EP28: Five Reasons Why You Should INVEST in RADICAL Career Change
It’s time to make radical changes in your worklife. Corporations are reneging on their sustainability commitments, mass layoffs are becoming normalized, and YOU need to make empowered choices about who you are willing to work for.
The goal of making change happen from inside these organizations is proving to be a fantasy. The illusion that a corporate job means security and safety is evaporating. But YOU have an opportunity to define your career on your own terms.
In this slightly punchy episode, I’m giving you five hard truths about why you should be investing in radical career change TODAY. I’ll explain what it means to invest in a meaningful career (it’s not just about money!) and why radical change is the only kind of transformation we have time left for.
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Full Transcript
Alisa: Welcome to the Regenerative Worklife podcast. I'm Alisa Murphy and I am here to help you exit corporate and build a regenerative business. Usually I start the episodes with a little bit of. Gentle storytelling. Maybe I share an anecdote from my life, my career, or my experience with clients. Today. I'm dispensing with all of that. We're just gonna get right into it. I'm feeling punchy. I think there's a real urgency to what I wanna share with you today, so let's just get right to it.
Five reasons why you should invest in radical career change. Reason number one, corporates are choosing profit above all else. I'll be honest, I'm not sure that corporates were ever really doing anything else, but at least from a while they were pretending to.
What we're seeing at the moment is a kind a real definite. Trend of corporates backtracking on their sustainability commitments as well, of course as their DEI commitments. This is a real intersectional retrenchment that's going on.
So what this means for those working for those corporates is that this idea that I know a lot of you have that change from the inside is possible and potentially even preferable because you have. An organization with structures and processes, and it has scale and the possibility to have real impact quickly and potentially globally.
I know all of the reasons why we want to believe that change can happen from the inside, but the evidence that we are seeing is that it's just not going to happen. Something has shifted in the political landscape. I don't think that's too complicated and there is a sort of carte blanche for corporates to just pursue value for shareholders at all costs, and that is what we're seeing happening.
The most notable example in the last weeks, certainly where I am in the UK, was BP going back on its commitment to renewables and announcing that it's going to be significantly increasing its investment in oil and gas. But BP is not the only one.
There is the Norwegian state owned, I think it's utility EOR that has made very similar moves away from renewable. Back into oil and gas. There are loads of examples recently of banks going back on their commitments. Wells Fargo has essentially dropped all of its net zero commitments.
Barclays and NatWest have dropped climate tag targets from being part of their executive bonus structure. And Morgan Stanley has joined Goldman Sachs and Citibank in leaving a UN backed climate alliance. There's also been, I think it's about 40 fashion suppliers who have gone right back on their sustainability commitments.
The point is, it's happening everywhere. It's happening fast, it's happening without warning. And for those people inside the organisations that are pouring their time and energy into sustainability initiatives, into alternative sustainable energy, this is really devastating.
Reason number two layoffs and redundancies just seem to be happening all the time. Again, I don't think this is completely new for corporates. I've worked with a lot of people who have shared their experience of seeing whole teams or divisions or projects just axed overnight. But I think with the arrival of. Elon Musk and DOGE and what we're seeing happening in the US it's just becoming really normalised to fire people at scale.
And again, I know that a lot of people have chosen to go into the corporate world or to stay in the corporate world because of perceived. Safety and security. They see that this is a really sort of stable job with a reliable paycheck. And I think it is time that we really question that assumption. Are we really safe inside of these organisations?
Because can I tell you where you can't get fired when you work for yourself? Can I tell you where you can't be at the mercy of unilateral overnight decision making that. Just wipes out something that you have been working on for years when you are the one who decides what you work on.
Reason number three, we literally do not have time for you not to get radical. I understand incremental steps feel better, and I know that you might be waiting for that sort of indefinable time in the future. When the stars align, when things feel right, when you reach a certain level of success or financial security and you feel like, then I'll be able to make the changes. Not right now, it might not feel sensible right now. It might not feel safe right now, but we don't have the time for you not to get radical. We need change to happen yesterday.
Reason number four, your employment is one of the biggest levers of influence that you have, and I think this is still really overlooked. We understand about consumer power. We can choose to buy products or not buy products to support brands or not to support brands. I think there's increasing awareness of the power that we have through our money and where we invest our money and our pensions and a lot of people are starting to take, make the decision to divest from banks and other financial institutions that support oil and gas, or arms for example.
