Since I sold Money Under 30 in 2018, I sometimes feel like I’ve made one bad professional decision after another. I kept trying to go back down the same road I came from, each time knowing it was less lucrative and more perilous than before.
My business coach used to ask me: “How do you know you know something?”
I struggled with that question for weeks, if not months. Whatever answer I eventually gave her was wrong.
What I now realize is that, for my entire life, I have been making professional decisions with my head, not my heart.
It’s not like I didn’t know how to make decisions with my heart. I gave up careers to follow the love of my life (twice). More times than I can count, I spent irrationally large sums of money on experiences and gifts that my heart knew were worth it.
But two forces were at play:
- A cultural value, instilled since childhood, to succeed at all costs, where success is implicitly defined as the confluence of money and prestige.
- My own financial insecurity, set in motion by my parents’ bankruptcy that permanently devastated their physical and mental health.
Optimizing my professional life for potential financial gain worked spectacularly for a while. Until it didn’t.
Over the past several years I made losing business bets totaling nearly $1 million dollars.
For quite some time, it felt like I would never forgive myself.
But then, I found a remarkable peace in radically and unconditionally accepting everything.
This acceptance gave my heart permission to take the reigns.
And when it did, there was an astounding shift.
Amidst compelling advice (both from trusted others and from within) to, yet again, pursue new money-making ventures, I felt something telling me to take a different path. A visceral, somatic sensation. Not a thought. Not an idea. Not a spreadsheet. This. This is how “I know I know”.
And so, I enrolled in graduate school to become a licensed professional counselor (LCPC).
The roots of my decision have been growing throughout my life.
As a teen, I saw myself entering a helping profession.
In high school, I volunteered as an EMT and loved it. I loved the thrill of racing to an emergency, sure. But mostly I loved having the chance to help. I loved meeting patients and their families on their worst days and begin able to hold their hands and comfort them. In most cases, to tell them that things were going to be OK. In the other cases, to simply let them cry.
Over the last decade, my own therapy has be instrumental in helping me overcome depression, increase my self-worth, be more present with my family, identify and abide by my principles, and stop wasting energy chasing wealth and external validation.
Counseling will draw on my natural strengths of emotional intelligence, communication, and introspection.
Also, I look forward to connecting with other humans one-on-one, something I sorely missed during decades of working behind a laptop.
And of course, there are the very practical benefits of mental health being a high-demand field with the opportunity to work anytime, anyplace and, in private practice, as much or as little as I want.