8 Cool ways to tell family and friends you’re changing careers
How do you expect your family and friends will react when you’re ready to discuss your career change?
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio
Maybe you’re counting on your partner’s unconditional support. Perhaps you’re steeling yourself for your parents being rigidly opposed to you quitting a steady career you’ve worked hard to establish. Are you wondering where your friends and colleagues will sit on a scale that starts with indifference and ends with ‘absolutely in your corner?’
As with any aspect of changing careers, try not to assume you know how things will pan out before taking the plunge. You might be surprised by who jumps on board to help you uncover new career ideas or who’s so inspired by your move that they embark on their own career change.
Get perspective
When you’re deeply immersed in a career change adventure, it’s easy to lose sight of its impact on those who know and love you. For you, it’s bound to be a bit or a lot scary, but it’s also exciting and liberating. In others, it might spark shock, fear and longing.
Understand that your ‘uncertain but determined’ state can unnerve family and friends who want you to be safe. Often but not always, our parents’ generation value the virtues of ‘staying put.’ Leaving an established career, especially in these uncertain times, can look like madness to people whose career experience is defined by loyalty, stability, and longevity.
Alternatively, escaping a career you’ve outgrown to pursue something more meaningful and fun might produce pea-green envy in someone stuck in a job they no longer love.
If some of your significant others seem less than impressed by your career change project, try seeing it through their eyes. Maybe they’re scared stiff for you. Perhaps they wish they could be more like you. Either way, you may have temporarily morphed into someone they no longer recognise.
So, if you’re sensing or hearing disapproval, it’s probably fear talking. Listen with openness and empathy and discuss the practicalities of changing careers and how they might help you with them.
How your closest humans respond to your career change bombshell depends on when and how you drop it.
Before you spill the beans, get clear on what you want and need from friends and family and when and how you’ll reveal your plans.
Prepare for qualms and queries
Curiosity is one of career change’s signature attributes, but it can be tough to summon it in vulnerable moments. Telling people whose opinion and approval you value that you're about to ‘upend everything’ is one such moment.
Photo by Olya Kobruseva
Heads up here, your nearest and dearest will almost certainly have qualms and queries about your career change. Reduce your risk of getting flustered, defensive, and cranky by promising yourself that you’ll stay open and curious and hear them out.
Reacting with anything less than an instant ringing endorsement doesn’t mean your family and friends think you’re useless or bonkers. Mostly it means, ‘cool plan, but hey, have you thought about this, that, and the other thing?’ Some of which are things you’ll need to resolve. Identify the things you need to attend to and get cracking on that. Set aside objections based on other people’s fears or priorities that aren’t relevant to you.
Go into the conversation ready to share some of your serious preparation. You’ll calm your crew if you show that you’ve run the numbers and researched the requirements for careers that have captured your interest .
Pick your moment
Aside from your partner and/or best friend, who has probably twigged anyway, most people don’t need to know the nanosecond you decide to change careers.
If you’re anxious about how someone will react, wait until you’re nearly in the new career. Once you’ve negotiated fewer hours, arranged a break, found a coach, accepted a job offer or started a side hustle, you’ll have concrete career change evidence. People will see that you’re serious, and you’ll feel more confident about having them scrutinise your progress.
Even though my client knew her dad was deeply interested in the new field she was pursuing; she was worried that he would be mortified by her ditching a ‘good stable’ job. So, she waited until she had one foot out the door of her old career before spilling the beans. Then she broached the career change subject by discussing how she could contribute to an area they both cared about. The result? Her dad was impressed by her courage and super supportive of her move .
For more ways to calm fears and reconnect, read on.
Wear your heart on your sleeve
Don’t feel pressured to present 101 rational reasons for why you want to change careers. Just speak from your heart.
Focus on the positives. Talk about what’s drawing you towards a new career path. You don’t have to give everyone a forensic account of every new career idea you’re having. It's OK to set boundaries around what and with whom you’ll share your career change adventure.
Know what you want
More importantly, know what you can reasonably expect from each person you tell. Different people can give you different things. Approval, devil’s advocacy, emotional support, practical help, a sounding board, and accountability to keep you motivated.
Based on how friends and family react to your news, decide who’s best placed to deliver one or more of the supports you need. Then be transparent with them about how they can help. Not sure what you can ask for? Start with some of these seven things.
Give them jobs
Enlisting their help can reassure your special humans and help them understand and accept your decisions. You’ll need different things at different stages of your career change. For starters, ask for help finding people for career conversations, budget-making and balancing, and being an empathetic ear.
Changing careers is much more about looking for people than looking for jobs. Ask if your people can keep an eye and an ear out for people doing intriguing things in areas, you’re keen to delve into.
My client’s mum was fervently hoping that career coaching would convince her clever daughter to put her ‘unused’ degree in psychology to ‘good use.’ By involving her mum from the outset in exploring and discussing potential careers, my client helped her mum appreciate why that wasn’t going to happen.
Figuring out how you’re going to fund your career change tops most people’s priorities. If your circle is flush with number-crunching spreadsheet aces, ask one of them to help you stay solvent.
Know someone whose penchant for picking things apart verges on the annoying? Ask them to apply their analytic smarts to listing every risk associated with a potential new career plus all the probabilities and impacts. Then discuss how to mitigate them.
A friend with oodles of empathy and a (slightly black) sense of humour makes a super sounding board. Be clear about simply needing someone to listen and offer to return the favour.
Choose a cheerleader
This is the person (or people depending on how you roll) who’ll help you stay:
buoyant when things turn stormy
accountable for maintaining your career change momentum
clear about being capable and courageous even when you feel small and scared
This is the ‘absolutely in your corner’ person who’ll celebrate every tiny and tremendous success and put ‘stumbles’ in perspective.
Choose your cheerleader early. They may or may not belong in your inner circle. Sometimes a trustworthy colleague can be a wiser choice than your favourite family member. Either way, choose someone who knows how you tick, gives frank and fearless feedback, and is prepared to stay the distance.
Back yourself
When career change decision time arrives, you may not feel ‘ready’, but you know times up for your old job. You won’t have all (or maybe even any) of the ‘what’s next’ answers, but you know you need to find them.
If your resolve starts to waver in the face of staunch opposition, step back and stand firm. Few people change careers on a whim. Like most of us, you probably decided after loads of soul searching while valiantly surviving in a job that sucks. Congrats, you’ve already done some of career change’s hardest yards. So back yourself and bring your humans along with you.
By Jo Green, Career Change Coach
I know that when you find what you love, heart and soul, your life changes. I work every day with people who are reshaping their current careers, starting new enterprises or searching for a new direction. Basically I help people who don’t like their job to figure out what to do instead!
As a Careershifters and Firework Advanced Certified Coach and experienced career changer myself, I can help you figure out what fulfilling work looks like for you.
Drop me a note to organise a free 20 minute consultation to chat about your career change and how coaching could help.
