Choosing Your Next Career Step as a Multifaceted Creative

and sharing what I’m currently working on

just a moment from the Jardin des Tuileries

After over a year and a half long rut, I’ve finally put out a suite of new offerings into the world. Are they perfect? No. Is my website design and copy as elevated and eloquent as I’d like? Definitely not. Does it encompass every skill, passion, and experience I have as a multi-passionate person? Not completely. Is it a good starting point that will inevitably lead me to the next? It is. And that’s truly all we can ask for.

I sat in a spinning cycle for months, trying to craft the perfect offerings that seamlessly weaved all of my passions and skills together. I tried projecting years ahead, in hopes of paving a roadmap with complete clarity. It’s not surprising that nothing I came up with felt like “enough.” Not inspiring enough, or impactful enough, or financially lucrative enough. If you’re wondering what changed, what switch finally flipped in my head that caused me to take a first real step forward, my initial answer would be that it’s due to a combination of thousands of words read, podcasts listened to, meditations done, journal entries written, therapy sessions attended, conversations had, documents created (then deleted) and more.

However, in simpler terms, it has required me getting out of my head and out of the research mode where it’s so much easier to descend further into its depths instead of into action. It’s taken me reaching the point where I am so sick of my lack of progress that I finally said enough is enough, and I’m choosing to move forward. Somewhere…anywhere.

Perspective Shifts for the Multi-Hyphenate:

Your passions can live separate from your work and career (aka how you make money)

Why do passions only seem worthwhile and part of our identify if they’re monetized? Why do we feel like we need a permission slip to have hobbies outside of work? If, like me, you were raised in the States, part of this has to be due the capitalist tendencies that lay the foundation of our society. If you’re not making money from it, it’s not worthwhile to pursue. So, my question for you is: What hobbies and passions can simply exist as so?

Not everything can (or needs to) be center-stage

“Support” is a key (if not THE key) to clarity and progress. As a multi-hyphenate person, it can be paralyzing trying to decide what work you want to create, or what you want your career to look like. Mainly because it could be SO many things, and oftentimes when we try to fit them all together into one perfectly packaged idea, project or offering, it feels impossibly frustrating.

It’s important to remember (or realize) that not every one of our passions, skills, or experiences can be center-stage, BUT they can work together in support of one another. While deciding what I wanted to release into the world next, I continually talked myself out of things because they didn’t directly incorporate all of my “hyphens.”

However, once I noted my various skills, passions and experiences, I was able to clearly see how one could support another. For example, I’m not releasing branding offerings into the world, yet my experience in branding will be a valuable asset to whatever I create. Ask yourself: how can my skills and passions be in support of one another? And, continuing on the point above, what can simply live as a passion without me needing to integrate it into my career?

Your next move doesn’t have to define you forever.

Release the pressure of permanence and instead, lean into a seasonal approach for offers and projects. I wrote a previous post all about this topic: “The Seasonal Strategy: A Shameless Approach to Pivoting.”

You have to be where you are. But you don’t have to stay there.

If you’re like me, you may be overwhelmed by the seemingly immense gap between where you are now and where you dream to go. Sometimes this gap can be so overwhelming that it prevents us from making any progress at all. Yes…it’s true: You have to be where you are now. No amount of overthinking or daydreaming will magically transport you to where you envision going. There are no shortcuts. You can’t skip from A to Z. And even if you could, what fun would that be anyways? However, you can recognize that you don’t have to stay where you’re at, and those steps forward, even the tiniest of baby steps, will inevitably begin decreasing that gap.

Also, it’s important to take our current circumstance into consideration when we’re plotting our next moves. What is realistic for this season of life? What do I have the capacity for?

Start small and specific, then expand.

I have notoriously jumped head first into massive undertakings that I frankly have no business pursuing (like co-founding my first tech start-up at 20.) Expanding on the point above, I didn’t want to start small, I wanted to immediately begin at the end of the road, trying to accomplish massive goals without giving myself the space to start small and specific. As people with many visions, ideas and aspirations, it can be hard to do this, especially as saying “yes” to one thing feels like saying “no” to another, and therefore closing a door to a part of ourselves, which can feel painful. BUT if you can give yourself permission to just start somewhere, with the security of knowing this doesn’t have to be forever (i.e. releasing permanence) and that you can (and inevitably will) expand to other projects in the future, it makes the idea of starting small less, well…small.

This morning while listening to a podcast, they said “Connect with people in five different ways, but only monetize one.” To me, that was an extremely helpful reframe, and maybe it will be for you too!

You can do things your way

There is no one-size-fits-all model. And there shouldn’t be. We are all unique, with our own experiences, circumstances, ideas, passions, skills and purposes. While the idea of “doing things your own way” sounds exciting and liberating, it is simultaneously scary and confusing. Wouldn’t it be easier if there was a one-size-fits-all method? If we could have a perfectly mapped out example of which steps to follow that provide a fool-proof plan to our version of success? Easier, maybe, but definitely less fulfilling. Once we can let go of our need for control, or to have a clearly defined roadmap based on what we’ve seen from others, we can begin paving a path that is unique to us.

Choosing One Next Best Step

These perspective shifts have allowed me to move forward and take action, even if it’s just one baby step after another. If you’re wondering what these shifts might look like when they’re applied to a real-world situation, here’s how they’ve manifested in my life and career as of late:

Last week I announced a few new offerings for this upcoming season, which are centered around travel and experience design in Paris and across France. I plan on collaborating with both brands and individuals to create inspiring experiences that are rooted in wonder and connection, whether I’m helping design a trip to Paris, or working with a business owner to host their retreat.

And I’ll also use this opportunity to slyly announce that I’ll be hosting my own creative retreats in Paris next year, if you’d like to join the waitlist here.

Now, get this…I initially had the idea for almost these exact offerings a year ago but never launched them as I didn’t feel like they incorporated “enough” of my experiences and passions.

I thought to myself “I’ve co-founded two tech start-ups and now I’m just going to design trips?” I should be doing more, leveraging more of my diverse skillset, doing something like brand consulting or business development. So I continuously went back to the drawing board to try to brainstorm offerings that were more business-focused and “impressive.” In addition to this internal battle between paths, I also lost myself in ideas and dreams that were simply not a reality, or a great fit for my current season of life, like co-founding yet another start-up or creative agency, or developing a product-based brand. Point being, once I got realistic on where I was in my life and what this next chapter needed to look like, I could see what was truly possible.

I look forward to seeing how these offerings will naturally evolve into other exciting opportunities and projects. Once I stopped trying to put all of my eggs into one basket, and instead, embraced the idea that my career can naturally evolve and incorporate more than one thing, I felt free to just start. So if you’re currently in a place where you don’t know where to go next, or you’ve been stuck in a rut, I hope that these words have sparked at least one new idea or reframe for you.

Until next week,

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