But surely one of the biggest leavers that we have is who we choose to work for. These extractive corporations cannot continue. These practice cannot continue to be part of exploitive capitalism if people don't choose to work for them, and the reality is not everybody. Has that choice. I talked about that at length last week in Episode 27, but for those of us who do have the career privilege to be able to make choices about what we do for our work and who we work for, it comes down to a choice between propping up a broken extractive system and being the change that you want to see in the world through your work.
Reason number five, life is precious. You are precious. Your energy, your time, your commitment, passion, skills, they matter. They are needed. You are too good to waste inside of hierarchical, high hierarchical structures where someone else will always wield the decision making power. And where those decisions will almost always be made in the pursuit of profit and endless good.
Take all of those wonderful ingredients that make you the incredible human that you are, the person who got to where you are today, and put them towards purpose. Put them towards making real change happen in the world. Make a meaningful contribution through your work. So those are my five reasons. I will do a quick recap for you, why you should invest in radical career change:
1. Corporates are choosing profit above all else. We need to stop believing the myth that change from the inside is realistically going to happen.
2. Layoffs and redundancy seem to be happening all the time. You are not safe or secure in your corporate job. Don't let that be your excuse not to change.
3. We literally do not have time for you to do anything other than radical change.
4. Your employment is one of the biggest levers of influence that you have. Use it.
5. Life is precious. You matter and you are needed.
Now that I've outlined those five reasons, I am going to just look a little bit at some definition of what I mean when I talk about investing in radical career change.
First of all, what do I mean by invest? First of all, invest some of that corporate capital that you've been enjoying into taking a risk and starting something new, at least for the short term. Exiting from corporate and creating a regenerative business is going to mean a reduction in earnings.
Corporate salaries are generous for a reason. It keeps you locked into the system. Can you be willing to be less comfortable for a while? Can you choose to sacrifice some of that income for everything you and the life around you stand to gain by you choosing a regenerative path?
Invest your time and energy. You don't have to exit corporate tomorrow. Even given the urgency that I've talked about, because your corporate job can be the easiest and most efficient way of funding your regenerative initiative. Whether you are thinking a major new career path, a life giving freelance offer, or a full-blown regenerative business.
But what's what you must invest starting today is your time and energy. This cannot come to life as a half-formed idea that's lurking somewhere at the back of your brain. You need to be willing to take it seriously. You need to put in the hours, take risks, get messy. Put yourself out there. Invest in coaching.
Exiting corporate in a way that feels empowered. Having the courage to pursue your forgotten dreams and build your own business, and to do all of that in a whole new way that supports your life and the life all around you. This is not easy work. It's going to require the very best of who you are. It's going to need incredible support for your nervous system.
It's going to take you to places that you have never been before, way outside of your comfort zone and current skillset. A coach is there to believe in you even more than you believe in yourself. To hold you accountable, to help you access the wisdom and depths inside of you. That is what I do for my clients, and it is worth every penny of your investment.
What do I mean by radical? Alright. I am really grateful for the chance actually to be really clear about this because sometimes people come to me with a misunderstanding of what I'm here to offer. I have very little interest in looking at or refining your cv. I'm not here to help you assess opportunities in the job market, and I don't want to help you get a slightly better job than the one you already have.
These are the tools of incremental change, and they do nothing to shift the systemic problems that we're dealing with. They do nothing really to give you radically different experience inside of your work life. I am here to help you create radical change. That means creating a career for yourself that is unrecognisable compared to the restrictions and demands of the jobs that you've had before.
That means ways of working that prioritise joy and meaning and cycles and balance work that recognises our humanity and our nature. That means creating offers and businesses where there is very little precedent for you to draw from Taking those seeds of passion in your heart and turning them into viable realities.
Ultimately radical also means playing a role in dismantling the system that you sit inside of right now, but even more radically doing that joyfully, humanely, and in community. I hope I've given you some real food for thought today. Whatever might be coming up for you as you listen, whether that's a feeling of freedom, right through to fear and frustration, I'm here for it.
I want to know, you can email me at alisa@regenerativeworklife.com, and I would love to start a conversation with you.
Thanks for listening. Listen again, if you need to, then let's get to regenerative work.
