I’ve found that it’s easy to get caught up in distracting thoughts of the future when you’re in the thick of a career transition. At least when I was an undergrad many years ago, my anxiety about life after college actually helped me focus on my schoolwork. Studying kept me from dreading about what I will do after graduation.

Now I’m older. All my friends are moving along in their careers; those annoying alumni reception newsletters I get in my inbox make me wonder how I’m doing compared to everyone else I graduated with; my mom and dad always find some way to communicate their worry that they failed me in life because I’m 30 and don’t have an official job. It’s easy to feel behind in these shoes.

However, I feel surprisingly patient and more in control of my career than ever before. What gives?

I think the following few things have helped:

1. I call it reverse engineering. Paula calls it life planning. Whatever you call it, planning with the end in mind has worked for me. Money magazine has a great article you can read here. The upshot is:

Life planning posits that to find satisfaction, you should do two things: put in the effort to figure out what you really want your money to allow you to do in life and examine how the attitudes you picked up about money decades ago may stand in the way of your reaching those goals. Take on those assignments and you’re more likely to stick to the numbers part of a financial plan.

Career isn’t something I ever took seriously, partly because I listened to many negative influences that said it’s impossible to make a decent living as a creative person. After years of suffering through mind-numbing jobs, I finally did the legwork to figure out what kinds of creative careers exist. Once I found a field that complemented my writing interests, I was able to come up with a clearer, detailed “big picture” of what I want from not just my job, but from life in general. Having that clearer picture inspired further action to move forward.

2. Again, a plan was involved, this time thinking in short term. I created a Relationship Action Plan (RAP) as suggested in the book “Never Eat Alone.” I first got the idea of going back to school by sitting down and figuring out where I want to be in three years. Then I reverse engineered goals in 90-day intervals after that. I spoke to friends and mentors about my goals, continuously refined my RAP per their feedback, and I finally got to the place where I am now: achieving my career goals with specific short-term goals in mind.

3. Internal feeback. Even with the ups and downs of school, I’m picking up skills to accomplish more output of the creative ideas I’m always carrying around. Turns out that my instructors and fellow students like what I’m churning out. More importantly, I’m fully engaged in my projects. I actually have the patience to learn and deal with tedious tasks — a far cry from how I dealt with my previous boring jobs. Dare I say, I’m having fun in school.

Yes, I am excited about getting back to work, but not really just for the money. I mean it. Money is a nice thing to have, but if I end up having to take an entry level position once I’m done with school, I’ll be happy if I’m just making enough to survive paycheck-to-paycheck, as long as I’m doing what I love.

Well, the other thing is that I don’t expect to be poor for too long. Like I said, I have plans in mind, which include business relationships and short-term goals. I have a good idea of where I’m headed because as of now, I’m still on target with my goals, and in a few years I expect to financially comfortable. (I just need to ease up on daydreaming about how much I’ll love my job and the money…)

And that concludes my Bliss Chronicles series. Hopefully I’ve demonstrated that anyone can make a career transition with the right preparation. I’ve learned that your success depends on how badly you want to make that transition. If you want something bad enough, nothing seems impossible. Not even a blissful career.

Good luck should you decide to take the journey too!

Since both the program and price sounded great, I then had to figure out how I would pay for living expenses while I was in school. If I had to do this process all over again, I would have eaten the cost of talking to a financial advisor instead of enduring the messy and hectic process I endured.

I’ll skip forward past how the process worked for me because it’s a private matter with unique circumstances, and also, you need to examine the condition of your own current finances and tailor a personalized solution that will keep your finances healthy.

Here’s what I’m working with now: monthly income that is 1/3 of the money I brought in when I had a job.

Here’s how I’m making it work: cutting back, cutting back more and staying organized.

Again, I have unique circumstances working for me here. I live with my partner Zac. I used to pay twice his share in rent because I made more money. We talked, and he offered to chip in more for rent to help ease my monthly budget.

I had to find other ways to reduce my spending to stay on track, and by on track I mean that I found myself back to living paycheck to paycheck again.

Lots of things had to go: nice wines (do you know how hard it is to pass up wine in San Francisco?); occasional fancy groceries; new clothes; nights out with friends; weekend trips. These were just luxuries. Nothing to complain about, right?

Right. Cutting back isn’t a big deal when you realize that you need to cut non-essentials. You learn to find new luxuries that don’t cost as much.

And you learn to stalk sale items at the supermarket.

