#NewJobNewMe

"Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of my life," I thought that Sunday night, eager for morning to come. Okay maybe not that intense. But it is the first day of my new job as a journalist/writer and I couldn’t be more excited. See, this isn’t just any ordinary job. It’s the career transition I have been wanting for a long time. It’s my move back to my greatest passion in life—writing.

All my life, all I ever wanted to do was write. I wrote in my personal journal through my elementary, middle, and high school years. I wrote for the school paper in college. I worked as an editor for a couple of years after college, and I always continued to write here and there.

Back to the cubicle life, but I'm cool with it :)

But life derails, as it so often does. And I found myself needing to make more money, wanting to challenge my knowledge and skills, and become my own financially-stable person. So I did want any normal person does when career options seem limited, I became a teacher.

Life, Interrupted

For the last four and a half years, I have been working in education. Surprisingly, it was the only job I could find all those years ago. Never in my life had I ever considered education as a career, but I was sure I could make it work.

So I became a second grade teacher, but that didn’t work because they were too young; then I was a third grade teacher, but that didn’t stick because I was too bored; so next I became a high school freshman teacher, which lasted only a year for obvious reasons; then I became a college counselor guiding seniors on making their transition to college, but still it was not for me.

Finally, I knew I had to stop trying to fit a square peg in a round hole, stop pretending to be something I was not, and go back to pursuing my lifelong dream.

I couldn’t wait for the perfect job to come along, so I decided to take a more active approach. I said farewell to my colleagues and students and ventured out into the unknown—a world of, dare I say it, unemployment.

A Fruitful Hiatus

This was a change I had been wanting to make for quite a while, but all my feeble, last attempts proved uneventful and got me zero results. If I wanted to be successful this time, I knew I had to shake things up. The biggest shake, of course, was quitting my job. Now this was an important first step because, as humans, we tend to remain at our most comfortable. There was no great need for me to take action before because I was still keeping busy and I was still getting paid. Hence, comfort.

As soon as Comfort exited the door, Urgency came in with his tag-along friend, Purpose.

Soon, there was purpose to everything I was doing. I found myself carefully analyzing the situation and visualizing the results. I did something out-of-the-ordinary and created a good old-fashioned action plan. I don’t just mean a trivial to-do list existing only in my head. No, I literally wrote out a strategic four-page action plan, titled Find Kickass, High-Paying Communications Job 2.0.

There were many components to this plan that proved vital to getting my new job. The three most important were:

1. Resume. I had to modernize my resume and re-order my experience, moving up my relevant jobs/internships in the communications industry and downgrade my teaching experience.
2. Network. I reached out to people I knew: friends, colleagues, past mentors, professors from college. Everybody was happy to help and I can honestly say I wouldn’t have been able to make this career change if I didn’t have people cheering me on and leading the way.
3. Resources. I read blogs, searched on Linkedin, visited the career services from the college I graduated from. I looked everywhere for guidance on getting a job and learned so much about what works and what doesn’t.

It all paid off. It only took me one month to find my new job. I never suffered financially and I never lost hope. If I have one recommendation to anyone looking to land a new job, it is just that, make a plan and stick with it.

Home, Sweet Home

So here I am now. Working in downtown Dallas. Interviewing sources. Writing profiles. And, collaborating with other creatives. Every day now I wake up, eager to get dressed, look my best, and head off to work.

This first week was the conceptualization of everything I wanted. Better yet, it ended with a bang in a badass marketing meeting. My new co-workers had just returned from the Digital Summit and they were meeting to share conference highlights. One by one they all discussed their recent findings. Fascinated, I hung on to every word. Hopefully soon, I can share insights just as astute.

I feel at home now. I no longer feel like an outsider looking in. I belong. I’m glad I finally had the courage to pursue my passion. This is what drives me forward and I don’t intend to live without it. Because life without passion is pointless.

Life without passion is pointless.