Career Relaunch®
Joseph Liu
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Finding What Fulfills You with Pam Katz
Do you ever wonder if it’s too late for you to start your second career? You should never say never. But only you can create the change you seek. No one will do it for you or hand it to you on a silver platter. Having spent 20 fruitful and fulfilling years in the business world, including operating her own successful digital marketing company, Pam Katz is now happily immersed in her second career, nursing. I decided to have Pam on the show because, first of all, given the current pandemic, we’re long overdue for having a nurse on the show. And also, because she’s going to share some useful insights on what it takes to completely shift directions in your career, even if that journey’s a little more challenging than you expected. During the Mental Fuel® segment, I’ll address a listener question about what to do next after you’ve been let go of a job you didn’t like very much in the first place. Key Career Insights and Tips You’re not necessarily going to reach your moment of happiness overnight or your first foray into something new. Putting in some extra exploration and legwork upfront will increase the chances of you finding your way toward a more fulfilling job. When you are starting a new job, you have to lean heavily on the skills and talents that have gotten you to where you are in your life. Those skills aren’t completely irrelevant, even if you feel a bit like a fish out of water. Just because you have a bumpy start to a new role doesn’t mean it’s been the wrong move. Every new job has a steep learning curve, which is par for the course. You're not necessarily going to reach your moment of happiness overnight. Pam Katz Tweet This Listener Challenge During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I addressed a listener question about how to figure out what to do with your life. My challenge to you if you’re unsure of what to do as you look ahead in your career is to step away from trying to figure it all out on your own and proactively reach out to someone in your network to talk things through. The skies may not part immediately, and you may not have any sort of epiphany after the first few conversations, but there is a real power in live discussions that may help you uncover a few helpful themes that help you narrow down the overwhelming number of options out there. You never know what ideas may come up that you never considered before. 📖 Episode Chapters 00:00:00 Overview 00:01:07 Introduction 00:02:15 Chat with Pam Katz 00:29:17 Mental Fuel 00:36:22 Listener Challenge 00:36:59 Wrap Up About Pam Katz, Oncology Nurse Pam Katz spent 20 years in the business world, including operating her own digital marketing company. Around the age of 40, she went through a mid-life “re-evaluation”. Even though she had a successful business and was good at what she did, she didn’t feel fulfilled by what she did each day. She decided something had to change, and eventually went back to school to get her master’s in nursing. She’s now happily immersed in her second career at the Rush University Medical Center as a hematology/oncology Registered Nurse. She also volunteers her time to help vaccinate people against COVID-19 in the more vulnerable areas of her city. Taking care of others is in her blood and she’s now in a role that helps others, gives back and serves the greater good. 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 Pam 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 and Facebook. You can also follow host Joseph on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Comments, Suggestions, or Questions? If you have any lingering thoughts, questions, or topics you would like covered in 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 Namecheap for Supporting the Career Relaunch® podcast Thanks to Namecheap for supporting this episode of the Career Relaunch® podcast. Namecheap is an affordable, trustworthy domain registrar that offers free privacy protection with every domain registration. Claim your unique website domain today to start building your brand by visiting CAREERRELAUNCH.NET/NAMECHEAP. Music featured in the show Isobel O’Connor / King of Forest Green, My Favorite Tree, Our Waters / courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com Rippled Stone / Descend, Tales of a Town, Before it Ends, My Moment, Read Me / courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com Episode Interview Transcript Teaser (first ~15s): I myself was the only one who was going to be able to make that change for myself. I think everybody has to take that step back and evaluate who they are, what they are destined to be, what calls them, what fulfils them, and it’s going to be different for everybody. Joseph: Hello, Pam. Welcome to Career Relaunch! It is great to have you on the show. Pam: Why thank you so much! It’s good to talk to you again. Joseph: I know you’re quite busy right now, so I appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. I just want to dive right in. First of all, I want to get a sense of what you have been focused on in your career and your life before we dive into your career history and some of the transitions you’ve been through. Pam: I’ve been at Rush University Medical Center for three and a half years now. I work in the Haematology Oncology unit. We handle all the blood cancer patients and all the stem cell transplant patients. Right now, I’m very focused on getting my oncology certified nursing certification which is a higher-level certification within the oncology area. I’m looking to see what might be next in the nursing area for me whether it’s taking up a notch of what I’m doing or going to outpatient. The great thing I’ve found about nursing is that there are so many opportunities and so many different things you can do with that education and background. The opportunities are endless. Joseph: I know you’ve spent a few years and it hasn’t been a tremendous amount of time—coming up on 4 years working in nursing. I’ve got to ask you, what impact, if any, has COVID had on your day-to-day work as a nurse in a haematology and oncology unit? Pam: Believe it or not, it’s had an impact in many ways for us. The number of patients we’ve had on the unit somewhat dipped during the height of COVID because I think many people were putting off care. The nurses in our unit often end up floating to those units that were accepting COVID patients. You also feel like you’re a part of a bigger mission to attack this pandemic, to help the people, and try to figure out what therapies would work the best. In the course of last year, as the pandemic ebbed and flowed, people can only stall their care for so long. Our census came back up and pretty much stayed up since. But education and communication with our patient population is specifically impacted because most of them have very compromised immune systems and are far more susceptible to catching things like COVID. The impact on them, if they were to get it, would be far more devastating. We had to learn an awful lot in terms of medication strategies above and beyond what we would normally counsel our patients on. Joseph: It probably goes without saying, on behalf of everybody out there listening including me, we definitely appreciate what you and all the other nurses and doctors and healthcare staff are doing out there during these really challenging times. I know you haven’t really been a haematology nurse, Pam. I do want to come back and talk about your day-to-day life as a nurse, but I was wondering if we could go back in time. This is a show about career change. I was wondering if we could go way back in history, and we could talk about what you were doing before nursing. Tell me about your time working in marketing and then we could move forward from there. Pam: When I got out of college—truthfully even going into college—I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do. You’ve got your Venn diagram of what you’re good at and what you like to do, and you have these intersections that can encompass many things. I think I initially went into marketing and advertising because my eldest sister did, and it seemed like an interesting thing to do. I got into marketing. I was working at ad agencies early on, for a good chunk of my career. Then I moved into digital marketing in the late 90’s when things were just starting out. I proceeded to specialize in that field for the rest of my career. I worked at United Airlines. Then, I worked at FTD. I had a number of different agencies and client-side marketing roles. But in the end, I ended up starting my own digital marketing company. It was called Charlotte’s Web Marketing. I did that for about 8 years. It was great. It was very fulfilling at the time. I ran a successful company. I had employees. Marketing’s an interesting beast. I would never want to disparage that occupation overall but for me, it felt like I was trying to sell people things that they didn’t necessarily need. Joseph: You mentioned United Airlines. What were some of the other things you were selling that you kind of felt like, “I’m not really finding this super fulfilling or gratifying. Pam: One of my major clients when I was working at the ad agency was a major movie studio. There’s nothing wro
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