Personally, the hardest parts of handling my finances during a career transition are psychological. For instance, sometimes I can’t buy or make a friend a birthday gift, or sometimes I need to withdraw from social events because I’m running low on money. I start to feel guilty and look for ways to cope.

And no matter how carefully I try to stay within budget, sometimes I go over budget. I hate to admit this, but when I’m running low on money, there are times I have to put purchases on my credit card. Usually I use my credit card only when I can earn points or cash back. I get an acidic sting in my gut when I have to use my credit card otherwise. I console myself by remembering that I have a low interest rate and that I intend to pay down the balance ASAP, but that’s not good enough. I work harder the next month to stay within budget to avoid resorting to my savings or credit card as a safety net.

Organization is keeping me sane. Last year I wrote a series called Almost Debt Free, which from now on I’d like to refer to as Getting Wealthy. (After all, the whole point of the series was about reducing debt and building wealth. You live, you learn, you edit, sometimes a year later…)

While I was writing Getting Wealthy, I was exploring ways to keep my finances under control and highly organized. Expense tracking has been invaluable in helping me see where I need to reduce my spending. Keeping a financial notebook (or calendar) has helped me make sure I always pay bills on time, and I always know weeks in advance how much money I’ll need to cover my bills.

I try to leave little room for surprises in my finances. However, there are always some surprises.

The lesson here: The only real differences about my finances during a career transition is that I have to monitor my spending closer than when I had more discretionary income, and I always need to keep planning how I’ll spend money in advance.

It’s a little tiring thinking about money so often, and like I said, it’s a bit of a bummer having to find ways to maintain your social life on much less money. However, school keeps me busy enough that I’m distracted from the things I’m missing out on and I’m more focused on what I’m working towards.

Given how school is working out for me, I’m pretty confident that I won’t be missing out on life once I return to the workforce.

That brings me to next week’s topic: Staying focused on the present with the future in mind.

No career transition is easy, though some are more manageable depending on circumstances. I’m lucky to have a supportive partner and a fairly stable financial situation. I don’t take these facts for granted. Not anymore at least.

When I was being overworked as a paralegal, I had to abandon time I’d dedicate to most of my interests. I had little or no time for reading books, cooking, enjoying nature, or finding obscure music and movies. I barely had time to date Zac, but I made it happen because I met an incredible person.

Zac turned out to be my mirror during a time when I didn’t recognize myself, and I don’t just mean that in some annoying dramatic way. I mean it literally too — there were weeks that I was pulling so many all-nighters at work that I couldn’t even think straight, unless it was related to the facts of a case I was working on.

On a rare night that I got out of work early, I caught up with an old photographer friend of mine. I explained to him that Zac was my only connection to sanity, because when I looked at myself in the mirror, I kept asking, “Who is this person? And why does someone as great as Zac think I’m so special?”

So my friend took a few pictures for me, hoping the camera would provide more answers than the image a mirror provided. And it worked.

There wasn’t anything about me that was different except for circumstances. I still liked the same old things, still had the same values and burning desire to be my own boss some day. The difference was that the man in some of the photographs had a trapped, helpless look on his face.

I was making easy money — over $40 an hour in overtime just for making freaking binders! until three in the morning, or longer. It was a little more involved work than that, but not complicated work, which made it harder to walk away from. The most difficult part of the job was to bite my lip when a diva attorney would yell at me because he didn’t like the size of the divider tabs I used.

It’s not in my nature to bite my lip, nor to let anyone or anything get in my way of spending time with Zac. And frankly, while I like money, I’m not someone who is money-hungry enough to endure being mistreated at work and relinquish control of my own schedule in the evenings and weekends.

Looking back, my career transition started the day I saw those pictures nearly 18 months ago, and not only because I saw how trapped I felt from my work situation.

Two other pictures from that night startled me. In the first one, I saw that I looked a bit older and worn, like my appearance was finally catching up to my age. Then I saw an expression on my face I had never seen before, but didn’t seem so foreign either. I was staring into the camera with a piercing look in my eyes, as if I’m about to say, “I’m not giving up yet, and I never will.”

In the second picture, I wore a giant smile while I thought about Zac. I looked somewhat goofy. There was a lovestruck gaze in my eyes, the kind that either makes you melt or vomit, depending on how you’re inclined to respond when you witness a tender moment. I never let my guard down for a picture like that before.

Even though I couldn’t recognize the person in my own reflection, those two pictures showed me that I still had hope. I wasn’t completely lost. I still had spirit to keep trying, and I had a boyfriend who knew that and admired me for it. He always said that’s why he looks up to me, and he still says it now.

