Beyond the Paycheck: Finding Purpose in Your Professional Pivot

Twenty years in tech. That's what the resume says. But what it doesn't show is the quiet Sunday evenings spent wondering, "Is this really what I'm meant to do?" Or the morning commutes filled with dreams of work that feels more meaningful.

If you're considering a major career change, especially after building a successful career in one field, you're not alone. The question isn't just about changing jobs – it's about aligning your work with who you've become.

I recently spoke with a former tech executive who made the leap into sustainable business consulting. "The hardest part wasn't learning new skills," he shared. "It was giving myself permission to start over, to be a beginner again after being an expert for so long."

This resonates with many professionals facing similar crossroads. The challenges are real:

• Trading expertise for uncertainty

• Rebuilding professional identity

• Managing others' perceptions

• Balancing financial stability with personal fulfillment

• Navigating family impacts of career transitions

But here's what we often forget: Your years of experience aren't just a list of technical skills. They're a foundation of wisdom, problem-solving abilities, and emotional intelligence that can transfer to any field. The question isn't whether you're capable of change – it's about finding the courage to begin.

Think about this: What if your career change isn't about starting over, but about expanding into something greater? What if your previous experience is exactly what your new field needs?

The real challenge isn't the practical aspects of changing careers. It's the internal journey – rebuilding confidence, redefining success, and reconciling who you've been with who you want to become.

This is where the LifeResults CORE workshop becomes transformative. Over one powerful weekend, you'll:

• Clarify your authentic professional purpose

• Build confidence in your transition

• Develop tools for navigating uncertainty

• Connect with others making bold life changes

• Create a practical roadmap for your journey

Your career change is more than just a job switch – it's a chance to align your work with your values and create impact in ways that truly matter to you.

Ready to transform your professional uncertainty into purposeful action? Join us at the next LifeResults CORE workshop. It's time to build the bridge between your experience and your aspirations.

Finding Yourself Again: Rediscovering Joy After Divorce

The mirror feels different now. Where you once saw someone's partner, you now see... who exactly? It's a question many of us grapple with after divorce, when our reflection seems to blur between who we were and who we're becoming.

I remember sitting across from a woman who told me, "I spent so long being someone's wife that I forgot how to just be me." Her words echo the sentiment of many who find themselves navigating life after divorce – feeling simultaneously lost and on the verge of something new.

The truth is, divorce isn't just the end of a marriage. It's often the beginning of a profound journey back to yourself. But this journey comes with its own set of challenges:

You might find yourself questioning decisions you once made confidently. Simple choices – what to eat for dinner, which movie to watch, how to spend a Saturday – suddenly feel weighted with uncertainty when there's no one else's preferences to consider.

Your social circles might shift, leaving you to rediscover not just who you are, but who your true friends are. Some relationships strengthen, others fade, and you learn to navigate gatherings alone.

Most challenging perhaps is the inner dialogue – the constant negotiation between grief for what was lost and hope for what could be.

But here's what's beautiful about this moment: you get to choose. Every aspect of your life is open to redefinition. Your schedule, your home, your goals, your dreams – they're all yours to reimagine.

Consider this: What if this period of uncertainty could be transformed into a time of intentional self-discovery? What if the space left by loss could be filled with new purpose?

This is where the LifeResults CORE workshop comes in. Over one transformative weekend, you'll join others who are also navigating life's significant transitions. Through proven tools and guided experiences, you'll:

• Reconnect with your authentic self

• Build confidence in your choices

• Develop resilience for your journey ahead

• Create a vision for your next chapter

Ready to transform this challenging time into a breakthrough moment? The next LifeResults CORE workshop is waiting for you. Join us for a weekend that could change everything.

What If We Listened?

Are you happy with the state of the world right now?

I'm not – and I've been thinking about what we can do, what I can do?

What if we listened to each other as a starting point?

What if we asked “Why do you think that?” instead of attempting to prove our own belief using power tactics such as “my source is better than yours,” “I have more education” or “someone important said this.”

When’s the last time you changed someone’s mind with an Internet posting? Infrequent at best, right? How about in a conversation? Likely more often, though these days that can be difficult as well.

Why is that?

In my view, because we aren’t listening to each other – and if you want it, you gotta do it, model it, so others can see it works.

At LifeResults, one of the tools we teach is the “Four Fs.” These are four fear-based reactions that we all have ourselves, and see in others, on a daily basis. Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Façade (fake).

HMMM.

And best of all, we each have our favorite – our go-to fear-based reaction. Though most of us are experts in several so that when one doesn’t work, there’s another one at the ready. 

Now don’t get me wrong, these fear-based reactions can be useful, can save our lives even. We need to flee a burning building, for example.

