I’m a talker. I’ve always been this way. Whether it was in school when I was supposed to be doing something else, in front of an audience, or to motivate others to achieve a simple goal, the one thing that I’ve always been good at and love doing - is talking.
Like many other people, my career path was never fully mapped out - it just snowballed from one job to the next. I started managing media relations efforts for one of the world’s largest PR agencies Burson Marsteller. For the next decade, I did corporate PR, branding and events for Fortune 500 companies such as AT&T, Lucent Technologies and IBM. After 10 years of working in the same professional niche, I desperately wanted a change. I tried whatever I could think of to switch industries and became one of the youngest Directors in the history of NBC. However, in less than two years, I found myself at a personal and professional crossroad wanting to make a career 180.
Simultaneously, I looked for classes on how to navigate my “quarter life” career transition but couldn’t find anything - so I created my own. My Living on Purpose Project ® course became an extremely popular seminar at New York University for more than a decade. This one course eventually led to me becoming a professor of marketing and career counseling at Hunter College and NYU. Now many, many years and hundreds of students later, I have discovered that I’m also really good at helping people to discover and do what they love.
You just need to find that one thing that you’ve always done that is part of who you are - and be ready and willing to take at least one big risk.
Whoever said we can only have just one career - lied! Truth is, we all can create a career lifestyle that both combines our personal and professional interests and talents, and compliments the way we want to live.
