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Hello, everybody. I hope you are having a great week, and thank you for joining me again for this solo episode of the Conscious Success podcast. So today, this episode is for the people who are listening and know deep down that your current job is not aligned. It is perhaps draining your energy, or at the very least, it is not lighting you up.
And while it might feel scary to admit that to yourself or to say out loud and to share with others, deep down, you have a vision for something else you want to create. Maybe that's a business. Maybe that's some creative dream or project. But you're not confused about what you want. The reason that you feel stuck is because every path to get there seems to require a sacrifice that you don't want to make. You don't want to compromise your knife
nice life, you don't want to compromise your nice lifestyle that you've worked hard to create by just walking away from your lucrative corporate job. You don't want to trade your sleep or exercise or time with your friends and family or let's face it, probably scrolling or watching TV in order to build that business or work towards that dream, even though work is demanding.
You don't want to trade sleep or exercise or time with your friends and family or, let's face it, probably also scrolling or watching TV to build your business. Even though work is demanding and then you have no more hours in the day. You don't want to get off the high potential track and put your career on pause in case pursuing your own dream doesn't work out. And whatever the story is for you,
This is where so many people get stuck for far too long because you're trying to optimize for everything without being really willing to sacrifice anything or accept any risk or downside. But unfortunately, that is not a recipe for success. It is a recipe for still being in the exact same place you are today in 10 years time. And so you stay frozen and you're hoping for this no trade-off option.
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or for a future date when you suddenly have all the time and all the money and all the confidence in the world to finally pursue that dream. But unfortunately, that is not a reality. And the people who actually make this transition, who are actually earning money, monetizing their passions and doing things they deeply enjoy and they give them energy and provide them with an income, they do not have more clarity or ability than you.
What they have is a clear relationship with trade-offs, and they're willing to make short-term compromises in order to achieve their long-term goals. So maybe it's that you want to build a direct-to-consumer business. Maybe you want to have your own coaching practice like me. Maybe you want to write a sub-stack or build an audience that you can monetize. Maybe you want to write a book or become an interior designer or a paid speaker.
Or maybe you just want to have your own fractional consulting practice rather than continuing to work for the man and have control over your time and the clients that you work with. Whatever your dream is, it is personal. But if it continues to call to you, I also believe that it is possible. That is why they call it a calling, right? It doesn't shut up. It is that.
quiet but unshakable voice that keeps trying to tell you and alert you and direct you to what you are meant to be doing. But it is not possible to honor that voice without making trade-offs. And so the sooner that you can accept that there is no perfect option, which allows you to present all... So the sooner you can accept that there is no perfect option, which will allow you to prevent all risk and all downside while maximizing all time and upside,
then the sooner you can start moving forwards and taking meaningful and consistent steps to actually building the career that you want rather than just making peace with the one that you have. And in my work as a career redesign coach, I see five viable transition tracks to be able to start earning an income doing something that you love while not completely blowing up your life and your financial situation as you do it. And look, none of these are perfect.
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all of these required trade-offs as we've talked about. But today we're gonna really dive into what each of these five paths look like and what are the trade-offs required so that you can get clear on which path will work best for you so that you can stop feeling stuck and start taking action. Okay, so the first transition track as I call it that you could possibly choose is to start
deprioritizing, putting all of your time and your energy into your current job, and start to actually reserve and reinvest some of that time and energy into the thing that you actually want to build. But in order to do this, you also want to preserve the financial safety net and the runway to get there. So you're not ready to leave your corporate job. You have financial commitments and a lifestyle that you want to maintain.
And you're not willing to just walk away and sacrifice that towards building the vision.
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Okay, so the first transition track, the choice is to deprioritize work by
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Okay, so the first possible transition track is to maintain your current job, but deprioritize how much time and energy you give to work and start to actually reinvest some of that towards building to the dream that you actually want. And this allows you to continue to have the income stream and the financial safety net and the runway to actually be able to build towards that goal.
