Nothing is definite. Don’t be afraid to make a change.
When I was 19, I moved to the UK to start studying for my Bachelor's degree. My friends kept asking me, “Aren’t you scared?” This question popped up again when, later, I moved to Latin America and then, yet again, when I, a few years later, moved to the United States to start my career in the corporate world.
Even today, these types of questions keep recurring, especially after having made a big career shift in the last year. These days, instead of helping companies with their compliance programs or uncovering their messy financial activities, I have chosen to help individual people improve their personal and professional lives.
As a result of these changes, people have thrown a bunch of additional worries at me, like, “But you will be completely alone in a new country,” or “You will be away from family, won't you feel lonely?” or “How will you make a living?” or “How will you find clients?” or “You will need to start from scratch all over again!”—the list goes on…
How did I respond to this? The same way as I did when I was packing my suitcase for my move to the UK: “I can always go back to where I was.” And isn’t this the simple truth? I could, indeed, always move back to where I came from. If my studies wouldn’t have worked out, I could have moved back to Lithuania; if living in Latin America didn’t pan out the way I had imagined, I could have flown back to Europe; if coaching wouldn’t have proved a viable new career for me, I could have gotten myself another corporate job. Nothing is definite.
When you are about to make a significant change in your life, you may face your own fears or those that others project onto you. In such moments, you have two choices.
You can either let those fears stop you in your tracks. Or you can take those fears and turn them into something constructive, like creating a more detailed plan with a clear list of actions or inspiring you to think through something you maybe haven’t considered before. In my case, I started coming up with potential ways to meet people well before I moved to new countries. I always made sure I knew someone there, and I did research on activities that would introduce me to a new network.
Or when someone asked me, “How will you make a living from coaching?” I, instead of letting these, admittedly, very valid questions get in the way and scare me off, turned it around into something like, “What challenges do I want to help people resolve, and how can I connect with these people? Where can I find them?” Rather than being afraid of not having a regular paycheck any longer, I thought about how I’d attract clients, which would make my new career financially viable by extension.
So, what I’m saying is we should actually be thankful to those friends and family who bring up these concerns. They give us a chance to plan better and act in a more intentional way.
For me, my peace doesn't come from avoiding changes or the potentially adverse consequences that could follow from making big changes. Instead it comes from knowing that I attempted something different, something I've been contemplating for a while, and I dared take the leap—and if my ideas and dreams weren’t to work out, so be it. At least I know I tried.
The reality is that through such experiences, where you make drastic changes in your life, you will most likely learn a lot of valuable life lessons. Without these lessons, we do not improve much if at all.
So, if you do have something in the back of your mind that you've wanted to change for a while, whether that's a lingering thought about moving somewhere you always wanted, starting a business you always dreamed of, or finding a job that is completely different from what you are doing right now, don’t be afraid to act on it.
Remember, nothing is definite.
