A Recent Turning Point

And in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. ~Abraham Lincoln

We regret to inform you that effective immediately your position has been eliminated and your services will no longer be required.

Like tens of thousands of Canadians in 2009, I saw these words from my employer and knew that my life was about to change.

Losing your job can be one of the most stressful and traumatic events in a person's life. The HR person assigned to give me the bad news was more than prepared for me to sob uncontrollably, my tears landing on the walls, ceiling and floor of the tiny meeting room. I think it says in the HR handbook that if I had requested a hug that she would have been legally obliged to grant my request and say "there, there" as she rubbed my back.

There was just one problem...I had never been happier in my life! You see, I had known for some time that this job was all wrong for me and had been thinking night and day about making a career change. Instead of looking at being downsized as a horrible situation, it was actually an opportunity to move in a positive direction in my life.

I'm naturally a very positive person and believe strongly that happiness is a choice. And because of that, I made my choice to change careers when I realized that I wasn't doing something that made me happy.

Like everyone else, I have unique skills and passions and I believe that the best way to spend your life is to find a way to exercise them every day. I wasn't doing that at work and it was threatening to become a huge emotional drag on me. I knew my current career wasn't going to offer me what I wanted or needed out of life, so I decided to go in a different direction.

Thinking back, I can identify a few guiding principles that helped me to make this decision:

1. Life is short-do what makes you happy and don't put it off!
2. Be honest with yourself-are you really happy or are you just trying to convince yourself that you are?
3. Don't allow yourself to believe you're "stuck". The only people who are truly stuck are those who believe they are.
4. You always have options.
5. Making a big change in your life (whatever it might be) takes courage. Find that courage, it's worth it.

It didn't take me too long to figure out my new career path and the adventure has been more fun than even I imagined it would be. Something tells me I'll talk about that adventure in another blog post very soon...