without just up and leaving your job and your financial commitments, right? So for those of you listening who really have a lifestyle that's important to you to maintain, you have financial commitments that you are unwilling or unable to sacrifice, you can still get to that vision if you start to divest and reinvest some energy strategically from trying to continue to climb the corporate ladder to instead
shifting towards using some of that to building. And you've probably heard the term quiet quitting. We don't buy into quiet quitting here. I think most of my clients are too motivated and high achieving and hold themselves to too high a standards just to accept a paycheck with doing a subpar job. And quite frankly, it's out of alignment with our values. But there is another option which I like to refer to as quiet building. And here,
The shift is that rather than constantly focusing on hitting that next rung, the next promotion, the next performance review, impressing your leadership, you focus from, instead you shift from being focused on climbing to building your path out. And there are these terms that you can either be a
superstar or a rock star and still do a great job. So what do I mean by that? A superstar is on a super steep trajectory. They're like a shooting star, right? And as soon as they achieve one milestone, one promotion, they're on to the next. It's up, up, up, up, up. And they're willing to be in that steep learning curve and to work really hard and to really put in that effort in order to move forward, which
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Look, if you want to climb the corporate ladder, if that's your big dream and goal, and you're super energized by that, that's amazing. Keep doing that. But if you want to build a business or you want to pursue a creative dream of your own, what you need is time, not more prestige and not another promotion. So rather than just continuing to focus reactively, honestly, on climbing that corporate ladder,
If you shift into being a rock star, rock stars focus on developing the know-how and the mastery so that they can do their current role well while also buying time back for themselves. We all know the intensity of starting a new role or at a new company and you're trying to learn everything and learn all the systems and the processes and the people and build the relationships. And once that's established, once that's in place, and once you really know how to do your job and do it well,
it becomes so much easier to do that job well and less amount of time invested. So as a rock star, you've built or you build mastery first, you know how to do the job in front of you, you know how to navigate the organization, and you start to focus on optimizing to be able to do it well in less time. And this is when you truly are able to have that work-life balance, right? You might not be
promotion worthy on that next round, you might not be taking on that stretch project that you would otherwise do, but you're able to do the full job itself probably in about 80 % of the time. And doing that allows you to reinvest that 20 % or let's call it 10 hours a week into your side hustle. And look, the company is still getting value. You're still showing up. You're still doing a great job. So you don't have to feel guilty.
but your focus is on what you're building on the side, not on moving up. But shifting from, if you're used to being a superstar, shifting from being a superstar to a rock star often requires a lot of identity work and a lot of reprogramming so that you can really uncouple your sense of worthiness from work and receiving external validation and be able to set and hold strong boundaries so that you can consistently devote
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the time that you've bought back, so that you can consistently devote the time that you've bought back towards making progress towards your vision versus letting that time get eaten up by continuing to work harder in the role that you have or by house tasks or scrolling or the million other things that can distract us. And so while this process to quietly build while maintaining your full-time job,
maybe slower than you would like if you could go all in, that's the trade off, right? It's going to take longer to build and you're gonna have to split your focus a little bit. You can't have 100 % of your attention and 100 % of your creative energy go to the thing that you wanna build. You still have to stay committed and showing up to the job. But if you can take those 10 hours and stay consistent week after week, you will be amazed at what you're able to accomplish and what avenues
you're able to open up for yourself or what revenue streams you're able to prove out in a year or two. so quietly building is such a sound strategy, particularly if having that financial security is really necessary or really important to you. And so you get to keep that stable income. It might be a little bit hard on your ego to not get, you know, exceeds expectations on that next performance review or be passed over for that promotion.
There's a lot of emotional regulation work that we may need to do to continue to move through that and to continue to focus on what our goal is and be super intentional about those priorities. But this can be such a winning strategy. And I also definitely believe that building while having a financial safety net that allows you to stay regulated
that allows you to stay in creator mode rather than going into survival mode and panic and scarcity for many people is the right approach. again, it's not about having one of these. So consider if that is you.
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Okay, so that is the first option to start to deprioritize your work, your day job, your time and energy that you invest and start to reinvest it in what you want to build. The second transition track is to deprioritize not your work life, but your personal life for a season. Now, you might be thinking to yourself that that will never work for you.
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You might've been thinking to yourself when I was just talking about deprioritizing your work that that would never work for you, that your job is just too demanding and maybe you're a leader, you're not really in control of your time or you work in billable hours trading time for money and there's nowhere to hide. Well, in that case, that might be the reality. And if financial security and continuing to maintain an income while you build is really important to you, then the next strategy that I really see work is to
Deprioritize your personal life for a season in order to free up the time to build, right? We only have 24 hours in a day. The time has to come from somewhere. It's going to come from our professional life or our personal life. And so really, there's a choice point there. And so in deprioritizing your personal life, you are choosing that for a season, not forever, you might have time for less workouts. You see friends less.
you might get up earlier and compromise a little bit of sleep or go to bed earlier and honestly compromise those hours spent binge watching TV or whatever that looks like for you. And one of my clients right now is building a CPG company on the side of her very demanding job as a chief of staff at a major tech company. And she's really just not in control of her time at that job. She supports this high powered exec. She's responding to fire drills across the business.
