In 2014, I had a conversation with a career coach that shook me to the core.  I was sharing my passion for helping people navigate their careers and telling her that one day I would become a career coach.  Saying “one day” was a mistake.  She hit me with “you are already a career coach, what are you waiting for.”

It took me about a year to publicly announce to people that I was taking the leap.  I did it in a short e-mail to 100 friends and family that helped me land my first two clients.  Here is the e-mail

Friends,

I’ve always been borderline obsessed with trying to figure out how to learn, develop valuable skills, and market myself in my own career.  At the same time, I’ve always been equally as motivated to help others achieve success.  From aggressively pushing my college roommate to apply to a job at GE (which he got!) to help my mother write “the best cover letter we have seen,” I loved seeing others accomplish their goals.

I started small, helping people find jobs, enhance their resumes and cover letters and prepare for interviews.  As I got better and I started to achieve success in my own career, more people started reaching out to me.  I noticed pretty quickly that I was pretty damn good at seeing other people’s potential (even more clearly than my own), helping them identify what they were good at and helping them accelerate towards their goals.

I gained a lot of confidence as my “clients” delivered on some big goals.  From a UConn senior that beat the odds to turn a goal of breaking into strategy consulting into a successful reality to another gaining acceptance into a top 5 business school and even another making the transition from 5th grade math teacher to healthcare research analyst at the #1 global strategy firm, I was finding myself more inspired and excited than the people I was helping.   It became crystal clear that this was something I wanted to pursue on a more serious level.

So here I am.  I’m going to pursue thison the side(no I’m not leaving my job :-] ) and I wanted to share it with you first.  Do I know where this will take me? No, but I’m excited to find out.

There are three things I want to ask you:

1. Check out my site and let me know what you think: careerswithpaul.com (RIP)
2. Let me send you updates on my thoughts: Click Here
3. The next inspiring person you meet that wants to accomplish great things – tell them they need to connect with your friend Paul

Thanks for your support and inspiration over the years, I’m really excited about this.

Eventually, I DID leave my job and pursued this on a more permanent basis, but I had no idea where I was headed at the time.  Do you have the courage to start?

33k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here