A simple hack to overcome career wounds

• The pressure from a family legacy of holding grudges (3:11)
• The affect career wounds have on decision-making (4:41)
• A powerful hack to freedom (5:30)
• Understanding how your thoughts can manifest your experiences (6:58)

QUOTES: 

“When we have career wounds, when we are living in an experience we’ve had in the past. It is essentially impossible for us to move forward clearly, to understand who we are, what we’re here to do, what our purpose is on this planet.”

“What happens is, when we get one wound, like, let’s say we get a little knock in there, and then it gets deeper, right? You start to layer on other ones and then other ones and other ones, and now you have this whole pile of career wounds. And what you have to do is kind of get back to that first one so you can start to understand and move that out. So here is the simple hack. This is the thing that’s most important to remember about it is – instead of spending all your time thinking about all of these things, The simple hack is for you to start loving exactly where you are in your career right now. No changes, no add ons, no deviations.”

“When I used to focus on career wounds, bad experiences I had with bosses, I used to get really stressed thinking about it, and I would flash back to those experiences. And when I started to understand that that was creating the energy that was drawing in more bosses that were really challenging for me, more experiences that I didn’t love, I started to realize there was a powerful new way for me to look at this. So instead of worrying it was going to happen again, instead of stressing out over it or feeling anxiety about it, I recognize that if I chose a powerful new reality, I could shift the thoughts and experiences that I had.”

“Every trigger, every challenge is actually a lesson in disguise. And when you can come into that reality and really start to choose that reality, that’s when your life can change. And that’s when you get to choose a life of transformation, of expansion, of openness.”

NICOLE

Hello friends. Welcome back to the School of Self-Worth. I’m your host, Nicole Tsong. Today I’ve got a topic on tap that has been resonating deeply with all of you and with my clients. And that is how to get past your career wounds. It’s going to be a spicy one, so make sure to stay tuned. We’ve got some really good stuff and tips ahead. And if you’re an Asian American woman who wants to manifest her career pivot in 60 days, DM me ‘pivot’ on Instagram.  I’ve got a little something for you.

Okay, friends, let’s dive into this really fun conversation. Welcome to the School of Self-Worth, a podcast for ambitious women who know they are worthy of an astoundingly great life. Join us weekly as we get on the right side of your intuition, redefine success, and reclaim your self-worth. I’m your host, Nicole Tsong, an award-winning journalist who left it all behind to become a bestselling author of three books and work/life balance expert, helping ambitious women unlock their intuition and step into a life of fulfillment and radical joy. Every single week, I will bring you diverse and meaningful conversations with successful women from all walks of life who share insight about what it takes to be brave, joyful and authentic every day. Every episode is thoughtfully designed to leave you feeling empowered with tangible tips and advice that will lead you to your next breakthrough.

Oh, career wounds! This is like an unspoken issue that is happening for so many of my clients, especially when they first come in to work with me. There are things that have happened in the past, in their experience, in their job and their career, that have just created all these little wounds, over time. Sometimes there’s big ones, sometimes there’s little ones, and they just cannot get past them. And these wounds run the gamut. They can be a bad incident with a co-worker. They can be a toxic boss that you really had so many challenges with. It can be a mistake that you made that you’re still ruminating over. It can be rank or aggressions.  There are so many different ones that happen, especially in the corporate world, that a lot of the women who come in, just feel very challenged about moving on from there.

Today I will be giving you a really simple hack to handle career wounds. It’s something that I teach all of my clients when they first come in. It is not an easy one. I’m going to warn you in advance, but it is a very powerful tool to move forward so that you can actually do this. And this is one of the biggest things. The blocks that I see for so many women who are trying to pivot is that they’re still so stuck on whatever this career wound is, that they struggle to get any clarity or direction for their new job and what they want to move into next.

