How I Finally Made The Big Jump And Said Goodbye To Corporate America!
I made the jump! It’s been 4 weeks since I ended my job at a big corporate healthcare company. While the first week was filled with the thought of, “Did I make the right decision?” I had a lot of time to catch up on day to day errands and just more free time, which I did not exactly know what to do with.
I had to keep telling myself, “Take a step back and enjoy this time.” I was even able to catch up with friends at restaurants and coffee shops in the middle of the day! When you are working 8 hours a day, there is never a thought to even meet up with friends after work. You just try to get out as soon as possible to make it home before traffic hits.
The next three weeks were a different story. I started my contract work as a home health physical therapist. I ultimately chose to return to this setting as I was able to make my own hours and the idea was to be able to focus more on my business and product. But it got so overwhelming. I think I was too ambitious and overzealous, where I was accepting all the patients that the agency was asking me to take. I was overwhelmed with having a lot of patients, driving everywhere and then coming home having to chart with a whole new documentation system. I was thinking, “Wait, I thought I was supposed to have more time for my business and product?”
But I was spending all my time with contract work and learning how to be proficient with scheduling patients and with the documentation systems. I had to be reminded from my husband and friends that there is always a transition period as you learn something new. I still had the doubts of “Did I do the right thing?”
As I was talking about my day with patients, my husband said, “I like you back with the old people.” Returning to home health means working with more of the geriatric population. My friend and former colleague who also made her jump said, “I can hear it in your voice how much you enjoy working with the older adults.” As I come to think about it, I do like working with the geriatric population because I like to have fun and joke with them. For many of them, they do not have a lot of visitors and essentially feel forgotten, so if I can provide some companionship and get them moving, I feel that I am impacting their lives for the better.
Upon reflection after my fourth week out of my 8–5 job, I have mentally taken note on things I can improve on to help myself work smarter not harder. I will be more vigilant about only accepting patients that are in my target area versus trying to please everyone by accepting too many patients. I have decided to accept more patients with two agencies than another for more simplicity with documentation and logistics. I will also be scheduling in time, possibly a day of the week to focus on my business and product.
When to Jump: If the Job You Have Isn’t the Life You Want has helped me through this process and transition as I explore the uncertainty of contract work, building a business and creating a product. This book provides accounts of people who have made their own jumps and countless pieces of advice. Here are my takeaways and pieces of advice that struck me in my own jump, which have helped me to stay motivated as I continue my journey.
1. Listen to the little voice-
· “That little voice is your true voice.”
· “If you body’s telling you something, it’s not lying. If you feel like you want to do something else or be somewhere else and that feeling stays in your body and it’s not going anywhere, listen. Your body doesn’t lie.”
2. Make a plan-
· “Seek out the people who have done what you want to do. Study and understand what they do.
· “Sketch ideas in a notebook and brainstorm with friends of friends and with former co-workers and with anyone that might be able to help.”
· “Mine your personal network for anyone who may know somebody who knows anything on the subject then meet that person. After you’ve talked together ask, ‘Do you know anyone else that might be help me?”
· “You might fail a hundred times, but that doesn’t define you, what defines you is whether or not you get back up.”
3. Let yourself be lucky-
· “You need to learn how to make money in your sleep.”
· “Working at a big company isn’t the only way to have benefits. I can just pay for them myself.”
· “Find people who have gone through it.”
· “Put an idea out into the world and see what happens.”
· “When you jump for somethings you care about, you’re going to surprise yourself and you’re going to stumble into the next things that you’d otherwise never see.”
· “You are steps away from running into some luck. You might not collect on that luck until you actually jump, but favorable coincidences begin to appear.”
· “Looking back, I seems like giant risk to quit a job that paid me all kinds of money, there wasn’t a shred of doubt, and I was getting so sick of going to work there every morning.”
4. Don’t look back-
· “You’re not going to lose anything by jumping.”
· “Outcomes aside, you’ll be closer to the things that interest you and the people who motivate you.”
· “Getting closer to that answer of figuring out what you want to do how you want to spend your days-is reason enough to jump.”
· “You come out stronger.”
· “Jump to learn. Learning needs to be the number one priority in what you do, much more so than a paycheck maybe even more that stability. Those skills you learn are going to catapult your further in your career and faster.”
· “Jumping to follow your passion requires much more discipline than it does passion.”
· “You have to be mentally prepared that it’s not going to be a smooth ride.”
· What it came back to was this sense that if I didn’t try, I would live a life of regret- and the kind of regret that you carry around from inaction felt much worse than the regret that you might feel from having taken an action.”
· “We only have one life.”
· “The reasons we give ourselves for not making a jump-rationalizations we make, excuses we come up with- are fears that in hindsight, should never hold people back.
· “Fears always going to be there.”
· “Jumping is nothing but hard work.”
· “In the moments after your jump, embrace ‘shed time’: the in a shed where you are locked away trying to understand your craft and master your skills.”
· “You can’t just try once-you try again and again and again.”
· “Jump for what makes you get up in the morning.”
· “The act of jumping itself will put your life back in your hands. Whether it works out or not is irrelevant- the fact that you made the choice will change you.”
· “I keep coming back to the idea of agency: the difference between life happening to you versus making life happen. You have more control over your life than most people give you credit for.”
· “Know your worth. Trust and double down on what you can do. My jump was the first time I really bet on myself.”
I made the JUMP so can you! “Take a chance, follow a passion. See where it leads.”
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