Give Space Between the Question and Answer
Feeling frustrated that you're not coming up with any answers to the big career change questions? When it feels like trying to squeeze water from a stone, here's the antidote.
Jun 21, 2021•4 min
Curate the Future
Curate the Future is for multi-passionate high achievers to get clarity on your dreams, get unstuck, and design and launch your new career or business. If you're a purpose-driven, creative soul ready to reinvent, but need to push past perfectionism, imposter syndrome, and self-doubt, this is for you.
I'm Sumayya Essack, an educator and coach who helps creative, high achieving women to design their career changes and businesses and get the confidence and strategy to launch. I'll share the paradigm shifts, actions, frameworks, and tools to forge your path and tackle the mindset blocks so you can start your fulfilling new chapter.
In addition to solo episodes, I interview women who have made their own reinventions and started businesses, to give listeners an intimate and real-world view at navigating the journey.
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Episodes
The Decision Informs the Path, the Path Informs the Decision
Career change clarity often feels like two steps forward, one step back. When you're excited about an idea and then you find out it will take more than you expected to get there, it can feel like sliding way backwards. But you're actually still going forward.
Jun 07, 2021•8 min
Let Go of Forcing What Isn't Working, with Kaitlyn Casso
When Kaitlyn Casso worked in marketing, she found a passion for photography when she took that on as part of her role. Later, after spending a year looking for a new marketing job to no avail, she felt she was trying to force a career to work that she no longer wanted. She decided to take a chance on her new passion and now she's an independent brand photographer (and much happier!). The dots in her story connect in a way she couldn't have predicted, but she says sometimes we have to be patient ...
May 31, 2021•36 min
Let it Be Easy
Have you ever set arbitrarily ambitious goals for yourself, then felt like a failure when you didn't meet them? High achievers tend to make things really hard for themselves, and be tough on themselves for not measuring up to their own standards. Why is that?! We've become suspicious of things feeling too easy, but sometimes the answer isn't doing more, it's doing less.
May 24, 2021•7 min
Say Yes Then Figure it Out, With Vanessa Awong
In her 30s, Vanessa Awong decided she'd had enough in her finance career and decided to become a doctor while also starting a family. "Let's just say yes and figure out the rest as we go," she told herself, and that started her new path. With four years of commuting out of town, it wasn't an easy road. She's an M.D. now and has thrown some creative projects and consulting into the mix, because why not?
May 17, 2021•28 min
Leaps and Lily Pad Hopping
"How do I get from here to there?" is the million dollar career change question. Sometimes you can get there in one big leap, but lots of career changes happen by strategically hopping between a series of lily pads. Here's how to know if you can make a shift in 1 move or if you need to lily pad hop, and real life examples of what hopping looks like.
May 10, 2021•7 min
Move Forward Calmly, With Alejandra Molina
Alejandra Molina is co-founding a language learning app, currently focusing on medical Spanish during the pandemic. She doesn't have a tech background, but believes in figuring things out with a willingness to learn, to find inspiring mentors, to see value in all of your previous experience, to put imperfect ideas out there and get feedback. "Take everything calmly," she says, noting a venture capitalist's advice that each VC would give different feedback based on their own backgrounds. It's a g...
May 03, 2021•30 min
Overthinking and Underthinking
Overthinking is a thing, but so is underthinking. We dwell on some career change questions to the point of overthinking, and we skip over the useful questions by underthinking. If you find yourself drawing a blank, here's how to know which it is and what to do instead.
Apr 26, 2021•7 min
Listen to the Sparks, With Claire Simeone
Claire Simeone is a marine veterinarian and 2018 TED Fellow who started her own conservation-focused company, Sea Change Health. She has carved her own way through her field by following subtle clues. In our chat she describes how she learned to listen to those sparks: by separating her self worth from her career, and by separating fear-based anxiety from anxiety provoked by deep misalignment between our careers and who we really are.
Apr 19, 2021•37 min
Behavioral Economics Explains Why Career Change is Hard
As a coach I tend to hear similar themes in the fears and objections potential career changers have. We can take those thoughts as signals that we are weak and inferior, but they're often actually just behavioral economics at play. Here are 5 ways the difficulties of career change can be explained by behavioral economics. It's not you, it's your brain.