And let’s layer into this. Growing up with immigrant parents who might be the type who hold grudges for generations. Are you hearing me out there, my Asian American women? Because I know that my family have fights that go back, like, 20 years, and I’m not even joking about that. So if you come from that experience and you have family members who do this, you might have just learned that you hold on to sh** forever. And so there might be a little bit of that going on for you. And I believe in you. I believe in your ability to move past these things. I want to really get into it, because it’s not something that’s helping you. That is the key thing to know. When we have career wounds, when we are living in an experience we’ve had in the past, it is essentially impossible for us to move forward clearly, to understand who we are, what we’re here to do, what our purpose is on this planet.

My clients and I, we spend a lot of time looking at the things that are upsetting them. We look at the root cause that is creating a reaction in them and an upset in them where they really cannot manage to separate what happened before, with what’s happening in the present moment. Why does this matter? I have seen more than one client who wants to quit a job because of a career wound. You might be someone who is in that position right now, and it’s just not something I typically recommend, because now you’re making a decision from a reaction. And whenever we’re in reaction, we are not in clarity. We are not following a more grounded intuition. And these are also the decisions that, over time, are the ones you start to second guess or doubt yourself on. Now you can add them to the list of career wounds. So what happens is, when we get one wound, let’s say we get a little knock in there, and then it gets deeper, right? You start to layer on other ones and then other ones and other ones, and now you have this whole pile of career wounds. And what you have to do is kind of get back to that first one so you can start to understand and move that out.

So here is the simple hack. This is the thing that’s most important to remember about it – is instead of spending all your time thinking about all of these things, the simple hack is for you to start loving exactly where you are in your career right now. No changes, no add-ons, no deviations.  Stop wishing that something did not happen to you. I see this a lot. Like a lot of people are wishing that hadn’t happened. I wish that things were different. I wish that this has changed the course of my life, and I’m not really happy with it.

Well, your life right now is exactly where you need to be. This can be really hard to hear because a lot of times we’re like, there’s all these things we still want. You’re like, I want this kind of job. I want this kind of partnership relationship. I want a family, or I have my family, but I still want other things in my life. And when I see women doing that, this constant reaching and stretching, what it’s doing is creating even a deeper level of dissatisfaction. And it’s coming from wishing something in the past did not happen. So stop doing that part of it first. Then the second piece is to stop being hard on yourself about it, stop regretting what has happened in the past, and stop being judgmental about yourself or anybody who was involved. All of this energy is pretty negative. It’s pretty charged.

When you start to get deeper into energy work and manifestation, you start to learn this really simple thing. You are always manifesting some kind of energy. Right now, at this very moment, whatever thoughts you are having is creating an energy. Your thoughts are always behind the energy that you’re experiencing. And so when you go into negative thoughts, the way the law of attraction works is that now it’s pulling in and drawing in more negative thoughts. So the more you do this, the more you have this downward spiral. You’re focusing on the past, you’re focusing on something that happened. You’re now going to keep attracting in more experiences like that.

So if you’re ruminating about it or you’re worrying about how it’s going to affect your career, this is when it gets deeper, and you start to get buried under an avalanche, essentially, of these thoughts. Worry, in particular, is the worst. It’s pretty toxic. It’s basically planning for a worst case scenario. So if you’re worrying that something which happened to you before, is going to happen again, it’s essentially like calling that in. Lots of immigrant daughters, in particular, also grew up with a ton of worry, you know, especially if you had parents who are in survival mode. And I would say that anyone who’s immigrated to this country has some elements of survival mode.  They don’t know the language, the culture. There’s so much adaptation that has to happen. So worry can be pretty constant for them. And then you might layer in that they had pretty intense experiences. If they were like children of war or went through a lot of trauma in their home country, there’s a lot of that. Worry is probably something that they use as a coping mechanism.

But you, however, get to choose a different pathway in another way, especially when you start to understand the energy of worry. And so when you want to get out of this energy of worry and getting out of this energy of self-doubt, you have to start looking at the thoughts that you’re having.

