When you’ve had a successful run in your career, leaving it behind can be especially difficult. So how can you tell when it’s time to make a change even when you’re good at what you do? In this episode of Career Relaunch, Shawn Askinosie explains how he relaunched his 20-year career as a criminal defense lawyer to found his own chocolate company. We’ll discuss how your intuition can be more precise than your logic and how to create the space you need to make a clear decision about your career. Afterwards, during today’s Mental Fuel segment, I’ll talk about how serving others helped ME figure out where to take my own career.

Key Career Insights

1. How your body feels physically can send you clues about your job satisfaction that you may not be able to fully rationalize logically. Pay attention to the signals your body is trying to tell you.
2. Don’t get lost in endless research. It can paralyze you and send you into a bottomless pit of choice. You have to also allow yourself to just listen to your own intuition.
3. If you’re feeling stuck about what to do next in your career, shifting the focus from yourself to serving someone else can create some space in your mind for the answers to come more naturally to you.

Tweetables to Share

Resources Mentioned

• Check Meaningful Work: A Quest To Do Great Business, Find Your Calling and Feed Your Soul, by our guest Shawn Askinosie & daughter Lawren Askinosie.

Listener Challenge

During this episode’s Mental Fuel segment, I talked about how I myself gained some clarity when I was feeling confused about where to take my career. In line with Shawn’s advice, I challenged you to find some way to serve someone, ideally in a way that relates to your unique skills, strengths, or interests. It can be something simple. It can be something small. But just some way to help someone else out in a way you also find gratifying. If you can carve out some time to do it, you might be surprised where it ends up taking you.