Yeah, But... What's Really Stopping You From (Career) Success?

I'm a career-changer. In my mid 30s, I left my job in biotech to retool as a high school teacher. When you make a significant change to your life, you expect to encounter challenges. The most interesting, though, came not from institutions (like the bank or university) but in the form of people's sometimes negative and hostile responses. I upset not the people who were closest to me - but work colleagues and acquaintances. My decision struck a nerve that made a number of people defensive. I figured that once I'd explained my decision to my parents and explained about how even the bank was happy to float me a line of credit that that would be that. Y'know? Afterall, I reasoned, my parents would be the people most likely to object to a career change. My parents, I discovered, were the easy sell. I had the financial angle sorted out, and most of my dad's family were teachers, so my parents' questions were easily answered. While my parents lived their lives well within the 1970s and 80s rules of working for one employer for the majority of a career, they had instilled a few rebel thoughts into the heads of my brother and me. My father repeatedly turned down promotions into management because he was a stereotypical Dilbert-style engineer who was (and still is) self-aware enough to know that managing other people is not in anyone's best interests - especially his own. My brother and I learned that there are always alternatives to doing things differently than in the ways that other people take for granted. My father was also the person who first started to tell us that times were changing and that people would increasingly have more than one career during their working lives.

My parents taught me to look critically at cultural norms. I didn't realize how different that made me - until I decided to change careers.

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