Written by: Karuna Jain, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
I shifted careers in 2008, moving from being a Project/Program Manager in a large Information Technology (IT) company to starting my own healing center. It was a major shift in my life. For me, it was not a conscious career change, in the sense that I was not looking to change careers.
I was doing very well in Information Technology, always being in the top 5% of all companies I worked for. I loved my job and living in the Bay Area, California I was used to the world of high tech. I wanted to pass some certification exams for work and was struggling to study for more than a year.
With a full-time job and two young kids at home, it was a struggle just to balance home and work. I heard about hypnosis as a state of focused concentration. I was immediately drawn to it as that was exactly what I needed to study. I passed my exam within 3 months of learning Self Hypnosis. My memory retention, memory recall, focus, and concentration improved substantially.
I just had to read a passage once and I would remember all the facts. I was fascinated with hypnosis and started learning more about it. With self-hypnosis my productivity at work was amazing and I actually started having free time to study. As a hobby, I enrolled in a nine-month course in Hypnotherapy. I practiced the techniques I was learning and found big changes within me. I had more patience, was more present with my family, and balanced work and home much more easily. My productivity skyrocketed and so many other things changed. I started practicing the techniques with my friends and colleagues and they noticed positive changes. Being a bookworm, I was doing a lot of research on the brain and reading many books besides doing the hypnotherapy course.
As I was doing my self-hypnosis every day, I started receiving inner guidance to move into healing others, of changing careers. I totally resisted this guidance. I had been on a spiritual quest for many decades, studying Yoga, reading about religions, and studying spiritual books. I knew every experience was bringing self-awareness to Who I Am. The experiences were showing me parts of me that were hidden in my subconscious mind.
An unexpected turn of events forced me to shift my career and start my own Karuna Healing Center as a hypnotherapist. I believe in reincarnation and that we are carrying a lot of baggage from many lifetimes. Later I added Life Coaching, Energy Work, Past Life Regression, Soul work, and more to my practice. It all happened organically. This shift brought up a lot of emotional baggage and limiting beliefs that were buried deep within me.
Here I am sharing all that I went through as I shifted into a new career. I have spoken to and assisted a lot of people in making career transitions and these challenges are common among many people. I hope this helps others who are making shifts in their careers.
Loss of identity
My identity as a Project Manager was ingrained deeply as I had been working in Information Technology for decades. Shifting this identity to being a hypnotherapist was really challenging. I felt uncomfortable telling people I am a hypnotherapist. I had a lack of self-confidence in the new identity. I had very limited experience being a hypnotherapist when I started and that affected me as I was so used to being an expert in my earlier career. My brain was programmed to be a Project Manager and not a Hypnotherapist.
Solution: I used hypnotherapy on myself to start changing my subconscious identity, and my brain programming. I created recordings for myself and listened to them regularly. I knew I had to change my inner world to see a change in the outer world. I mentally rehearsed talking to people and telling them I am a hypnotherapist, what I do and how I can assist them. Repetition is key to success.
Loneliness
My friend circle was pretty much people who were salaried employees, mostly from the Information Technology field. As a project manager, I was used to having a team and working in teams. With starting a business, I was by myself, figuring everything out on my own. It felt very lonely at times.
Solution: I started networking with therapists. It started with cold calling therapists and see if they would like to connect. I would meet them for coffee and learn from their experiences. I got ideas from them and got to do sessions for them so they understood my work. First few months most of my work was centered around setting up the business and taking care of a lot of logistical things, which was not always interesting work. I started an online blog and began sharing my take on books I was reading. I started volunteering at Stanford Hospital once a week so I get to interact with others and be part of a team to assist families going through challenging times as their loved ones underwent heart surgeries. It also gave me a structured activity to do once a week.
Insecurities – financial, emotional.
As months went by, I was feeling insecure about not having a salary coming in every month. It felt like I was not supporting my family. We went from being a double-income family to a single-income family. Our home expenses were the same but now there was only my husband’s income coming in. Though he was supportive of my career change, it was affecting him and it showed in his behavior. We were first-generation immigrants, and there was no fallback on the family as a support system. I wasn’t sure when my business would ramp up to contribute sufficiently to my family. It wasn’t easy to talk about my insecurities with others.
Solution: I started identifying my limiting beliefs and changing them with hypnotherapy and self-life coaching. Another thing that helped me with this was deciding I am going to give myself 3 years in this new career. If it did not work, I would go back to Information Technology. I set aside some money from my savings to take care of my business for 3 years. Giving myself this time limit/ budget really eased a lot of pressure from me. I felt I could breathe better as I had an exit strategy to get out.
Fears about my future, and my career came up several times.
I am an introvert. My basic nature is shy and quiet. This aspect was not evident in my earlier career as I was very confident about my work and had a good handle on getting results in a highly competitive Information Technology field. Having to stand on my own abilities fully now did bring up fears about my future. It is a big mind-shift to move from being a high-paying, well-established, salaried employee to being in a business on my own with unpredictable income. From being a very confident person to feeling shaky now was an uncomfortable emotional experience.
