You’re Not Starting Over, You’re Starting From Experience

You're not starting over. You're starting from experience. What's up, everyone? My name is Mary. This is Jill. We are social emotional learning experts, which basically just means that we help you people better, not just with other people, but with yourself as well, because that is the cornerstone of you being able to understand your emotional intelligence and how it works for you, not against you. So today we want to speak to the people who might be on the edge of taking a leap in their life. We like to say you're not starting over.

You're starting from experience. So we want to bring you four ideas to help you if you're in that in between stage in your life. And what does that in between stage mean? Maybe you just left a relationship. Maybe you broke up with somebody. Maybe they broke up with you. Maybe you quit a job, maybe you got fired. It is really easy to sit here and say, oh, my gosh, now I have to start over. But are you really starting over? We want to challenge that narrative and say, absolutely not. You're actually starting from experience.

So these four things are going to help you run through why you're not technically starting over and why you've really got stronghold step with whatever you're going to do next. So the first idea is risk. Risk is what's going to help you really start the conversation around. Okay, what's on the other side? If I take the leap? If you don't risk it, you're not going to know what's going to be on the other side. You thought she was going to say, if you don't risk it, you're not going to get the biscuit right?

Wrong. This is really, really poignant for me because I just left my full time job to go into full time entrepreneurship with Jill. In our business, it's called girls mentorship. We do the same thing we're doing here for teenage girls. And for me, I had to ask myself if it was worth it. Was the risk I was about to take worth it? And we go through this list in our heads, what could happen? What are the possible outcomes? It could work. It couldn't work for me, the most poignant question that I asked myself in taking this leap was, what was my worst case scenario?

And as humans, we go so far down that path, it's like I'm gonna end up homeless with no friends and I can't gonna pay my mortgage. They're all of the things we spin and spin and spin. But realistically, after I logically said, am I gonna wind up homeless? No. Am I gonna be able to feed myself? Yes. I have enough people that could take care of me if something went wildly wrong to be okay. So realistically, my worst case scenario was going to a job that I really didn't love anymore. It was like living groundhog's day over and over and over again.

So in that moment, a light bulb went off and it said, so you're already living your worst case scenario. You're already doing it. It was that gentle nudge. It was the first tap that was like, hey, hey. And those are hard to hear sometimes because as humans, we tend to fill that void, meaning the space that we need to create in order to hear our internal dialogue and what we're really needing with other things. We fill it with social media, endless scrolling, movies, tv, music. We're not often alone with our own thoughts.

So I heard that it was like, if I'm already living my worst case scenario, then what's the big deal, right? Because if I take this leap and I fail, if I take this risk and I fail, I always have something to go back to. I know that those skills are applicable back in the industry that I'm trying to leave right now. And I love that we're using this as an example, because what I want to pull out for this second, this second idea is trusting your gut. Mary, in this big transition, didn't get distracted by other people's opinions or her scrolling aimlessly and losing time and days.

And she knew that by really quieting the noise around her and listening to her gut, it was going to really lead to the answer of taking that risk. And I did. It wasn't just what I had for lunch that was speaking to me in my gut. It was a nagging feeling that started out as a very small murmur, right? And that, again, teaching you how to people better is understanding your self awareness. Do you have self awareness to hear what's going on in your body or to feel what's going on in your body? Because our body gives us clues.

It says things like, hey, I'm not happy here. This is going against everything that I want to do to get up and go to this job anymore. And we tend to ignore those signs and symptoms. And in me trusting my gut, I really had to trust myself, which can be difficult because if I was to get everyone else's opinion on what I was supposed to do, I wouldn't have moved. Because people think that you're crazy. People think that you shouldn't do it, that you're so good at your job, right? And we don't want you to leave.

It's a selfish thing for a lot of people because I left a whole community behind that I had created relationships with over the last five years. So, selfishly, did they want me to leave? No. So are they gonna tell me something to make me want to stay? Absolutely. Do they know that they're necessarily doing that? No. So I can't blame them. However, I listen to myself, and before going into those conversations, I was already confident in what I wanted to do, whether I was actually really confident or not, because there was that, holy moly, am I doing the right thing?

Am I doing the right thing happening inside my brain? However, I knew that I needed to be firm in my decision, and I love that because that brings us to our next tip, which is your skills. Your skills from job to job are transferable. So, yes, Mary, being in the fitness industry for over a decade, has garnered these skills that she probably was a little afraid to be like, well, what happens if entrepreneurship looks differently? But the beautiful thing of what we've learned in jumping from different opportunities and starting over is that our experiences and our skill sets have followed us and have served us in such a way that what happens if she stayed put for another ten years?

She would never know that these skills can really take her further, faster, by trying it on, by being an entrepreneur, by saying, hey, my fitness industry or my fitness background is serving me in so many ways that I didn't know that I needed. And those skills wouldn't have gotten challenged anymore because, quite honestly, show of hands, who can do their job with their eyes closed, I was in that position. So I wasn't challenging myself mentally, emotionally. I was going through the motions because it was easy and easy, honestly, the concept of doing things that are easy in the moment makes your life harder in the long run.

And that's something I really wanted to lean into because, d*** right, entrepreneurship is difficult. I've cried four times this week. I'm not going to lie about that. However, I know that I'm getting refined. Right? When you think about a blade or a saw, it's got to get sharpened by resistance. Iron sharpens iron. And that's why I was totally okay making the leap, because I knew that I'd garnered a skill set that could easily transfer to what we're doing now. Because I was mentoring people then, I'm mentoring people now.

It's just in a different way. So it's, you're not starting over. That's the whole concept of the video. You're not starting over. You're starting from experience, and I really had to lean into that concept. And the last and final tip, because here it is. The fourth one is just analyze. Once you've taken the risk and you've listened to your gut and you're really leaning into your skills, you get to really assess and analyze. Is this working for me? Or is it not just taking inventory of, was this worth it?

Was it worth it? And we're not gonna know unless we're in it. If you're in a job that felt like Groundhog's day, you can't sit there and talk to your future self if you're not in that position making those strides. Absolutely. Something we tell our girls all the time is no decision is permanent. And I know that it can feel like that in the moment, but just because you made a decision doesn't mean you can't change your mind and make another decision or go back to the industry that you were comfortable with.

Whatever it is. Is it the relationship? Is it the job? Now, we're not sitting here saying, go back to a toxic work environment or a relationship if that's what's comfortable for you. We are saying, however, you get to give yourself grace and make a new decision, if that decision that you made didn't work out. There's the famous line from friends, pivot. You get to pivot. And I want you to take that and really run with it and empower yourself to make the decisions that you've been holding off on making because you've been too skinny, scared to make them right.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Love that. And at the end of the day, what happens if it all works out? Hmm? What happens if it works? Not? What if I fail? What happens if I succeed? Start asking yourself better questions. You'll start seeing better results.