From Career Regret to Reinvention: How to Move Past Pain & Design Your Ideal Career

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Imagine if you were offered a trip back in time so you can undo your biggest regret. If you could live your life all over again, what’s the one thing you would do differently? When I ask myself that question, the words shoot out of my mouth without even thinking: my educational and career choices.

It turns out I’m not alone. In the book If Only, author Neale J. Roese, Ph.D., cites a series of studies conducted by independent researchers who were interested in finding out what adults consider their biggest regrets. During the period of 1989–-2003, adults of all ages were asked the questions: If you could go back and live your life all over again, what would you do differently? What parts of your life would you change? With eleven studies in all, the researchers discovered that the following four regrets appear consistently at the top of the list, in this order, in study after study.

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Have Them Come to You: How to Meet Like-Minded People Effortlessly

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Interested in having more likeminded people in your life? Who wouldn’t, right? Finding these people can be extremely easy, if you go about it smartly. You are a unique person with unique interests. But you might not have people in your life to share these interests with. Where are these people hiding? If the internet has proved anything, it’s that you’re not alone. These days, you can find thousands of people around the world with interests similar to yours.

Interacting with these people online is great, but it doesn’t compare to actually meeting with them in the real world. Unfortunately, it isn’t as easy to find these people in the flesh. But there’s one convenient technique that allows these people to find you, instead of you having to search for them.

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Fail Forward

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Any successful person you meet will have a story of failure to tell you, and actually probably more than one. What separates the truly successful from those who skate by in life is not just what they learn from those failures well after they happen, but also how they handle those failures as they happen. These are delicate situations that can literally make or break a person’s life for a long time to come.

I’m about to tell you a story of how I faced a very difficult situation of failure which I could do very little about, and how I was able to turn that failure into an eventual long-term success.

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Don’t Take Vacation From Your Good Habits

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Consider these scenarios and the similarities in them: You keep eating healthy food during the week but when the weekend comes, you diet mainly consists of junk food; You wake up early during the weekdays, but on weekends you tend to wake up late, thus losing your productivity; You have implemented a healthy habit of drinking water while you work, but you “forget” this habit when it’s the weekend.

If this is you, then welcome to the club! I have experienced these same things myself. In fact, I felt I wasn’t honest to myself. I was living with the productive and healthy habits only 80% at a time. I knew I had to change. Otherwise the remainder 20% of the time would ruin my good habits and the benefits I got from them.

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8 Teachers for Navigating Change

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As a recovering type A personality, I wish control worked. And it does, sometimes. But there’s always at least one area of life that cannot be tamed. You’re happily married but have health issues. Or you’re financially stable but struggling with fertility. You have fulfilling work but no life partner. Nothing ever goes our way entirely, and that can become a great doorway for transformation.

The heart of transformation involves facing change. Here, change makes us feel vulnerable because it means engaging new unknowns. We’ve been taught to rely on control to deal with uncertainty. The challenge is that control boxes us into viewing reality as good versus bad. So if a change arrives that fits into our perception about what life should look like, we’re happy. But what happens if a change arrives that doesn’t fit into our box? Either we can’t recognize it or we push it away (hello, denial). And what if life throws us a curveball? Then the box crumbles and we’re left feeling overwhelmed.

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Getting Comfortable With the Uncomfortable: My Journey to Being Who I Always Wanted to Be

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I’m not old by any means but one thing I have learned from my 31 years and 8 months in this world is that each of us is unique. There is not one single person out there that looks like me, thinks like me, has the same circumstances as me, or the same thought process as me. So it doesn’t really make much sense to follow the same life course as anyone else.

Much like there is no one size fits all approach to fitness and nutrition, there is no one size fits all approach to how you should live your life. This is the story of my journey to being who I always wanted to be. It includes why I quit my job, sold my car and gave away $45,000. I hope you enjoy.

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Broke and Worthless

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broke

I looked at my bank account online this morning and saw my balance is $-0.01. AAAAAAAACK!!! Intellectually, I know this is temporary. I know that it was caused by a “perfect storm” of bad timing revolving around deposits, withdrawals and a bank holiday. I know that more money is coming to me. But in this exact moment, I can’t help but feel panicked.

The trick I’ve learned, and the reason that I’m sharing this deeply personal, and potentially embarassing information with you, is that I need to make a distinction between “having no money” and “being worthless”.

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5 Tips For Being Productive When Working From Home

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Here’s the thing. The grass is always greener on the other side. It looks easier than your grass, it seems so much softer than your grass and if only you could have ‘that’ grass, how much nicer your life would be. You could probably come up with at least a dozen things that you would do with that grass. Then it happens. You finally have your chance to take ownership of that fantastically greener, softer version of your own grass and what do you know? You’re sitting on the couch in your pajamas watching the 5thepisode of that insatiable reality show that you have a love/hate relationship with.

It happened to me. I worked for 15 years in Corporate America before I had the opportunity to work from home. Like many people working in Corporate America, I’ve always thought that living the life of an entrepreneur would be a piece of cake compared to working for a billion dollar corporation where conformity was the norm and creative freedom was a hobby. In 2010, the opportunity of a lifetime unfolded right before my eyes and for the first time, I was given a chance to step over to the other side of the grass.

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5 Ways Working Abroad Helped Me Grow

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Can you pinpoint the pivotal time in your life when you became an adult? For me, it was when I finally left my home to go traveling.

I took a working holiday in New Zealand for six months and while I was there I met my English boyfriend and lived in England with him for 14 months. During these 20 months of travel I grew more than I ever could have if I had stayed in Canada.

When I left Canada at the age of 22 I was confused and conflicted. I wondered what my future would bring and I had only a slight inkling that there was so much more to see and do in the great big world out there. When I returned to Canada at age 24 after having worked and lived abroad in New Zealand and England for two years I was a strong and confident adult with a plan for my future. Here are five of the ways that working abroad helped me to grow up:

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5 Lessons Learned from a Toddler

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If I could summarize my world for you in one sentence, it would be: chasing my toddler. I know the back of my daughter’s scruffy blonde head anywhere: dashing across the living room, making a break for the next grocery aisle, or attempting to go up the slide (much more fun than going down). My old day job required me to attend meetings and sit in front of a computer most of the day. Now, I’m lucky if I get 10 minutes to sit down for a breather before my girl has me running to catch up with her.

I’ve never raised a child before, and given my personality, I decided to read about it. All the toddler self-help books talk about what you need to teach them: how to play with others, learn language, go potty. These books contain great advice for child rearing, but none discuss the things parents learn from toddlers. I have learned at least as much from my daughter as she has learned from me. So here are some tips for living from someone who just started her life journey:

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