My Career Change Story
I just find it so hard to condensate my journey on a page, but I’ll do my very best and don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions! Hope this helps you if you’re navigating your own career change.
A bit of background on my upbringing
I was born in Italy near Rome and within my family study was very important, probably the most important thing growing up.
I enjoyed studying very much, it was my comfort zone so it worked out pretty well for me. For this reason a part of me knew that the real training I would have needed was a more practical - real- life - kind of training because of my academic and unpractical mind.
I was also a creative child, with a big imagination and a deep inner world but at the time I thought that we were all like that, so I didn’t consider it as something of any particular value to focus on.
My focus during my school years was to do well and the notion of doing something you love wasn’t part of my vocabulary, I simply wanted to be a good student and do well in all subjects without preferences.
The first sign of my soul wanting to discover who I really was came at the end of high school when I started to dream about going abroad and go explore life, so I spent a blissful year as an high school exchange student in Cambridge in the UK. It was the best year of my life because it opened my eyes to different people, having different interests and the opportunity to explore them too, so I took photography and fashion courses for example and that’s also where I explored my first romantic love and started to see myself as a woman.
My intuition told me to stay there and continue my studies in London but rationally it didn’t make any sense since I still had my last year of high school in Italy to complete and so I went back to my old life but with an expanded mind. You cannot unlearn what you’ve learned!
Moving to Milan for Business School
I applied for university both in Italy and in the UK but at the end, also because of the influence of my family, I decided to stay in Italy but move to the main business school in Milan.
That was again a leap forward because what I desired deep down was being surrounded by ambitious students and have the best education I could after few years in high school in which I felt that meritocracy and wanting to do more wasn’t encouraged very much. I remember one of my teachers even telling me that I was going to that University because it was private and I could “buy” my degree!
I found myself in a big city environment with people more prepared than me coming from prestigious schools and families and my main memory of that 3 years was a lot of catching up and working hard including holidays and Christmas days.
That’s were I got a taste of something missing because in order to succeed I was focusing a lot on productivity, studying to do well in the exams and I was loosing a bit of my feminine and creative side. it was as if a part of me was dried up and I did become a very serious person back then!
From Milan to Paris for my first job experience
After my bachelor I wanted again to explore the world and I wanted nothing more than going living abroad again after the first taste of freedom I had during high school. Immersing myself in another language and culture always helped me express some parts of me that I didn’t feel comfortable expressing back home and in some way I felt more aligned with living as an expat than a local.
My idea was spending a year “living life” , maybe working in a cute café , meeting fun people and growing up into my own identity without being affected by who I had been until then. But it didn’t happen, I got an internship in a big pharmaceutical company in Marketing and the opportunity was in Paris.
It was 2011 and I was 21 years old .
I didn’t know much about French culture and knew little about Paris but I was super excited to be abroad and so my french adventure started. I spent 10 months in that internship and the biggest gift was the awesome people I met there, but I couldn’t say that I fell in love with the job.
But again I thought it was just because I didn’t know much about marketing by then since I had just some notions of it from my Bachelor , so I decided to continue for a Master Degree more focused in Marketing and since I was already in Paris and had a desire to settle down I decided to apply for universities there.
At the same time a deeper part of me was feeling out of alignment, I didn’t feel like I was living on purpose and I went through highs and lows, crying my eyes out for apparently no reason about once a week. But I decided that I was just tired and went back home for the summer to recharge before the beginning of the Masters.
Looking back it was a sign that I wasn’t living my truth in my career but I didn’t have the tools to know that back then.
My Masters in Marketing in Paris
I spent 4 years doing my Masters in Paris. Like in Milan I didn’t feel like I belonged in Business School , I wasn’t as competitive and motivated by going up the corporate ladder as the other students but again I studied a lot, did my best and got another long internship in Marketing. My choices were rational and guided by my mind and I was often putting myself in hard situations that didn’t fulfill my soul.
But even by then I didn’t have the vocabulary to put my emotions into words and define why I wasn’t happy with what I had.
The dark night of the soul happened on a cold weekday in February. I was 24, it was already getting dark outside of my studio apartment and I was honestly feeling miserable and depleted. I was taking refuge in my inner world and I asked myself “What am I doing here? Why am I not satisfied with what I have'?”.
I felt a lack of gratitude in what I had achieved and I felt guilty for not appreciating my life.
But a little voice inside of me raised up and told me that I could change the things I didn’t like.
