By my late 20s, I was managing a team of nine people at the Barcelona branch of Autodesk, a US software development company, where I was working as a global data analytics manager. I had experienced very rapid career growth, but I was feeling burned out and depressed.
My aim was to get a director's role as quickly as possible, as that was my definition of career success. But one morning, feeling anxious and worried about the day ahead, I realized I hadn't thought about what success really meant to me. I'd just internalized what others understood it to be.
Something wasn't right, but if you just change jobs without understanding what you truly want to do, then you'll end up in the same situation again. So, I did some deep inner work with a coach. To increase my confidence and deal with my impostor syndrome, I also did a coaching certification to learn some tools and strategies to help myself.
During this journey, I realized that I wanted to start my own coaching business to help people who were feeling exhausted and depressed by their careers. The people themselves weren't the problem. They just weren't in the right environments.
I laid the foundation for my coaching business first. So often, we want instant results, but then, we just set ourselves up to feel miserable. Instead, I set myself a goal. By January 2022, I wanted to have started my business. I made sure my student loans were paid off and that I had savings in the bank. Before leaving my job, I got the certifications I needed, set up my website and started building my LinkedIn presence.
Social media is so important because people come into your world. It's a living résumé of who you are, your background and what you believe in. People connect with that. I also reached out to people in my network because there was already a level of trust there. Then, once I had a number of positive testimonials, the growth outside of my network became more organic.
I've learned that it's important to take ownership of your decisions. Before starting my own business, I'd always had someone in a position of authority — my parents, a professor or a manager. It comes down to releasing fears and taking the authority back.
For anyone thinking of making a career change, I'd recommend the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck. It explores the difference between a "fixed mindset" and a "growth mindset". Someone with a fixed mindset looks at life as a linear, static constant, whereas someone with a growth mindset looks at life as a cycle, with phases and constant opportunities to learn. Courage, resilience and confidence can be acquired over time.
All too often, self-imposed limiting beliefs and excuses, like "I'm too old to change jobs", stop people from making changes in their lives. People don't like to hear it, but it's a choice. It's up to you whether you take full responsibility for how your life turns out.