And so really doing her job in less time wasn't a viable option. So ultimately what she decided to do was to sacrifice some of her personal life while she got the business off the ground. And so rather than waking up at her standard 7 a.m., she switched this to a 5.30 a.m. wake up. And rather than working out before work or walking her dog most mornings, she chose two mornings a week that she was going to give up her workout and ask her husband to walk the dog.
and work on her business instead when her energy and creative capacity was at its highest. And then rather than spend all weekend, you know, relaxing or seeing friends, she decided to devote half a day every weekend to working on her business and limit her other plans accordingly. And so these were the trade-offs she made in deprioritizing her personal life. And in doing so, she was able to free up 10 hours a week across two mornings each work week and a half of a day on the weekend.
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And again, across a long enough period of time, 10 hours a week can translate into such meaningful progress and results. And if you listen to my podcast episode with Erica Katz, the former corporate lawyer turned novelist who I spoke with a few weeks back, if you haven't listened to that episode, it's amazing, please go back. But she talks about how she chose this strategy when she was writing her first novel alongside of her law job.
she couldn't scale back on her billable hours or just hold boundaries with these senior partners who they themselves were responding to emails at 1 a.m. But instead what she chose to do was to devote her vacation days to writing her first novel. And she also de-prioritized dating for a period of time so that she could see that dream through to fruition. So the trade-offs here, again, the process, only having 10 hours a week versus
40 or 50, it might not go as fast as you wish it could. And you may be sacrificing other things that you enjoy in the ways you wish you could spend your time. But the benefit is that you get to keep a stable income while you prove out that path, right? So your personal life, your social life, now it'll take a backseat for a season, but it will allow you to really...
find the energy and the time to stay committed to something long enough to see that through. And I should mention, especially being the mom of two two-year-olds with a third on the way, this option likely isn't possible for most moms of at least young kids. Now I know Julie Fidel, who was also just on the podcast, she did employ this strategy.
getting up early before work and working on her business three mornings a week. And she does have a son, but her son was in, I think, middle school or high school at the time. So he was older and needed her far less. But being a mom and certainly a mom of really dependent young kids and having a big career, those are both full-time jobs. So trying to expect that you're going to be able to add a second business on top of a career and being a mom, like the math just doesn't math. Something has to give.
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Oftentimes the strategy of like deprioritizing your personal life, it's either a younger person's game, a person who doesn't have kids game, or once your kids are older and more self-sufficient, or at the very least sleeping through the night. So just wanted to name that as that might not be a sound strategy for those of us in our childbearing years. Okay, so the third transition track that I see work well is to downshift to a bridge job.
So the first two options allow you to prioritize keeping your current job and your current income while building on the side. And the first has you prioritize work, the second has you, the first has you deprioritize work, and the second has you deprioritize your personal life. The third option is how you can keep some income coming in, but it also usually decreases the amount of time you need to invest.
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Now the third option allows you to keep revenue coming in, but it often causes you to de-
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Now this option of downshifting to a bridge job, it allows you to keep some revenue coming in, though that might not be as much revenue as if you kept your current job. So this option is really about consciously downshifting or switching to a job that is downleveling the intensity, downleveling the pace, downleveling the amount of time you need to spend in the job.
so that you can free up even more time to work on your side business or towards whatever that vision looks like for you. And so this downshift could take a variety of forms. Sometimes it looks like switching roles to a less demanding role at your current company. Sometimes it can look like trying to negotiate a four-day work week in exchange for 80 % pay. Sometimes it looks like switching from a full-time W-4 to a
Sometimes it looks like switching from a full-time to... Sometimes it looks like switch... Sometimes it looks like switching from being a full-time employee to doing contract work where you have more control over your hours. And sometimes it looks like taking another job at another company that's less demanding or even in another industry entirely. So a bridge job can take many different forms and it will depend, you know, what kind of bridge job is good for you will depend on your skill set and...
how much money you wanna bring in in the short term and the schedule you wanna create for yourself. examples of this, I had a client who had a conversation with her company where she'd been at for many years and she shared this business that she wanted to build and asked to move to part-time work instead. And she was valued at the company and they ultimately shifted her to a 30 hour a week contract rather than a full-time setup. And this freed up a lot more time and honestly a lot more
energetic focus to be able to work on her business. And this is also what Erica Katz, the former lawyer I was just talking about, chose to do while writing her second novel. So she took on a managerial role at her law firm, which was a less demanding job than being an attorney on cases, so that she had more time to write. While that took giving up on her partner track and the more lucrative role, she was able to focus on her first priority.
