What do you feel at the end of your day, when you step away from your work?

• Tired but accomplished?
• Fulfilled and focused?
• Resentful and depleted?
• Full of hope or hopeless?

Sarah used to sit in her car, often in back-to-back traffic coming north up the freeway, and find herself still thinking about work and what needed to get done, hadn’t got done, was probably never going to get done… interrupted by blurts of “What the hell am I doing?” “How do I get out of this?” “There’s got to be something more!”

Driving home most days, this 50-something highly accomplished executive felt anxious about how to escape from the life she’d built for herself without destroying her family, her credibility, her security and her sanity.

Her and thousands of other hard working professionals, all sitting in their cars at the end of the day, finally alone, and in between texting/emailing … feeling trapped by the life they’ve built.

In a 2017 study by SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management), 40% of employees stated the desire to leave their current employment within the next year.

Most of the people who work with me are facing the last big chapter of their professional lives, and they want to make a difference, make a splash, and come out of some sort of hiding.

So often, many of us are doing what we think we should be doing, acting the way we were taught to when we were kids, and holding back our own nature, our own way of doing life. For Sarah, our 50-something exec, it took a long period of depression and most of the fun draining out of her marriage for her to decide it was time to do something different.

Of course, she did find an alternative career. She eventually moved with her family to another state. And she feels about 20 years younger these days.

I know with certainty that most people can have the change they want.

It’s not rocket science ~ more than anything it takes bravery to resuscitate parts of our own psyche that have been out of commission for a long long time; in some cases trained to remain deep down inside ourselves. It takes reviving those parts because we need them if we’re going to fulfill our sense of what we’re capable of. It also takes breaking things down into manageable steps, and an ever-adjusting strategy.

But mostly bravery.

A quiet, vulnerable, deep bravery.

An agreement you make between you and your deepest soul.

A bravery without fanfare.

Consider some times in your life when you were brave. Remember them in technicolor. And allow yourself to feel how you felt back then. I’ll bet you were scared… but you did it anyway, or you had to do it anyway. Regardless, you made it through.

If that brave part of you were making your career decisions right now, what would you do differently?