Finding your own career path? The key to confidence
This article was written by Anna Myers who writes about culture, lifestyle, identity, relationships, social commentary and everything in between for publications like Teen Vogue, Elle, Glamour, Refinery29, SELF, Popsugar, MTV, Apartment Therapy and The Financial Diet.
Switching careers gets a bad rep. Changing roles, industries, university courses. Changing our mind. Teachers will tell you it’s not the wisest option, friends will advise you to just stick it out just a little bit longer, and family members will look on with compassion as you try to make sense of the never-ending chaos in your mind.
Because --well, taking any kind of leap is not easy. A career leap? Harder than most. But I’m here to tell you it was the best decision I could have made, both for my professional and personal life, and the greatest confidence boost I’ve ever experienced. I should know: I switched careers three times in the last six years!
I’d originally moved to London to train as an actress, but -a graduation at BAFTA, a Durex commercial and too many terrible auditions to count later- quickly realized I wasn’t going to be finding my place in the world through Shakespeare plays and waitressing shifts. There was no logical next step, nor did I have any idea what else I’d be good at besides crying on camera and polishing cutlery. I was young, heartbroken, and so, so lost.
Looking back, I wish I could tell my 23-year-old self that in order to find answers, she would need to start asking better questions. I didn’t know what value I could bring to a company, and that made it impossible to communicate any value at all to the world. It was only when I started asking myself what had added joy, and brought life to my experiences so far, that I realised I had so much more to offer than a half-empty CV and a few buzzwords on a cover letter could express.
That was the true confidence boost: putting pen to paper and listing how many skills, learned and bettered through the years, I could now apply to a different role altogether. With a good dose of incredible luck and stubborn resilience, I landed an internship at a fast-paced PR agency counting true Hollywood stars as its clients and the best mentor I could have asked for as its head. We worked closely together on exciting project after exciting project, and I soaked up everything I could. The internship turned into a full-time role, and I had a penny-drop moment: I was good at this. I loved everything about my job, and for the first time in a very long time, I was excited to wake up every morning and go to work.
This was as much about the role itself as it was about me reshaping everything I knew about work and realising the true potential of what I’d kept under wraps for years, stuck in a path that didn’t belong to me anymore. I learned something new about myself every day -from goals I’d never dared dream of, to weaknesses I’d never before had the chance to spot, and natural skills I had never before put to use.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I decided to do it all over again. I knew I wanted to be my own boss and try out new ways to test myself, so I took the jump to go freelance, start consulting, and move to a different country. Only a pandemic hit not long after, and well, we all know how that story goes.
I first panicked, then panicked some more, and finally did enough deep breathing to start brainstorming my next steps. By then, I’d learned enough about my own strengths and weak spots: I knew I could pivot my freelance offerings in a way that ultimately made more sense and kept me sane (and working!) through the last year and a half. I now write for publications like Elle, Teen Vogue, Refinery29, Glamour, SELF Magazine, Popsugar and Apartment Therapy; help brands communicate their value to a wider audience through copy & content writing; and lend my voice to names like LEVI’s, Esteé Lauder, FIFA, Bvlgari, Microsoft Surface and many more, whenever they need someone with theater training to read out their scripts in commercial, corporate or educational videos.
Safe to say I’m pretty busy these days, and happier than I was when I thought I’d be the next Meryl Streep! But I didn’t have even a drop of this confidence four years ago, and I would have paid good money for it.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that everyone needs to quit their job and re-evaluate their entire life on a regular basis. I’m not encouraging you to leave a life that fulfills you in all the right ways --I’d love more of that, actually, contentment is a deeply undervalued feeling! But if you’re feeling the pull to something different, or a knot in your throat telling you the right career path for you is somewhere out there? If you’re a bit stuck in life, and wondering what more you could learn about yourself from trying different identities out? Perhaps your intuition is gnawing away at you night after night, not in a Instagram-keeps-telling-me-I-should-quit-my-job-way, but in genuine interest for what might lie elsewhere?
I’m here to tell you that confidence is not a stepping stone nor an arrival point, but the push forward we need to keep bettering ourselves. It’s just another piece of the puzzle, and can come in many forms -even, or especially, the scariest ones. Wherever your path might lead you, I am rooting for you.