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of finishing her second novel. So oftentimes, know, downshifting to a bridge job requires putting your ego aside and being able to take a job that's less prestigious or less lucrative so that you can make progress to where you actually want to go. And this could even look like taking a job as a waiter or a bartender for a period of time in order to fully protect your days to work, you know, on your vision and make
your income in the evenings. There's no right way or right job here, but with a bridge job, it is really about having some income coming in, but sacrificing some short-term revenue for that long-term alignment. And the benefits are you can still cover your bills, but the trade-offs are you might need to tighten your purse strings for a period of time and be more discerning about your spending rather than just continue to live the same lifestyle you're accustomed to.
And it can also be, as I just mentioned, a big ego hit and can feel a bit risky that if you step off that path like Erica did, stepping off that partner path that you might not be able to get back on. But again, it is about choosing the trade-offs that work for you. Okay, so the fourth transition track that I wanna name here is to monetize your current skill set in the short term as a solopreneur.
while building towards additional revenue streams in the long term. So with this option, it's really about figuring out what are you currently really excellent at that you could be paid well for in a kind of fractional or consulting type of offer. So you're not necessarily doing different work than you are today, but you're doing it as a solopreneur rather than as an employee of a company. And this often works really well when you've
spent 10 plus years in a role and you've built expertise and you've built mastery and a strong network. And for some of my clients, by the way, this is the thing they want to build, right? They like what they do. They just want more control or freedom over how they spend their time and what kinds of projects they work on. So this can be the end goal in and of itself. But for others, monetizing that primary skill set, which they're currently paid well for,
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in order to bring in income in the short term while also giving them control and freeing up time and runway to be able to build towards or test other revenue streams until they prove those out. And then they can shift the distribution of where they're spending their time and how they're earning their money is really the path to getting there. So for example, I have a client right now who left her role in tech where she worked for almost 20 years.
she really created a niche for herself figuring out how to companies scale their sales organizations, whether that was by incorporating a vendor model or figuring out what was broken in the sales org. And what she really would love to do longer term is to do more team and leadership coaching. She really recognized that monetizing that skill set of scaled sales
as a consultant would be the quickest path to revenue that would allow her to hit her income goals by only taking on a few corporate clients a year, which would still give her tons of time to build her leadership coaching business as well. So in this phased approach, she focused on what is the quickest path to revenue as I go out on my own. And then once that's in a good place, she can...
choose to invest more and more of that time into developing her leadership coaching revenue stream as well. And so this is really the portfolio career model that I was speaking with Julie Fidel about as well. And it is a really great way to exit corporate and start making money in a pretty short amount of time by really monetizing the most lucrative, most valuable skill you have at present.
while building the expertise and the business and the audience or whatever that looks like to launch other revenue streams. So the benefits here are that it's pretty minimal work. You'd be surprised at how quickly you can set up a fractional or consulting business and start earning money for yourself and really give yourself that freedom and the runway and the control over your time and energy in order to invest in the right ways. But the trade-offs are that
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Oftentimes you're gonna take a short-term hit to your earning potential. Often there's a dip before you find and sign clients and figure out all of your business systems and processes. And also you're oftentimes walking away from the benefits or the healthcare that came with a corporate job as a solopreneur. Though if you have a partner and they have a job that can provide that stability, this option can be that much more attractive. Okay.
So our final option here is to bootstrap your own business. And in this option, it is about going all in on yourself and really just choosing, hey, I'm going to give myself a complete focus and an amount of time to build towards the thing I actually want versus splitting that focus. And this is what I ultimately chose to do when I built my coaching business. I did spend the first few months sacrificing my personal life while still working.
as I started going back to school on nights and weekends before I ultimately took a leave and then made the decision to leave work entirely in order to be able to focus on building my coaching business and going in on that full time. And when I made that choice to leave my job and go all in on this, I put $200,000 into a business bank account. And I told myself that if that account ever got to zero, that I would go back to sales.
