Cheryl Stein on the Quarter Life Crisis
by Cheryl SteinMonster's Personal Coach
People often think of mid life as the time when people take stock of their relationships and careers, and the time when people make big changes. You hear of people leaving their spouses after many years of marriage, buying really expensive cars, or quitting a successful career to do something that seems absolutely crazy. But mid life is not the only time when people have these great big moments of doubt about their lives. Sometimes, it happens a lot earlier.
Stephanie is a twenty five year old woman who is in the middle of a crisis. She graduated with a Bachelor of commerce degree and became an insurance agent right after finishing school. She worked for one of the big insurance companies, going out on sales calls all over the outskirts of her city. The organization was not a warm one. It was highly competitive, and wasn’t structured to help people new to the business to succeed. Stephanie quit after one year. She found another opportunity, still in insurance, but working for a much smaller independent broker. While this job was much more comfortable, it didn’t afford Stephanie the income that she needed to support herself. Essentially, to get ahead, she would be required to generate sales- and sales were not something that Stephanie liked to do.
While everyone around her was telling her to stick with it- after all, passing the insurance broker exams is quite an accomplishment; Stephanie felt that she had made a huge mistake in her career. She quit her job, and began to soul search about what she should do next.
When Stephanie came to coaching, she was pretty miserable. She felt that she had missed the career boat. All her friends knew exactly what they wanted to do and were all on the path to having steady professional lives. Stephanie felt like she had somehow failed to figure her life out and felt as if she was letting every one around her down.
We put so much pressure on ourselves to try and figure out the rest of our lives. If you are like Stephanie, give yourself a break. It’s perfectly okay to try different things and find out that you don’t like some of them. Until you actually try working at a career how are you supposed to know that it is going to be right for you? And who made the rule that we have to stick with one thing all our lives?
Through coaching, Stephanie realized that she loved the world of finance but didn’t like the world of insurance sales. She realized that she wanted to be part of a team and didn’t want to work in any industry that would force her to work alone. Her areas of focus became the banking industry and financial management. She also decided to go back to school and do accounting classes slowly. She figured that she didn’t want to overburden herself by taking on too much.
What do you do if you have a quarter life crisis?
1- Congratulate yourself for being so brave. It isn’t everyone that can admit to themselves that they want to try something else.
2- Take stock of all the things that you want, and don’t want out of your next job. (This career that you are leaving will probably give you lots of clues).
3- Narrow down your focus to areas of the marketplace that are interesting to you.
4- Don’t be afraid to go back to school- but don’t tell yourself that you need to be finished by next semester, give yourself time to take courses slowly.
5- Always remember that our most creative thinking comes out of being in a crisis. Even though this might not feel like a good place to be in, it actually is.