How do you choose or change a career?

Change is Scary, but Fear is natural

Circling back to where I started this piece, our careers are where we establish a lot of important parts of our identities, and the means by which we support ourselves, and often others. So, changing that is a high-risk venture that, to be sure, makes a lot of us more than a little anxious. And that makes sense: we’re talking about changing the very foundation for most of the day-to-day operations of our lives.

Here, I’m not supposing that those fears will magically evaporate. What I would like to suggest, however, is tweaking our understanding of fear a little bit.


Fear works differently than a phobia. The former is our mind warning us that there is some kind of threat. A phobia, on the other hand, is the same reaction to something that is not usually a threat. Given that fear is at least reasonable, we can take it to mean that, yes, there’s something risky going on.

Seen in that light, fear isn’t something to run away from, it’s something to listen to. If you can begin to understand the risks and threats involved in changing a career, then, if your planning is careful and there’s a bit of luck on your side, then you might well meet that fear with preparations that will aid you in accomplishing things that were, previously, merely dreams.

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