How To Live Your Dreams Without Quitting Your Job
To celebrate our 9 year anniversary, Mayra, my fiancee, and I took a trip to Cuba. We stayed at what I would call a generous 3-star Four Points hotel in Havana. Hey, it was booked on points thanks to the consulting travel life. Pulling up to the hotel, I was eager to check-in and hop on my email to gather details for a trip to Washington D.C. to meet my future employer. I was on the verge of trading my career in management consulting for one in nonprofit fundraising.
3-star Four Points Hotel in Havana. This pic is too generous. *Cues* Camila Cabello’s Havana.
The wifi in our room was janky. I paced around different corners of the room in search of good signal. Once I finally got online, I opened Gmail and saw a note from the CEO. My heart jumped for a second. The note read:
"Its been over a month since we extended the offer. There seems to be a lot more for you to evaluate. Unfortunately, we have run out of time. We need to move on to the next candidate and have to rescind the offer at this time."
My first thought: “WTF?” I was shook. In all honesty, I knew I was dragging out the decision, but I didn’t see this coming.
In these moments, coaches previously advised me to ask myself "how is this the best thing that ever happened to me?"
Well, little did I know at that moment, this was by far the best thing that ever happened to me…
From a rescinded offer to a sabbatical at the age of 26
This rescinded offer led to me going on sabbatical at the age of 26. During that sabbatical I delivered an 8-week social and emotional skills program to 18 middle school students, freelanced and fundraised $50k for a nonprofit, and negotiated a part time work arrangement. I also got engaged to my highschool sweetheart! <3 I want to share how I made it work, and I hope my experience inspires you to think creatively about how to make your dreams a reality much sooner than when you make Y amount, save X amount, or when you are Z years old. Let’s get it, baby!
Gage Middle School, the middle school I attended growing up. This is the school I was lucky enough to serve during my sabbatical. This is only the beginning!
“What do you do?”
I’m an Education Entrepreneur by early morning and a Consultant nine to five. I founded WeElevate, a K-12 Education service provider committed to bringing out the best in students with a basketball and post-its (more on that here). For my consulting work, I design and facilitate workshops, and develop sales processes that basically help large tech companies make money faster. Put differently: I spend my days with PowerPoint slides, swimlane diagrams and post-its.
While I hustled hard outside of business hours to build WeElevate prior to my sabbatical, WeElevate would not be where it is today if not for the year long pause on my consulting career. So how’d I do it?
Asking myself: “Why not both?”
This is a powerful mantra I’ve come to love and embrace over the past few years. When faced with a tough choice I ask myself: “Why not both? How can I have both of these things?” I’ve come to find that more often than not, we as humans tend to play the “all-or-nothing” game, similar to a win-lose mentality. Whether it be a tough conversation with my fiancee, a career conversation or a business negotiation, I do my best to create a win-win.
Leading up to and during my sabbatical, there was multiple scenarios where I found myself in situations that initially seemed like all-or-nothing choices:
Leave consulting for good or start a career in nonprofit
Continue supporting a nonprofit full time or move on to focus on my business 100%
Go back to full-time consulting or call it quits entirely
After applying my “Why not both?” mantra, here’s where each of these situations landed:
Took a sabbatical to experience the nonprofit industry, with the reassurance of my consulting job waiting for me at the end of it all
Pivoted full time work with a nonprofit to a few hours of freelance work a week, allowing me to grow my business
Negotiated a part-time work arrangement, providing me with steady income and the flexibility to continue working on my business
The mantra sparks possibilities. It widens your lens. Next, I paired the mantra with three steps: invest career capital, identify the value exchange, and “ask for what you want!” This is what I consider Career Engineering at its finest. Identify what you want, what others need, and get creative to make it work for everyone.
Career Capital
Career capital is a powerful concept I learned from Cal Newport’s, So Good They Can’t Ignore You. It’s a book that totally transformed the way I think about careers. He debunks the “passion theory,” a school of thought that states we’re all born with a passion for specific work. This is why we so often hear the phrase: “find your passion.” BS! Instead, Newport argues that we must first acquire career capital, which we then invest, and in return you receive the traits of work you love. Those traits include flexibility, impact, creativity and mission. In summary, get really good at something, develop rare and valuable skills, and then you will begin to love your work.
Acquiring career capital can take some time, but you probably have more in the bank than what you think.
Once I acquired career capital, I was able to invest it for things that I valued and wanted. If I were to make the requests above to leaders with zero capital, I would have been laughed out of the conversation with a “that’s cute, so millennial of you.”
Identify the value exchange
Step two: identify the value exchange. I believe life is a value exchange. Value exchanges are everywhere. For example, when you buy coffee (value), you give up your money (value) in exchange for something of value. The same concept applies across work and relationships. Think about it, you get paid to execute specific tasks and activities that deliver value. As the COVID-19 work environment has proven, do you need to be at an office to execute your work? In many instances, no.
What are the tasks your supervisor values most? Prior to making any request for more flexibility, identify those tasks and ground the conversation in value. In the scenarios above, I asked myself, “What does this person value? What do they want and need most?”
“Ask for what you want!”
And finally step three: ask for what you want. Have you ever had a moment with a significant other after a silly argument where you said something like: “Well why didn’t you just tell me that?” Ah, communication really is king.
Once you’ve gotten to step three you’ve done all the work, you just need to step up to the plate. For challenging conversations like these I keep it simple: practice, practice, practice. I map out my talk track, create a script even, and then I just get comfortable with my delivery.
And that’s it - the three steps I took to convert a rescinded offer to an EPIC, life-changing sabbatical.
Taste your dreams NOW
The concept of a sabbatical dates back to biblical times, it’s based on a practice named shmita. Biblical writings tell us Jews in the Land of Israel were required to take a year-long break from working the fields every seven years. In modern times, a sabbatical has come to mean an extended absence in the career of an individual to fulfill some goal. While sabbaticals aren’t required in the U.S., you have the power to make it happen. And while taking a sabbatical during a pandemic may not be the best idea, now is a great time to build career capital that you can later invest.
I lived my dreams for a full year. If I were to die tomorrow, I could say I lived the life I dreamed of. Yes, this was only for a year. But I’ve now seen and FELT what it’s like to live my vision. And I loved it. These experiences are the fuel that drive me to wake up at 5am everyday to work on my business. All we ever have is the present moment and handful of past experiences that really stick with us. “Someday…” does nothing for us. This is why we must get creative to engineer more of what we want to see and feel in our lives day to day.
What would you do with three months, six months, or even a year to make your dreams a reality?
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