AND, when we allow fear-based reactions to be our response, they become patterns. Patterns are non-think, non-creative, and usually destructive – and serve no one.

OK, what can we do?

Each of the four F’s has an “antidote” – a way to interrupt the pattern of fear and come from response, instead of reaction. For example:

• Fight’s antidote is Empathy: i.e. I wonder why that person cut me off on the freeway, they must have a really pressing reason to drive so fast (instead of speeding up to cut them off in retaliation).

• Flight’s antidote is Evaluation: i.e. when I feel like fleeing (physically or mentally), what if I paused, evaluated the situation to see if it really is dangerous, and then perhaps I can find a more thoughtful response.

• Freeze’s antidote is Enthusiasm: i.e. an object in motion stays in motion, an object at rest stays at rest – stuck. Get moving! Find a reason to take action, give the task at hand some energy, and you’re no longer stuck.

• Façade’s antidote is Ethics: bring truth, instead of a lie. You can even answer simple, everyday questions such as “How are you?” with a real response, creating connection and trust vs. “I’m fine” which does nothing of the sort.

What’s your “favorite F” (fear-based reaction)?

Knowing that, what do you need more of? (Hint, the antidote😊)

Try out your newfound “E” today – and maybe mix in kindness, respect, active listening, and acceptance as well. These are old-school values for sure, and yet they never go out of style. Let’s see what happens!

Submitted by Dave Vanable, LifeResults board president

I'm Just Winging It

It was a dark and stormy night... so I moved to Hawaii in 2014 where the sun shines a lot and warm rain often brings a triple rainbow. My sister moved to the Big Island in 1989; for 30 years I visited the island and lived there for 3- to 6-month intervals. Then in July 2014, she bought her first house on Craigslist. She asked, why don’t you just cut bait in NY and move here with me? Whaaat? Leave my sweet little ranch style house with a yard full of berries, garlic, and veggies? Life was great in NY; I owned my home where I saw therapeutic massage clients and hung with my friends. I was living a dream I had imagined years before. 

Perhaps I remember Oprah saying, “get a bigger dream.” 

My house sold in three days on Craigslist which created a glaring green GO light. During the next six weeks, I sold everything. During the arduous process of sorting and selling, I frequently asked if this was a wise decision remembering the mistakes of the past. 

AND, I remembered two lessons from LifeResults; 

1. Life at 99% is a bitch and at 100% is a cinch. If I sat in doubt, nothing would get done. Yet, knowing I was at 100% IN motivated me forward. 

2. One of the tools we teach in LifeResults is around  Courage -- and this was all taking a lot of COURAGE! Feel the fear and walk through it. My flight reservation had been made to prove to my sister that I was really moving. She thought about all the friends and family I was leaving behind and doubted my fortitude to follow through. 

A woman needs a car and that showed up on Facebook when a friend mentioned she needed to sell hers. With proper wheels underneath me, I cleared the pile of green waste the neighbors created when cutting down 20 trees - a lot of work, needed to be done, so I did it. . 

Job? Oh yeah, a job! When a friend needed six weeks off to visit family, I agreed to fill in as office manager for the local attorney who became a client and friend. Simultaneously, I studied diligently to pass the massage therapist test in Hawaii. During those six weeks, I was recruited as a massage therapist at a holistic addiction treatment center. When the center’s owner saw the extent of personal growth and private practice experience on my resume, she asked if I would join the therapy team. Sure, why not?

First day on the job I was to shadow my program director/boss, JF. But JF was really busy and said I should interview the client myself and write my notes in bullet form because English is his second language. I asked what I should do? And he said just do whatever it is you do. 

So … I did. As luck would have it, my first client Norm had just flown in from Oahu that day and was still pretty inebriated. Thanks, Norm, for being the gentle soul and the perfect first practice subject. 

Norm was my “first love”. Over these last five years, I’ve fallen in love with a few hundred gentle souls struggling with addictive substances, habits, and behaviors. I listen, we cry and we laugh as they share untold stories. I’ve been called an a-hole, a bitch, and an angel. 

For five years, every day, I’ve entered that house knowing I’m winging it, and trusting my heart and courage will carry me through… so far, so good! 

I enter that place prepared to teach THIS thing and end up teaching THAT thing. 

Neither JF nor his wife, Joyce has ever attended my class or one-on-one sessions. JF is an MKP (Mankind Project) brother and Joyce is WW (Woman WIthin), sister. I suppose that creates an element of trust. 

This is my story of COURAGE and I’m still winging it!

