5 quick career experiments you could do this week (part 5)
Figuring out your next career step can bring up a lot of internal conflicts.
There are so many variables to balance — what you enjoy doing, what you think you’re good at, what the market needs, how much money you need to make, what sounds impressive to your friends, what fits with the geography you want to live in, what fits with the amount of time you want to give to work vs. other things in your life, etc. etc.
That’s a lot of variables to keep in mind!
So if you’re feeling stuck, paralyzed, or confused, that is totally normal.
But here’s why it’s important to try to resolve those internal conflicts.
You and your brain are basically in a 3 legged race together.
And since you’re bound together at the hip every second of every day…
It’s really hard to get to where you’re trying to go if every part of you is not on board.
You can drag a dissenting part of yourself forward…
But it takes a LOT of effort and chances are, at some point, your energy will run out.
So before you start sprinting toward the finish line…
Take the time to resolve those conflicts and get every part of you moving in the same direction.
At the end of the day, that’s why we’re doing these career experiments.
You have an internal disagreement about what you should do next.
And rather than trying to resolve those disagreements with discussion…
We’re resolving the disagreements with DATA.
In the introduction to this series, I told you to pick ONE job or career path to test.
And over the last several days, we’ve covered 4 fast and easy career experiments that you can do this week, even with a busy day job and a busy life.
Experiment 1: Listen to podcasts where people “talk shop” about that industry
Experiment 2: Do coffee chats with people in the industry and get facts, not feelings
Experiment 3: Do the “job interview project”
Experiment 4: Make a ghost proposal
Today, we’re going to talk about the final experiment—
Experiment 5: Take on a free client or customer
In Experiment #4, you didn’t have to show your ghost proposal to anyone.
In Experiment #5, we’re taking things a step further and you’re actually working with your potential clients or customers.
You can make it a smaller project if that’s easier.
If your paid product would be a 3 month project, make your free product just a few weeks.
If your paid deliverable would a big transformation, make your free deliverable just one small piece of the puzzle.
But the point of the experience is for you to get a full rep actually DOING the thing you’d be doing — with a real customer and a real deliverable.
People often ask me how I made the leap from working in corporate to being a coach.
The answer is: I did this exact experiment for nine months.
In February 2021, I started writing and publishing two articles a week. Not publicly (way too scary) — just to a small group of friends via email.
I was trying out doing the marketing I would ultimately have to do as a coach — for free, with very low stakes, on a small scale.
In April 2021, I started a coach certification program.
There were hundreds of people in the program, but they broke us up into mini-cohorts of 10 people each.
They encouraged us to practice by coaching each other. The requirement was that we do six practice coaching sessions with each other in six months.
I decided to do a practice coaching session with every person in my cohort every single week.
We would trade off on either giving or receiving coaching…
So I spent six months coaching people for 5 hours a week.
Again, all for free and in a very-low stakes environment.
These were all people who were already bought in to the idea of coaching and who knew I was still learning how to do this (as were they!). There was nothing to lose.
At the end of the certification, I decided to take on 10 free clients for six weeks each.
These were people who had never worked with a coach before.
I took them through the full consult process so I could practice doing an intake, setting goals for a coaching package, and help them think through whether or not they wanted to work with me.
(Even if they weren’t paying with their money, they were paying with their time. So we talked through the decision as seriously as I do with potential clients today.)
And then I spent a couple months living in the full rhythm of being a coach — posting content online to let people know about my services, going to events and saying “Hi, I’m a coach!”, and having a regular cadence of client calls on my calendar.
And it was only after I did ALL of that that I “officially” became a coach and started taking on paid clients.
And by that point, it wasn’t a leap.
It was just the next simple, straightforward step.
And because I had taken my time and gathered plenty of data and resolved every internal conflict I had…
I felt fully aligned about my next step, and I could sprint wholeheartedly toward the finish line.
I told you that you can do these experiments this week — and you absolutely can!
But I also want to tell you: Don’t be afraid to take your time.
Because you’re not going anywhere — and you’re certainly not staying there — unless every part of you is on board.
So take it step by step.
Do one experiment at a time.
And keep working on resolving your internal disagreements with DATA, not just endless circular discussion :)
I absolutely had a coach to help me through this process.
I don’t think I could have done it alone.
It’s so hard to see things objectively when it’s YOUR career, and everything feels so personal.
My coach played a critical role in keeping me on track, getting me out of my emotional spirals, and providing an objective outside perspective.
So if you’d like a coach to help you through this process too…
Come talk to me, and let’s talk about how we could work together :)
What my clients have to say…
“Coaching helped me get up and feel empowered and feel like I could actually change my outcome based on how I thought about things.
Having been a real academic overachiever, I get into this situation where if things are not perfect, I get stuck in a rut. Unless it's all perfect, I don't move forward.
But Pooja taught me the concept of ‘quantity creates quality’ and gave me practical goals every week, and that really helped me move forward in my professional life (and even in my dating life!).
I moved from just sitting around in my room overthinking everything and not really taking any action, to having weekly appointments to move things forward, and having someone holding me accountable to getting stuff done. And that just gave me a lot more self-belief and structure.”
—Client | Communications Consultant turned Lawyer
Did you know I have a full table of contents, where all my work is categorized by topic, so you can easily find what you need right now? Check it out below! :)
⬅️ Experiment #4
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