Apr 12, 2021•18 min
Rejection is Part of the Process, With Thalia Patrinos
Thalia Patrinos found that being a teacher just wasn't for her. She knew she loved writing, and after a chunk of time feeling frustrated and confused about what was next, she pursued a science writing degree and today works at NASA. Thalia's message as a career changer and creative writer is that rejection is an inevitable part of the process and not something to be discouraged by, and that a "sort-of-but-not-quite-right" role can turn out to be the right move. (It's also possible that her fire ...
Apr 05, 2021•26 min
Ask Yourself The Right Questions
Career change prompts a lot of lofty questions about what to do with our lives. As a coach, I find people are more blocked than helped with questions like that because they have no "right" answer and they make us freeze with existential angst (enter: indecision, inaction, general freaking out). Here are 3 examples of common questions career changers ask themselves, why they don't get us anywhere, and what to ask yourself instead.
Mar 29, 2021•7 min
You Can Change Careers More Than Once, With Teresa Carey
Teresa Carey was a sea captain for years, and while she still owns a related business, she decided eventually to make a shift. She talked to other people about their careers and became a science journalist. One of the most frustrating challenges for career changers is getting new employers to value their previous experience, and that's what Teresa faced. It took a creative thinking company to value her previous experience, which has been invaluable in her new field. Still, it's a work in progres...
Mar 22, 2021•23 min
What it Looks Like When You're Ready for a Career Change
How do you know if you're ready to take the plunge and pursue a career change when there is, in fact, no such thing as being 100% ready? Those who pull it off have a few things in common in how they approach it. If these resonate with you, you might be more ready than you think. And if you're not there yet, it's ok - you'll see what might need to shift first.
Mar 15, 2021•5 min
"Let's Just See if I Can Do It", With Natalie Wong
Natalie Wong quit her job as a software engineer when her health started to suffer. After being a stay at home mother for many years, she thought, "Let's see if I can start my own business." And so she did. At Pepsoap she makes natural soap by hand. She created the business out of a drive to just see what she can do and for the personal fulfillment of the growth that comes along with learning how to make it happen. Natalie talks about finding her own definition of success, giving herself permiss...
Mar 08, 2021•26 min
The One Question to Ask
Sometimes, there's nothing left to think about, talk about, or analyze. When we're stuck, it can come down to this one question.
Mar 01, 2021•5 min
Treating Life Like a Staircase, With La Toya States
When she got out of the Air Force, La Toya States went through a divorce and period of homelessness while she tried to find her way. She's a writer and a poet at heart, and today she's a writer and editor at the Marine Corps with creative endeavors on the side while she pursues her doctorate. La Toya is open and honest about how difficult the climb was to get there, and that it was her belief in herself and her belief in a better future that kept her going, one step at a time, until she got to a...
Feb 22, 2021•31 min
When You're Struggling to Find Passion and Purpose
As people start to demand more from their careers, a lot of us are searching for passion and purpose which are, for most people, frustratingly elusive. I don't think they're bad things to want, but we sometimes need to shift how we think of them. If you're struggling to find passion and purpose, here's a perspective to help you see it from a different angle and start getting some answers that can lead you in the right direction.
Feb 15, 2021•7 min
Maybe It Doesn't Have to Be So Difficult, With Georgia Barnett
Georgia Barnett pursued her plan to become a biotech researcher, only to find she didn't like it. During her time off to figure things out, she mostly went in circles, trying to find a new path in science so that her previous efforts wouldn't be wasted. She says it all felt so hard because she was forcing something that wasn't right, and instead she decided to go for something that made her happy even though she didn't know what it was. So she launched a new direction without much of a plan (rea...
Feb 08, 2021•29 min
The Pattern that Runs Your Life
Our thoughts, emotions, actions, and results are more closely connected than we often realize. When we see how they fit together, it's clear how much of life starts in our minds and how much can change if we take charge of our thoughts. This episode follows the recent one on cognitive distortions to show how those distortions fit into this pattern, for better or worse. If there's one thing that can help you pursue a big goal and change your life, it's understanding this cycle and learning to tak...