Submitted by Sherri Longyear, LifeResults board member

Go Gently...Please

Now is a time to go gently with yourself and with others.   Now is the time for love, for generosity, for kindness and compassion – toward all beings, including you!  It is the time to care deeply.  It is NOT the time to judge, shame, or condemn others.  I see the temptation and suspect it’s going to get stronger as we grow more impatient, frustrated, and weary.  And so, I plead with you, please, please be gentle… 
​
March 11th, just a little over 3 weeks ago, marks the day our world changed forever.  It was not long ago at all and yet it feels like a lifetime ago… we got the call that morning telling us that the mighty Mom Klein had died.  We visited our son (2 days before visits were shut down for the foreseeable future), grateful we could deliver this news in person and share our tears, love, and hugs.  I went out to lunch with my sister at a local restaurant and enjoyed a nice meal, and probably another hug or two. 

March 12th – with a growing sense of things quickly spinning into something unknown and foreign, I did a radio show with Lori and Keith from Recovery Coach University Radio.  With a heightened sense of awareness, we did wipe all the equipment and surfaces with Clorox wipes and mostly kept our distance, but we didn’t yet get how serious this was.  We joked about the toilet paper hoarding and shook our heads in confusion… and just to be safe, on the way home, I bought two packs.  We affirmed and were relieved by my younger son’s decision to cancel his trip to Florida for Spring Break, even though he is young and healthy… already it felt like the unquestionably right call.  Just days earlier I had told him I thought they’d be fine to go… 

Things were changing and happening so rapidly and have been ever since.  I feel like I’ve been caught in a whirlwind… internally and externally.  A blur of news updates, of emails advising of extra precautions being taken which rapidly morphed into “We are closed until further notice…”  Cancellations, closures, schools switching to online learning,… more and more erasures in the planner of all the trips, appointments, and events I had coming up.  April went from one in which I would barely be home to one in which I will only be home, with no plans. Each day brings with it a swirl of thoughts and feelings as I try to magically predict when this will all be over, fall into despair, perk up at a story of goodness – living within the chaos of it all. 

It’s a lot.  We must be gentle. 

There has been so much letting go… of classes, appointments, events, routines, regular support, fun times with others, contact with loved ones.  And, in all this letting go, we are all feeling the weight of uncertainty.  Those words “until further notice” land with a dark and ominous tone. They remind us that life is always uncertain – we just usually pretend it isn’t.  Somehow it feels extra uncertain right now with so many things being disrupted all at once.  The fear is palpable as this invisible antagonist sweeps around the world.  As we take in the death tolls, we are faced with our own immortality and the truth that one day those we love will also die.  We hope it won’t be alone. 

We are ordered to shelter in place, to self-quarantine, or to PAUSE as our NY Governor has called it.  For a moment we imagine all that we’ll get done in this time when busy-ness is taken away.  But then we feel the weight of it all, and we are reminded of how exhausted we are and that stress takes a toll on everything.  We are brought to our knees as we are forced to confront what is truly essential.  To re-prioritize our lives – what really matters?  Health.  Relationships.  Life.  Love.  Kindness. Compassion. Generosity.

All these free offerings??  They are oh so tempting to someone with Bright Shiny Object Syndrome, like moi!  The urge to fill in all that usually coveted white space is strong, and I catch myself mindlessly signing up, saying “yes, please distract me from the here and now…”  Nature abhors a vacuum, and apparently so do I.  Until I reality check and realize my bandwidth is not as wide as my white space – it’s actually much, much less than before. 

I remember to be gentle with myself. 

I don’t need to do all the things – only those that will really nourish me.  I only need to be on the calls with people and in groups that feel supportive.  I can skip the rest.  This might not be the time to learn a new skill or to focus on business.  This might be a time when less really is more.  I want to do more less! 

Over the past few weeks it has been easy to let this ever-present concern consume us.  It’s been easy to get obsessed even when we didn’t intend to.  Even if you don’t watch the news (which I don’t generally), the news is everywhere…social media posts, headlines of breaking news at the top of my email inbox and within every single email that comes in it’s there… Coronavirus… COVID-19. We need to be informed, but we don't need to be flooded with input.  It's too much to digest. 

We see the inherent inter-connectedness of all beings and this both terrifies and empowers us.  We are reminded that viruses don’t respect borders, oceans, or walls. 

We find ourselves reeling as we ride the roller coaster of emotions in this human experience – feeling our own and the collective fear, overwhelm, sadness, dread, and grief while also being uplifted and inspired by the many acts of compassion, caring, kindness, love, and generosity.  This time bringing out the best and the worst in us. 

It’s a lot. 

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Submitted by Barb Klein, LifeResults volunteer and founder of Inspired Possibility