Solution: I used hypnotherapy to release my fears. I set up structured goals for myself and tracked my goals. I used my project management skills to identify a plan for establishing myself. Having a structure and plan really helped mitigate fears and insecurities around my new career. I learned to be compassionate and kind to myself as I made this big shift. I created a mission and vision statement for my healing practice and kept my focus on this whenever I was going through doubts, insecurities, discomfort, or wanting to give up. Having a spiritual core and believing in higher powers definitely helped me a lot.
Discomfort starting a business
Setting up a business was a new concept for me. I wanted to do everything correctly and legally. It took a while to figure out a name for my business, what city I wanted to be in, how to register my business with the city, get all the licenses/insurances in place, create visiting cards, and so forth. It didn’t work that I always enjoyed doing. I was evaluating different strategies to bring in clients. There was discomfort and I wanted to give up at times.
Solution: My project management skills helped me to tackle all these unknowns. At first, I thought I needed to get everything just right such as the company name. Then I realized it is okay to start with something and later I can change it if I wanted to. Letting go of getting everything right the first time around really helped. This wasn’t easy for me. Using this approach helped me go with the flow and allow things to happen versus forcing things. It helped me to trust myself more, knowing that I could handle the changes if they happened. I did change the name of my company and my logo a few years later. My inner guidance, my gut, was not allowing me to give up.
Split energies
This was a big issue for me. Part of me wanted to get back into my comfort zone, go back to my earlier career. Another part of me wanted to start the healing practice and not give up. I was splitting my energies and that created no movement at times. It was like having one leg in one boat and another in another boat and trying to move the healing boat forward. Every time things got uncomfortable, I started looking at part-time jobs in IT. At times I even took the step of going to interviews for jobs.
Solution: I realized what I was doing after a while, splitting my energies. I made a commitment to not look at Information Technology anymore for 3 years and give those years to my healing practice. Once I did that, a lot shifted and things started moving faster. It was as if the Universe was waiting for me to make a decision and once I made the decision, the ball started rolling for me. This decision was a big milestone.
Finding clients
I tried the conventional ways of networking, joining business mixers, and trying to meet more people and groups. It was just not working for me. It felt like too much work with few returns. Being shy, it was not easy for me to network so often. It was mostly me not having confidence in being a hypnotherapist and my belief that I needed a lot more experience to feel I deserved to be a hypnotherapist.
Solution: I decided the conventional ways of marketing were not going to work for my personality. I was not an extrovert and I accepted that was not something that I can change. I decided I am going to find medical doctors who believe in holistic healing. After all, if your medical doctor tells you to go to a hypnotherapist, you are likely to follow their advice. I found some doctors who believed in holistic healing. I did free sessions for their staff and slowly they started referring their patients to me. That was a huge success for me. My practice really picked up from there. I had the courage to recognize my personality and look at strategies that will work better for me.
It was a big inner journey of self-awareness, of finding the hidden inner resources I have. I am still on this journey and new layers of Who I Am are being revealed to me. What really helped me make the transition is an inner calling. Knowing my vision and mission kept me focused, not allowing me to give up. It required a lot of resilience and drive to keep going. Know why you are changing careers, and what you are going to receive from your new career. Keep the focus not just on yourself but on how your business is helping others.
Knowing that my work is assisting others in their goals, and helping them increase their fulfillment, and happiness really helped me wade through the emotional roller coaster I was on. Life is an adventure. Change brings growth so have the courage to make changes. Get out of your comfort zone. Be totally honest about what is driving you to make the change. You don’t know if you will have a tomorrow so start living your dreams today.
Be persistent and focused. Once you are over the hump period of changing careers, things will smooth out. You just have to ride through the hump and get over to the other side. The hump is where a lot of emotional baggage is surfacing to be cleared out. I am truly blessed I made this change in my career. A great wonderful transformation has happened within me, it’s almost magical. Sending blessings to all of you who are thinking of changing your careers or are in the process of shifting. You can do it. Don’t give up on your dreams.
I would love to hear your stories. Send me an email at info@karuna-healing.com or via the “Contact me” tab on my website at http://www.karuna-healing.com.
Karuna Jain, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Karuna Jain is a certified Life Coach, Hypnotherapist, Energy Healer, Past Life Regression therapist, and Corporate speaker. She combines science and spirituality in her work. She conducts classes on various topics including teaching Reiki healing. Her clients are global. She is into metaphysics, multi-dimensional realities, consciousness expansion, reincarnation, soul integration, and meditation. She is very passionate about empowering people to take care of their own health. Teaching and sharing knowledge is her major life mission. Her emphasis is on healing the mind and body through Universal Compassion. Her Mission: To assist her clients to reach their goals in a loving, compassionate, non-judgmental environment using the best of eastern and western methods of natural mind-body healing modalities.