Feb 01, 2021•8 min
Shedding the Shoulds, With Jing Jin
Jing Jin was a computer scientist at Apple who had the itch to explore the world of startups. She started - and let go of - her own company, and is now at another startup. She talks about the identify shifts that come with pushing ourselves to try new things, dropping the "shoulds" that keep so many of us playing it safe, how ideas that don't work are simply part of the process for a creative person, and she's learned to endure - and welcome - failures.
Jan 25, 2021•22 min
Thoughts Are Not Facts
Career change or starting a business are not easy, but the human mind makes things harder by filling our thoughts with cognitive distortions. Just because we think something doesn't make it true, and we don't question enough what we're thinking. So today I'm showing how common thoughts most anyone has about career change are actually 10 kinds of cognitive distortions. If you know what steps you could take to pursue a business or career change, but you're not doing them, there's a good chance tha...
Jan 18, 2021•8 min
Believe You Can Learn, with Mel Butcher
Engineering is not usually a field thought of as a second career chapter, right? Mel Butcher went back to school to become an engineer after earning her first degree in language and working in government. Imposter syndrome and misogynistic views of women in STEM were some of the hurdles she encountered. But Mel focused on her belief that she could just learn what she needed to learn, and she wants to share that message with other women who want to take on a big career change challenge.
Jan 11, 2021•26 min
New Year, New Possibilities
The new year - especially this one - is a time of reflection and looking back at where we've come from and where we're going. Here are some thoughts on being mindful of where you put your attention, and focusing on your excitement about future possibilities.
Jan 04, 2021•5 min
Say Yes to Everything, With Nicole Papaioannou Lugara
Sometimes the path unfolds through a series of saying "yes" without always knowing where it will lead. Nicole Papaioannou Lugara was working as an adjunct English instructor when she took a new job as an instructional designer. Now she's a freelancer - something she thought she'd never do - with a career she couldn't have imagined years ago. She shares her story of how she got established, including how she went from doubtful about the idea to being fully committed, and how making that commitmen...
Dec 21, 2020•34 min
An Inside Look at Social Entrepreneurship, with Rachel Kois
Rachel Kois is the founder of SimpleSwitch.org, an online store selling products from companies making a positive social or environmental impact. In our chat Rachel shares the ups and downs of getting a social impact business going in 2020, suggestions for getting a mentor, and a reminder that periods of doubt or low motivation do not mean you're not good enough.
Dec 14, 2020•31 min
3 Things Keeping You From Admitting What You Want
If you feel like you're on the cusp of making a decision about your next professional direction, but still not...quite...there...you might be in the group of people who actually do know what they want but have a hard time admitting it. Three sneaky things might be going on. This is the third part of the mini series on stages of clarity.
Dec 07, 2020•7 min
Winning is in the Doing, with Zee Cohen-Sanchez
How would it feel to work your tail off, only to find that in the end...it still wasn't enough? As a political fundraiser for female candidates, Zee Cohen-Sanchez has worked on headline-big congressional wins. She has also redefined failure - even when the outcome isn't what we'd hoped for, success can be found in the doing, not just the done. Shifting perspectives on failure isn't easy, but it might be the key to finally going for what you want.
Nov 30, 2020•33 min
Clarity for Multipassionates with Too Many Ideas
Being a multipassionate person feels like a blessing and a curse, right!? It's great to see lots of possibilities for yourself, but it can also be frustrating to make a decision when you're spinning in circles, wanting to do everything and finding it hard to choose. Everything seems like an option, yet nothing really stands out. Here are 5 things that can keep multipassionates stuck and what to look out for to finally get some career change clarity.
Nov 23, 2020•10 min
Aligning Business, Passion, and Impact, with Virginia Mendez
For Virginia Mendez, what started as a side project to write a children's book, while working in corporate, led to starting TheFeministShop.com, an e-comm business based on her passion for feminism. She shares how the idea has grown into something bigger than she would have predicted at the start. Hear her advice for those who are thinking of starting their own business, especially if you're concerned that there are so many other people already doing what you want to do.
Nov 16, 2020•32 min
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