Career Relaunch®
Joseph Liu
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Walking Away From Your Career with Kelly Price
Making the decision to leave an entire career behind is never easy. It becomes even more daunting if you don’t have your next role lined up. In this episode of Career Relaunch, Kelly Price, a former consultant in the pharmaceutical industry explains why she made the decision to move on from her stable career in the industry to pursue a career path more aligned with her personal values and interests. We’ll talk about dealing with “golden handcuffs” and how you can navigate a transition when you aren’t 100% certain what lies ahead. In the Mental Fuel segment, I’ll talk about how I managed the times in my career when I left one job behind before having my next one lined up. Key Career Insights If you’re working within an industry with practices misaligned with your values, it’s worth considering making a move to be more at peace with yourself. It’s not unusual for it to take an extended period of time to move on from a role you dislike because the costs of leaving, including creating a break in your CV or disruption to your steady income, can feel very daunting. The “golden handcuffs” of chasing a better title and higher salary can feel very alluring, but can result in you continually moving the goals posts of what will truly make you happy. Leaving one job behind without having another one lined up definitely happens, although can feel less common, which makes it both daunting and exciting. You can never go wrong investing more time pursuing your interests. Doing this leads you down the path toward being who you’re meant to be. When you allow yourself to pursue your interests, you can become who you're meant to be. Kelly Price Tweet This Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I put out a challenge to those of you trying to figure out whether to hold on or let go of your job to answer these two questions to help you clarify whether now is a good time to make your move. First, what single biggest interest in your life are you serving by staying? Second, what single biggest opportunity could you open up for yourself by leaving? For some help in doing this, you can download my “Should I Stay or Leave” Worksheet. Register below to download worksheet This resource is available exclusively to my Career Resource Hub members. If you're not already a member, you'll need to first register below. If you're already a member and seeing this message, you’ll need to login first to access this resource. --> Register free below to access this resource and gain access to my entire Career Resource Hub. If you’re already a member, simply login to access this resource. Register free to access resource Log in if you wish to renew an existing subscription. Username--> Email--> First Name--> Last Name--> Password--> Password Again--> Receive Joseph’s career newsletter About Kelly Price Kelly Price is a serial ‘intra’preneur with a desire to apply her strategic mind and business-building experience to the world of sustainability. After 18 years consulting for the pharmaceutical industry through medical marketing research, Kelly realized she would have major regrets if she spent her entire career in the corporate world. So she recently took a leap of faith, and quit her job without another one lined up so she could dedicate herself more fully to shifting into the world of clean tech & sustainability. As someone with extensive experience ‘pitching’ for business to clients, she would now like to use her skills to help clean tech & sustainability start-ups deliver more coherent, persuasive pitches to secure more investment. Check out the consulting she now does for clean tech & sustainability companies at Sundry Ventures. Follow Kelly on LinkedIn and Twitter. Did You Enjoy This Episode? Please Let Us Know! Tweet: If you enjoyed this episode and have a few seconds to spare, Tweet to let me and Kelly know! Tweet a thank you! Review: I’d also love for you to leave a positive review and rating for the podcast on Apple Podcasts, which helps my show reach more people who want to relaunch their careers. Subscribe: Be sure to subscribe to Career Relaunch podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or Android so you can automatically get each new episode on your device. Full instructions. Stay in touch: Follow Career Relaunch on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also follow host Joseph on Twitter and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered on future episodes, record a voicemail for me right here. I LOVE hearing from listeners! Leave Joseph a Voicemail You can also leave a comment below. Thanks! Thanks to Audible for Supporting Career Relaunch Thanks to Audible for supporting this episode of Career Relaunch. Audible is the premier provider of digital audiobooks, offering over 180,000 audiobook titles for listening anytime and anywhere on your favorite device. Career Relaunch listeners can download a free audiobook download and get 30-day trial at audibletrial.com/careerrelaunch. Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): We actually have a huge amount of potential that we just have no idea we’re sitting on. We just kind of look within the confines of our little job and think, ‘Well, this is about all I can do.’ I think it’s only in stepping away, being in this very uncertain space that I’m finally able to see that. Joseph: Good morning, Kelly, and welcome to Career Relaunch. It’s great to have you on the show. Kelly: Thanks for having me. Joseph: I am hoping to talk with you about a few different things today, including your time in the corporate world, why you chose to move on from your most recent role, and definitely about your leap of faith to leave one job behind without having another one lined up just yet. I was wondering if you could start by telling us what you’re focused on right now in this moment in your career and your life. Kelly: In this moment, I’m trying to figure out what my next step is, but I’d say I have one guiding North Star to that. That is I want to do something that helps the planet, something in the sustainability or clean tech just because I’m one of those crazy people that thinks that climate change is the biggest problem facing our planet right now. If I look back on my life—and I know that I wasn’t part of the solution, in fact I was part of the problem—I know I won’t be satisfied. Joseph: I really want to thank you in advance for coming on the show, Kelly, because I know you mentioned you don’t have things exactly figured out. I actually think that’s really nice because I think it can sometimes feel like everyone else out there has their career figured out, but in reality, for many people, especially those listening to this show, the process of navigating a transition is really confusing. There are no clear answers, so I’m really looking forward to hearing you give a glimpse into the realities of a transition. I was wondering if you could start off by just explaining what you were doing before this moment. I know you had spent many years being involved in the world of oncology drugs, where as I understand, your job was basically to help bring cancer drugs to market. Could you tell us exactly what you did during your time working in the pharmaceutical industry? Then we can move forward from there. Kelly: I kind of fell into my career in the pharmaceutical industry. When I was in college, I really didn’t know what I wanted to do when I graduated, probably like lots of people, but I knew what I was interested in. That was biology and languages. There wasn’t a clear connection between the two. I was studying Japanese and Chinese and Human Biology, and people ask me, ‘Do you want to be a doctor in Asia?’ and I’ll kind of be like, ‘No, I’m just interested in this stuff.’ When I graduated, which was 2001, the tech bubble in Silicon Valley was bursting, and getting a job in that area was not going to be the easiest thing in the world. I thought, ‘Well, I do speak Japanese. Maybe I could get a job in Tokyo.’ I was lucky enough to go to a career fair for Japanese speakers, and I found a job in Tokyo in consulting. I think when kids are graduating from college, they want to be ‘successful.’ In my day, the way to be successful was to go into iBanking or be a doctor, a lawyer, or consulting. People really didn’t think too much outside of the box at that point. Startups weren’t really a thing back then. In my desire to be successful, I thought consulting would be a good way forward, and I got a consulting job in Tokyo. I quickly found that I wasn’t able to really use my biology background in that job even though I thought I might be able to. I found a job in medical market research very quickly after, in Tokyo, that allowed me to use my Japanese skills in market research and also learn about medicine through my job rather than, for example, paying to go to med school to learn about medicine. That was a really good fit for me that I kind of just stumbled into by following my interests. Joseph: How did that experience compare to what you thought consulting would be like for you? Can you remember back that far? Kelly: In my mind, in my naïve, little, new-graduate mind, consulting was this very glamorous career where you wore a nice suit, and you went to the client’s site, and you gave very erudite answers to business problems. When I finally got on the ground, I found myself basically being a body, kind of hired out on a project. It was interesting.
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