If it weren’t for Zac, I wouldn’t have seen that I was taking my own strength for granted.

I didn’t know how I was going to make a career transition, or what particular destination I had in mind, but I knew that I was going to make it happen shortly after I saw those two pictures. I finally saw what Zac sees in me, and that was enough for me to believe I can accomplish anything.

This week’s lesson about venturing into a career transition is that you can’t do it alone. You don’t necessarily need a partner, but you need some sort of loving support, either from friends (like those who offer to take pictures of you — thanks again J), from family, or anyone who has known you a long time.

I like to think I’m the kind of person who remembers to appreciate people for the wonderful things they bring into my life. But sometimes I forget to appreciate myself, and while that sounds hokey, failing to appreciate your own strengths will make searching for a way out of a bad career harder than it needs to be.

Those are a lot of words just to say that more than ever you need close contact with the important people in your life when considering a career transition. But they’re also words no one ever said to me, and they’re words I wish I heard during extreme low points in my old unsatisfying job. That’s why I’m here to say there’s hope, as long you remember to keep looking inward with the help of others.

Next week: A career transition for me has meant leaner financial conditions, but Zac and I are coping nicely. Stay tuned.

Sometimes you’re taking steps towards a more satisfying career without really knowing. At least, that’s what happened to me, and momentum built up from there.

Nearly a year and a half ago I started blogging for Queercents because I had just completed a class on finance, and I wanted to apply what to I learned. Although I was working as a paralegal in financial institution litigation, my job had nothing to do with money on the personal level. I thought, Heck, I’ll do this blogging stuff for fun.

Much to my surprise, I found that it came rather easy to me, although of course there were nights my fist would pound the desk and I’d curse the very idea of writing. But once I finished a post, I forgot all about the momentary misery and loved blogging as a creative outlet again.

Then a strange series of events happened after the first few months of blogging. I started reading a lot of books about freelance writing. I lined up my Google Reader with niche sites about the topic too, as well with Internet commerce and entrepreneurship sites. I basically immersed myself in those subjects. I wasn’t entirely aware of it at the time, but I was crawling towards some kind of tipping point.

The real tipping point came when I lost my job, and I had to decide whether to stay in a line of work I didn’t like or become what’s now a cliché: guy gets fired and finds his career bliss.

Call me campy, because I wanted to be that cliché.

Luckily I had plenty of time on my hands to read through career guides and learn what I talked about last week — that in order to achieve career bliss, I’d have to take extensive inventory of myself, get advice, make plans, execute them, and keep refining plans.

I wish I could say the process is fun and games, but it’s hard work that requires solid dedication.

When you’re making a career transition, sometimes you have to start off at an entry-level position. Or in my case, you have to go school and then try to find an internship or something entry-level.

I’ve always loved learning, so I didn’t mind that all the legwork I put into refining my career goals indicated that a year of school for multimedia training would help me find rewarding work.

Having stamina and enduring the process of learning is perhaps the trickiest part. I find myself getting tripped up by some old habits. I’ll let ambition get the best of me sometimes, and I try to tackle tough projects. I sometimes get frustrated because I’m in a new field, and my output doesn’t quite come out the way I had hoped. But that’s the process of learning and improving.

That axiom about how you can’t teach an old dog new tricks is wrong: some old dogs are stubborn and don’t want to learn.

The most important lesson I’ve learned about making a career transition into something I truly care about is learning to pace myself. I’m quite passionate about having found a field where I get to create things. When a project moves along according to plan, I’m elated. When I hit a roadblock (like I did this past week), I’m furious.

Trying new things, experimenting, pushing yourself to reach higher levels in a field that’s new can make you aware that you have very delicate feelings about the decision you’ve made to make a career transition.

To me, that’s the essence of the early phase of a career transition. You’re like a newborn for a while. You’re blind at first, you start learning the basics, then you start specializing, and eventually, you gain confidence. You just have to keep growing, even if there’s struggle.

There’s an amazing line Tony Kushner wrote in his musical “Caroline or Change” that I’m going to close with because I’m gay and I believe all life lessons are in theater and “The Golden Girls.”

The character Dotty sings to Caroline:
“But folk can’t just surrender to their fears / I know it hurt to change / It actually hurts learning something new / and when you’re full grown, it’s harder, that’s true — / it feel like you have got to break yourself apart / it feel like you got to break your own heart / but folk do it. They do / Every day, all the time”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Next week: Why I’m glad I took the steps to find my career bliss.

