Creating a Life of Abundance

One year ago this month, I took a leap of faith because I believed in myself, and left my corporate job.

It’s not that I didn’t necessarily like the work I was doing. But I had decided that I wanted a change in my life, and that my current position wasn’t the one for me, for many reasons. Even today I still like and often miss the work I was doing and was extremely good at it - I was a top-level administrative management professional. I was just at the wrong job, working for the wrong person. And it was coming across in the work I was doing - or rather the work I wasn’t doing - and I knew it had to leave.

Looking back, it was such a bad fit that it’s almost like something or some force put me there for a reason, and it was a final little push to get me to make the decision to branch out.

I had already planned on leaving by the end of the year after I finished school and when I had actually launched my business, and had been saving and making sacrifices for a while, but it came to a critical point on multiple levels last March and I left.

And wow, was that a scary day.

I gave up my steady income and was relying solely on myself and the belief that I had what it took to do this. And I can now say that I was right.

But I also knew that I would have to change the way I had been living, working, networking, creating - basically, everything in my life had to change.

Included, and at the top of that, was my own mindset. I had, overnight, changed myself from an employee into a business owner, and that was going to require a new set of thoughts, skills, disciplines, executions, and processes.

And I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

It was going to be solely up to me to get it done. Although the change was of a powerful magnitude, I was up to the challenge because I was an agent of change, someone who had learned through the years to say “yes” and figure it out on my way.

Believe it or not, I wasn’t always like that. I used to hide behind my perfectionism (and I’m still recovering from it) as a result of my childhood, and only took on tasks I already knew how to do. When I did find myself in a situation that didn’t turn out like I expected, I would place blame or feel shame whenever I didn’t meet the expectations of others - or even my own - so I usually avoided anything new or unfamiliar.

What was my catalyst for change?

Becoming a mother.

I was suddenly in charge of this tiny human. I had never done it before, but it just felt right. Every day I would come up against something new and no one got hurt, and as he got older he still loved and wanted to be with me, and that feeling started to spill over into other parts of my life, particularly the professional side.