job actually required. Also skill. I know starting over can feel like admitting the old path failed. I don’t think that’s always true. Sometimes starting over is just the first honest thing you’ve done after years of trying to make the old path keep fitting. You can grieve what you thought your career was going to be. You can feel sad about leaving a field that shaped you. And you can be grateful for what you learned and still know it’s time to go. It's not that the last chapter didn’t matter. It's just that now, we're figuring out what comes with you. And more comes with you than you think. Take care, Tara |