Now that I’m a full-time student again, there are few thoughts about my finances that qualify as stirring. I’m learning to be quite resourceful on a tight budget, but I have much more important things to share with you than the things I do to shave $20 here and there from my expenses.

I’ve somehow overcome a lifetime of doubt and insecurity about what I truly want from life. I’m finally making a rewarding career happen, and if I can be any part in helping you to do it too, well… awesome!

I’ve decided to start a new series called The Bliss Chronicles because I think I’m onto something. Since I’ve been growing and learning immensely by following a career path that’s more meaningful to me, I figured that I should chronicle the ups and downs of the process to offer encouragement to those of you who also want to take the first step in achieving career bliss.

And for those of you already navigating the sometimes-frightening waters of pursuing your dream, I hope my weekly reflections will not only help you stay afloat, but embolden you more.

I’m not a career expert. I’m just a guy who has wanted to be a writer ever since I grasped the concept of it as a kid, which I remember I described as, “I want to make books too.” (That sounds sweet, but do take note that I also got in trouble for taking my statement too literally by tearing up books and assembling them the way I wanted to see them.)

Now while I love reading tips from career experts, occasionally I find that their advice slams upon my fledging hopes like a 4,000-ton anvil. Career experts are undoubtedly successful people. They’ve reached their destination, learned to excel even further, and they’ve become wiser professionals in the process.

Yet somehow, their words of advice don’t always connect with me. Something is missing.

The journey towards believing you are entitled to a blissful career is in my opinion far longer and more arduous than 1) reaching out to the people who can help you and 2) proving yourself to be capable in the field. I think many career experts miss this point.

That’s where I come in with this series. My experience has been that I never believed I could actually be a writer. I was always focused on barriers to entry such as, “I don’t know the right people,” or “I don’t think I have the right training,” or “You have to spend years working your way up the food chain to do what I want, and I can’t afford that.”

And so what would end up happening? I accepted any and all jobs that would hire me, they were always unrelated to writing, and they were always uninteresting, unchallenging and an incredible drain of my resources. I was only making excuses, pointing blame, and living in fear. That was my career.

The problem was that I didn’t have a clear vision of what I wanted to do with writing. I had written plays, short stories, poems, countless essays, and I often jotted down ideas and characters for novels. All I knew was that I wanted to be creative and write things, but I didn’t know where or how I could get paid for it, until recently.

To borrow a line from my journalism instructor, in order to create a clear vision of what to do with writing, I found that I must “report the hell out of it.”

What does “report the hell out of it” mean?

That means you need to:
- Be extremely observant, notice everything and record your ideas
- Talk to people to further develop your ideas
- Collect as many facts of as possible from credible sources
- Dig deeper into the facts the more you learn
- Keep asking yourself questions, and focus those questions as you go along
- Direct your questions to as many people as possible, from experts, to lay people
- Be persistent in getting people to respond to you
- Organize your facts
- Clarify anything that doesn’t make sense
- Fill in all the gaps in your information
- Put your information together in a logical order and make sense out of it

In other words, you have to do a lot of work to uncover the truth about your own career interests. But unlike journalism, you don’t really have a deadline.

I’m constantly absorbing information about the things I can do with writing. The facts I gathered and the people I turned to for advice helped me to understand that I should focus my efforts in multimedia. That’s what I’m studying in school now, and I’m evaluating what’s the best job for me the more I learn about the field.

Oddly enough, I had some indication that multimedia was the right path for me over eight years ago when I engaged in the exercises in the career guide What Color is Your Parachute?

My top three career interests were writing, film and music. I knew so little about the diversity of career paths in those fields (and their intermingling) that I dismissed the notion that I could be qualified for any of them with my measly psychology degree. Because I didn’t bother to investigate more, I spent the next seven years clumsily jumping between jobs while trying to find some way to develop my creativity after work hours. That’s seven years to come back full circle!

So here’s my lesson: You’re not going to have answers all at once. You may have a slight idea of what may be a rewarding path for you, but don’t get discouraged if it’s not entirely clear. Pay attention to the things that matter to you most, gather some facts about what kind of work you can do with it, and report the hell out of that line of work.

You may find that you’ll have to report the hell out of several types of jobs, but so what? Would you rather keep trudging through a job you hate, or would you rather find a way out of it? The more you learn, the clearer the picture becomes of your ideal job, and you’ll find that maybe you’re a better fit for the field than you previously thought. Soon enough you’ll begin taking steps in the right direction because you believe that you can eventually meet requirements for that dream job.

Stay tuned for next week’s topic: what taking steps in the right direction is actually like.