How Career Change into the Unknown Alters Your Mindset

The Comfort of a Predictable Path

One of the things that I’ve struggled most with in terms of transitioning away from my career as a GP to become a life coach is the fear of the unknown.

I’d been on one path for a very long time. Even though at times I had to put in a lot of work and effort, I felt comfort from the familiarity and predictability of it.

It started as a medical student, it was a case of go to lectures, study, pass exam, move onto the next step.

That was the cycle that I got used to and by repeating it over and over I could predict with certainty exactly what would happen in my future:

• I’d become a doctor
• I’d have job security
• I’d make a good living
• I’d be a respectable member of society

Then once I became a doctor I fell into a new cyclical pattern of shift working, studying and passing exams to move into specialisation.

So it was just the simple addition of a pre-defined work role that was given to me, I didn’t have to think about it– I just did the work and got paid.

The studying and passing exams for specialty was the same as med school just with less time and energy.

So I still knew exactly what was going to happen. I knew that just by following this path I would become a General Practitioner or whatever speciality I’d chosen.

5 years of med school, 2 years foundation programme, 3 years of GP training resulted in 10 years of a very familiar and predictable path that had been programmed into my mind.

Realizing the Need for Change

After working as a GP for a few years I found myself in a situation where I was looking into the future based on the programming of the previous 10 years and I didn’t like what I saw and felt there.

I knew that working as a GP wasn’t what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing. However I’d invested a lot of time into it and it was all I knew. And the thought of doing anything different seemed impossible.

I wanted to change from being a doctor but I wanted to stick to this program of watching lectures, study, pass exam and then be given a job.

So even before coaching came along my first plan was to learn software engineering. I thought by studying and getting a degree or some accreditations I could then get a job as a software engineer and make good money.

This was me wanting to stick to a familiar pattern that I knew and could predict the result of. I made a whole video about how clinging to the familiar leads us to trouble if you haven't seen it yet. 

External pressures vs Internal Values

Things changed when I started to really think about the internal values that I wanted in my life:

• Freedom
• Purpose
• Meaning

I realised that the autopilot program that I was on didn’t include (or at least no longer included for me personally) these values.

Before this I was focused on everything I hated about being a GP,

• Overloaded with work
• Demanding entitled patients
• Being vilified by the media and politicians

Therefore I wasn’t paying attention to those values of freedom, purpose and meaning and how much I needed them.

In this state it was still easier to just coast through life on auto-pilot, even the hate that I felt had become part of that program.

My attention was focused on everything outside of myself. It wasn’t just the things I hated, the judgements of other people played a big factor as well…

Being a doctor is thought of as a good respectable job, its not the kind of job that you would think to mobilise upward from, its at the top in the minds of most people.

So even though inside I was hurting from being in this job, outside forces as well as familiarity were influencing me to stay put.

As humans we’ve evolved to avoid pain and discomfort as they would have been associated in the past with danger and threat to our lives.

So for many people the scale will always be tipped towards comfort.

However for me those other values started to really weigh on my mind and ended up overcoming the comfort. That was when I started to venture onto the path of the unknown.

The Power of Belief

My calling was to be a life coach with freedom and autonomy through my own business. As part of this there were a lot of unknowns that I had to figure out and put together in order to basically create my own path.

Reading books by successful entrepreneurs has given me inspiration but there’s no exam to pass at the end. The success of your business isn’t based on a simple pass or fail.  

Its been around a year since I seriously committed to changing paths in life and I’m still feeling fearful of this unknown.

The thing is I know what I want, but the unknown is how and when.

I find myself thinking I’m doing all these things…. When is it going to come into fruition, when do I find out my exam results? Do you know what I mean?

And I think the most important thing that helped me with this fear is appreciating the difference between ‘knowing’ which was my previous path and believing which is my path now.

Knowing means you can predict something with a level of certainty that makes you feel comfortable.

But just because something is predictable based on your past doesn’t mean that its good,

It doesn’t mean that its safe

It doesn’t mean that you should ignore your internal values telling you it’s not what you really want in life.

Believing is accepting that something is true without proof. In my case accepting something which hasn’t happened yet with absolute certainty. I found that really difficult.

But I’ve rationalised it now with a new understanding.

Stay with me here.

Within the universe there exists a realm of infinite unknown possibilities. Every great accomplishment was once an unknown possibility.

Everything that could happen in the future is currently an unknown possibility.

The unknown is where everything that you could ever want lies waiting to be brought into existence. So we shouldn’t fear it but rather we should be excited and energized by it.

I know that there’s this pool of infinite unknown possibilities. I know that it exists because I can see the results of what other people have created.

This gives me the comfort of knowing that what I’m trying to achieve isn’t impossible it just hasn’t happened yet.

This is how I’m hacking my mind to believe.

I’m basically just adjusting my definition of belief slightly so that its easier for 10 years of programming based on ‘knowing’ to accept and internalise.

So whenever you have these doubts or fears about the unknown, cut them off straight away and tell yourself this:

“I know out there in the unknown there’s the possibility of the exact thing that I want simply waiting for me to believe strongly enough to make it happen”

That’s what belief is.

That’s all for now

Lewis