The problem was that I felt in a vicious cycle without end. It was years that a part of me was somehow unsatisfied and feeling empty but it felt like no matter what I did things didn’t change. It was the most frustrating feeling in the world!
Looking back I can see that things didn’t change because I was expecting something external to give me what I needed. I was expecting external circumstances to get perfect and with every action I was trying to control what was outside of me in the hope that one day I would get what I wanted.
For example I was expecting to meet the ideal boss, work on the perfect project for my skills, meet friends that were supportive and really feel finally at home.
My way of chasing this ideal was moving around a lot geographically. That’s why I had moved to another city for the internship even if I could have stayed in Paris. That’s why I moved home almost 10 times within the same city over the course of a few years. It was because I thought that I could find better elsewhere, that the right “fit” for me would come.
I basically wasn’t taking responsability to change what was working within . And as a result the outside world would never perfectly match my inner desires.
The inner shift
That evening something shifted for me.
I realized that what I wanted was to feel vibrant and healthy and free and in order to make that happen I needed to start from the inside out. That my new vision would have required to connect to my inner girl that I had abandoned as well as having difficult conversations and disappointing some people along the way.
That night I looked online at some personal development blogs and I found some amazing women that were living the life I wanted to live. I cannot remember exactly what I was googling, but I think I looked at psychology articles to try to figure out what I was feeling and along the way I stumbled across the blog of an Australian life coach that looked so healthy and happy.
It was as if a part of me felt suddenly alive and I visioned myself tanned and walking along a beach with a big smile on my face, feeling confident and at ease in my skin and wearing a colorful dress. That woman was my best version of myself and she didn’t look like she was living a corporate life at all.
That image stayed inside of me in the following couple of years while I finished my studies and I gradually worked on myself to understand how to get there.
Starting my new path training as a yoga teacher and Life Coach
In my last year of Masters, in 2015-16 I enrolled in a Yoga Teacher Training and in a Life Coaching Certification. I knew that my intuition was guiding me out of the beaten path and it was exciting and very scary.
I started my trainings with the only intention of learning how to reconnect with my body and emotions. I wanted to explore skills that had always felt natural to me and I started a blog to write my experience called “Follow your Inner Light”.
I still went through the last year of Masters with the goal of getting a corporate job and I even enrolled in a consumer goods specialization because I heard that there was where the real marketing was taught. But a few weeks into the specialization and looking at the amount of work it required I realized that to do that I would have had to give up so much of my personal time to respect that commitment and I felt like dying inside.
It was again my little creative girl screaming she didn’t want to do that, and that I was prioritizing my rational brain over my heart for the millionth time and she couldn’t stand it anymore. it simply wasn’t possible.
One evening I called my mum while I was deciding what to do and I looked like a shell of myself. I told her I wasn’t sure I wanted to continue and looking at my state she told me to quit. The day after I met with the director of the specialization and I quit. She was disappointed because I took the place that could have been given to someone else, but it was ok and I felt like a huge rock was unloaded from my back.
I felt light and free and finally doing something kind to myself.
In 2016 I graduated from my Master Degree in May, became a certified Vinyasa Yoga teacher in June and a Certified Life Coach in December.
You can read more here about my decision to become a Coach as my career.
I kept looking at job offers but the decision was taken, I would take the leap of faith and become self-employed.
When I took the decision in my mind I felt like I was coming home to myself. All that external noise, all that “opportunities” to make my CV nice just disappeared and I could breath again.
Taking the leap of faith and changing career direction
And from there my current path started. It was just the beginning of course, lots of challenges were awaiting for me and I wouldn’t say it was the easy choice at all, but it felt right and since then I simply felt like I was in the right direction without the need to know what it would have looked like in few years, and I’m still navigating that in 2020.
I have doubts, sometimes I even feel like giving up but then when I imagine doing another job my soul feels sad because I would always need time and space to express my creativity and I keep going. Making this career change was the best and bravest decision I’ve ever taken and I felt as If I started living as myself from that moment on.
My Career Change was happened very early on and it was a change in direction even before having a job contract. I do believe that if I had waited few years into a regular job the “benefits” of staying there would have been higher and made it harder to find a way out.
Your Career Change path will look unique to you and your challenges will be different but I hope that reading my story will have given you some encouragement and validated your need to follow your heart.
MY CAREER CHANGE STORY ON IGTV
In this video I share my career story as well as the main challenges I faced and a few useful tips for your own career change !
You can watch it on my Instagram account here :
https://www.instagram.com/alessiagandolfocoaching/
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