and I would still be able to feel proud of myself because I actually went for it. And I trusted that with my level of experience and network, I would be able to get another job. And now fortunately, it never came to that. I was able to pretty quickly get clients and build a sustainable business, but I made that jump before I had the proof. Now I will say that I made this choice when I was already married and I knew that I could rely on my husband for benefits and that we had already built
a financial safety net. this strategy typically doesn't work well for the person who's earlier in their career living paycheck to paycheck. You kind of need to have some money or some savings to rely on. And so this typically works well for people who are later in their career, who've already had a good degree of success or been able to put some money away. And while it does require, you know, dipping into your savings or, you know, being the primary investor in your business,
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It shouldn't be to the extent that you can't pay your bills or it's unsafe to do so. And with bootstrapping, the benefit is that you immediately get to spend all of your time and energy with that singular focus rather than trying to split your time and focus across multiple jobs. But the trade-off is that you don't have proof of concept or revenue yet, right? You're jumping and hoping that you can build a viable business before you hit the ground and that you're not crazy or delusional for trying.
So you make those financial trade-offs for a while, and that also can be really hard on the ego to walk away from the job that gives you a lot of identity. And also for a lot of my high achieving independent female clients, they're used to being financially independent and not needing anyone, even their partners. And so sometimes this option does require us to...
depend on our partner perhaps for the first time, which can feel very activating and very vulnerable to put yourself out there when people ask what you're doing and you say, I'm building a business versus quietly building on the side before really having that proof of concept that it's going to work. So I hope you can hear as I talk about each of these transition tracks, each of these possible options, that there's not a single quote unquote right option that works for everyone.
It's really just about what trade-offs you are willing or unwilling to make in this season of life. So again, the five avenues that we discussed today are deprioritizing your current work and really shifting from that superstar to that rock star mentality, deprioritizing your personal life for a season and using that time to build, downshifting to a bridge job where you may make less money, but you free up some time.
monetizing your current skillset in the short term as a solopreneur while building towards different revenue streams in the longer term and more and more aligning to what you actually want to be doing, or going all in, betting on yourself, being the primary investor and bootstrapping your own business. So as you hear each of these options laid out, maybe one or two feel the most viable, but just because they...
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may be viable doesn't mean that you don't still have fears or stories that come up wanting to keep you safe but stuck. But one of my favorite quotes that I repeat to my clients all the time is that bravery isn't the absence of fear. It is feeling the fear and doing it anyway. When you know this is a calling, when you know this is something you really want, it is about being able to regulate through and tolerate that fear and still take aligned action.
And the difference between the people who have the career that you dream about having and you is that they were willing to get uncomfortable, they were willing to be brave, and they were willing to take consistent action until their dream became their reality. So if this is you and you are done staying stuck, I invite you right now to just decide which transition track of these five makes the most sense for you. And then what is the next right step that you're going to take in the next seven days and then take it.
And look, if you then don't take that next step that you have gotten clarity on the path and that you've committed that you want to take, don't get hard on yourself. Don't beat yourself up. But I do invite you to get curious about why you haven't been able to take that step. In my client containers, often talk to my clients about, you know, we set action items. In my client containers, we always set action items at the end of each session between that session and the next. But my clients know that
If those actions aren't completed by the next session, I don't blame and shame them. I don't get critical, but instead I do get curious. And really this is where I think the value of coaching comes in because it's like, what is at the heart of why we're not taking that action? Is there fear or a safety strategy playing out? Is it that we don't have a clear enough next step or the action's too big? Is it that we don't believe in the strategy or the vision? Whatever it is.
It's not about forcing yourself to show up, but it's about really getting curious so that you can consistently get unblocked and keep moving forward towards that goal and that you can step into your power and really create something beyond your wildest expectations. if you're interested in support throughout your own career, if you're interested in support throughout your own career redesign journey, please reach out. The link to book a call with me is in the show notes.
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And I would love to help you to clarify that transition track, clarify the strategy and the big next steps for you to get there. The building blocks that will allow that to become a reality and then help you to step into.
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and then help you to step into being brave and to regulating through the fears or the patterns or the stories that come up so that you can really turn your passion into your primary income. So thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. I am so grateful that you've chosen to spend this time with me. I know how precious your earbud time is and your time in general. So thank you for being here.
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Okay, I really hope this episode served you and makes you just feel more clear and more empowered and like you actually have a plan to turn your passion into your primary income. I know your time is so precious. I am truly so grateful that you've chosen to spend it with me this week and I will see you in the next episode.