When I realized that thoughts were creating my future, at first I was fascinated. I started to pay attention to my thoughts, and then realized they were pretty negative. And your brain has a very strong negativity bias. We have something anywhere from, I think, 60,000 to 100,000 thoughts a day, and a good 80% of them are negative. They’ve done studies on this. You do the math – that’s a lot of negative thoughts every day.

Then on top of it, you need eight to twelve positive thoughts to counter the negative one. Now, before you go into despair, because I’m telling you all of these things, it’s helpful for us to pay attention to it, because negative thoughts are also a habit, and you can shift that habit. You can actually change how you think by changing the habit of the negative thoughts. Work on catching yourself when you’re in those negative thoughts and start to move yourself into ones that really support you. So that’s just something to know about so you can really take your power back over what’s happening in an internal place. And for me, I’m always looking at, how do I shift myself out of a negative thought into a positive thought? Part of it is by focusing on the kind of thoughts I’m having.

When I was focusing, when I used to focus on career wounds, bad experiences I had with bosses, especially bosses, I think is one of the most challenging places for us to move out of. I used to get really stressed thinking about it, and I would kind of flash back to those experiences. Then I started to understand that that was creating the energy that was drawing in more bosses that were really challenging for me. More experiences that I didn’t love, I started to realize there was a powerful new way for me to look at this. So instead of worrying it was going to happen again, instead of stressing out over it or feeling anxiety about it, I recognized that if I chose a powerful new reality, I could shift the thoughts and experiences that I had. Then when I started to realize everything in my career has led me to this point, and that is a super important thing to acknowledge and to understand, and that I’m in the exact right time in my life for what I’m here to learn, no matter what happened before. That alone is such a powerful new reality to choose.

Now the following one has really helped me stop being the victim of my past and to create a reality that worked for me. It’s one of my very favorite ones. I actually used this the most when I was going through a divorce. And going through my divorce, it was pretty challenging to not feel regret or shame or blame for all of the things that transpired. But this particular reality really, really helped me. And it’s this one:  There are no mistakes, there are only lessons.  I repeat, there are no mistakes. There are only lessons.

What I have learned from this one, is that anytime I felt like I was making a mistake in my career, in my personal life, or just my life, I started to recognize that that was just a trigger. There was something in me that was feeling shame or challenge around that experience. And that’s what made me feel like I had done something wrong, or I was hard on myself. But when I started to understand that that wasn’t a mistake, that there were lessons for me to learn from that experience, and I have learned huge amounts from both work career wounds and then also from going through a divorce, that those lessons, man, I wouldn’t give up those lessons for the world. Those lessons have changed my life. They have led me down pathways to reclaiming my power, to really understanding who I am, to being more authentically myself in every single way. So every trigger, every challenge is actually a lesson in discipline.

When you can come into that reality and really start to choose that reality, that’s when your life can change. That’s when you get to choose a life of transformation, of expansion, of openness. So if you can really remember that that is the hack. There are no mistakes, only lessons. And for you to look at what there is to learn from this experience you had, what can you carry forward that is really powerful about that experience? You’ve just been dreaming a bad dream that you can’t recover. But actually it’s not true. You can totally recover.

There are no mistakes. There are only lessons. So if you’re seeing some big insight for yourself, I would love to hear it. DM me @ NicoleTsong on Instagram. Let me know what insights you’re getting from this conversation. I would love to hear. And if you want the exact step-by-step to pivot into a dream career that is fulfilling, that you feel passionate about, that you can’t wait to go to every day, DM me ‘pivot’ @ NicoleTsong on Instagram. I cannot wait to hear from you because I’ve got something for you there. All right friends, thank you so much for this powerful conversation and I’ll see you next week.

Thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode. Before you go, don’t forget if you are a high-achieving woman who wants to uncover your biggest blind spots preventing fast intuitive decisions, I’ve got a 72-second assessment for you, so make sure to DM me ‘quiz’ @ NicoleTsong on Instagram and thank you for being here and for listening. We read every note that we get from you about how the podcast is making a difference in your life. Please know how much we appreciate each and every one of you. Until next time, I’m Nicole Tsong and this is the School of Self-Worth.