An anniversary I won't forget

This month, nine years ago, I began my coaching practice with a small handful of clients. At that same time, I was in coach training, and had just moved to Spain to be with my fiance. The next month we married at City Hall with our parents in attendance.

What a big time of change!

I had made big leaps in my life before. When I was 16, I went on a foreign exchange to live with a family in Chile for a year. When I was 18, I went to study across the country in New York City, which was pretty much a foreign country for a suburban Oregon girl too. And moving to Spain came a year after I had quit my job to take a sabbatical year.

But …

(I bet you could see this coming…)

This multi-dimensional leap – moving to a new country, switching sectors, starting a new business, and getting married and moving in with my new husband – was intense. Much more than I could have ever expected.

Many times when people come to me for coaching, they are also considering their own multi-dimensional leap. The most common type is wanting to switch jobs, sector, and location. They often ask me, what should I know going into this? With your experience, what is your advice and what are some tools that might help me with making some of the big decisions ahead?

Here is my top advice for how to consider all these leaps at once:

1. Clarify as much as possible what your end goal is.

   Knowing your future ideal helps you to know what to prioritize and how to make decisions. If you could lift yourself out of your current situation and into your ideal one, what would it look like? What would you be doing? Who are you with? What is a day in your new life like?
   
   Before I set out on my sabbatical, I was clear that I wanted to end up with a different lifestyle in a different place than my current city of Portland, Oregon. I wanted a life that was slower paced and closer to nature, and that didn’t always seem driven by consumerism. There were many other things on my list – and clarifying them helped me to recognize that though it was totally unexpected, living in the countryside between Barcelona and the Pyrenees was actually a really good fit. I also had articulated to myself what kind of partner I was looking for, and had done a lot of work identifying what jobs would be a good fit for me (and found coaching through that process.)
   
   These elements, partner, home and profession, have ended up being the easiest parts of my leap, and have been parts that have sustained and lifted me up when the other elements weren’t as easy.

2. Take directions from your fears.

   All kinds of different fears are clamoring for your attention with your leap because your brain is trying to keep you safe. A lot of times, of course, we know that people let their fears keep them from taking action at all. To be clear, that’s not what I’m advising.
   
   My position is this: There are probably very good reasons for your wanting to take this leap. Otherwise you wouldn’t be considering it so frequently or seriously. (And if you do Step 1, your reasons are probably quite clear, including what you want in life, what your values are, who you are or want to be. By the way, these are 100% valid reasons for taking a leap and you should listen to them.) However, since there are risks here, you should consider this leap very carefully, and your fears can give you excellent insights into how to plan for a best possible outcome, within your control that is.
   
   It’s important to remember that there is so much out of our control at any moment in life. There are a lot of things that might come up in your leap that you didn’t expect. So really what all of this comes down to is risk management. Your fears can alert you to the risks, and by writing them down and really considering them, you can evaluate them (do you really want to take the risk?) and even discern if you can eliminate or mitigate them.
   
   Writer Annie Duke, author of the books Quit: How to Know When to Walk Away, and How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices, recommends doing a “premortem” on a goal. Essentially you imagine yourself at some point in the future having failed to do what you set out to do. What has happened to make this leap a failure – both things in your control and out of it? The purpose of this exercise is to help you identify obstacles to success that you might now have thought of otherwise. (Click here for an excellent graphic with step-by-step instructions for this exercise.)
   
   When I set out on my sabbatical, one of my fears was running low on money. Taking direction from this fear, I dedicated extra time to researching potential costs of my year off, and creating a budget that I committed to keeping. The best decision I made due to this premortem thinking was to leave myself a chunk of savings at the end of my sabbatical which I dubbed my new life startup fund. When the time came, I needed it; it gave me a long runway for getting my new business off the ground and bringing in the income I needed to sustain myself.

3. Circle up all your people.

   When you consider any leap, and especially a multi-dimensional leap, you are going to need others. You are likely going to need your people – that is the people from your inner circle who have your back, always dispense great advice, and are there to listen and encourage you. And, you are also going to need new people who can help you enter the new spaces you want to get to, or who have done what you want to do and can give you information and advice. With your new people, you’re going to want to invest time in building relationships with them, have frank conversations, and actually listen to their advice.
   
   I know that it’s hard to listen to advice that is contrary to what you want to believe, especially when it comes to some new exciting plan in life. When I started my coaching business, a friend set up an information call between me and an established coach so I could learn from her. On that call, this coach told me that building a consistently profitable business took a lot of work, and time. It took six years for her to build her business to the point where it paid her the same amount as the corporate salary she previously had, she shared. Six years! I thought. That’s an eternity. I didn’t want to wait that long. I also wanted to believe that she had done something wrong to take so long. Maybe she lacked savvy or determination. That wouldn’t be the case for me, I decided. Well, it turned out her timing was totally on target. She gave me the most valuable advice that I didn’t listen to – until much later. Instead of being dismissive, I should have been curious.
   
   No decision is perfect. We do the best we can with the information we have (and we listen to). Sometimes there are unexpected consequences to our decisions too. They can be joyful. They can be painful. And they can be anywhere in between.
   
   That’s why I also recommend practicing mindfulness all along the way, whether you’re pre-leap or post-leap. Mindfulness habits can help you stay focused on what’s important, and what you can be grateful for, and the ways you’re already living your idea. They can also help you to manage stress when life throws a curveball, and to give yourself a big dose of self-compassion, which always helps, whichever stage you’re at.

Earlier this month there was another major anniversary that I won’t forget – September 11. I was in New York City that day. I was living in Brooklyn and commuting into my job in downtown Manhattan on the morning of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. When the second plane hit, I was in the earth below, sitting in a subway stopped at the WTC subway station. Being in a tragedy of that magnitude left me with a lot of questions about life, and I had a lot of life in front of me; I was 22.

I smile to think of how that 22 year old would never have possibly imagined that a little over twenty years later she would be living in a place as beautiful as this, as safe as this, and with such a dear family, and doing work that was so meaningful. Yet looking back I can see how so many of the decisions that brought me to a place as unexpected as this one were all related to what I learned on that unforgettable day.

Life is precious, and you need to make the most of it. For me, that’s what these leaps are all about.