Nikki Thomas kindly allowed us to send her some questions regarding her recent career swap. Nikki is a career success coach and has helped 100s of people find fun in the workplace again. Below are the questions we sent over to Nikki, and we absolutely loved the response we got. If you are ever looking to change careers at any point, the information below is really going to help you out.
What practical steps did you take to make the change to what you are doing now?
I meditated a lot, I went running, I wrote pros and cons lists. I find when we are about to do something that scares us we try to ignore it. We watch TV or we do things to stop ourselves from thinking about the task at hand. Instead, I went for a run or meditated to do positive things for me and when I sat down to write pros and cons lists I found it can be easy and more positive than feeling like I was running from things.
What was the push that made you change?
I was deeply unhappy. The pain got too much – everything felt wrong and I remember standing in the shower thinking ‘how did I get here?’ At that point, I pressed reset on my life. I changed house, left my job, left my relationship and started again. I knew that I needed to find what made me happy and create that in all areas of my life – and I did.
If you had three top tips to give people who want to change from where they are now to where they want to be, what would they be?
1) Be brave!
2) Know where you want to go – you don’t get in a car without a destination – don’t do it with your life!
3) if you don’t make the change you will always ask yourself ‘what if’?
How has making this change affected your life?
It’s changed my life in the most amazing ways. Negative friends in my life just evaporated – they disappeared. Amazing friends appeared because I was attracting people more like me. Who thought like me. I made the decision to take ownership of my life so I felt in control of everything for the first time. I also have become kinder to myself – when I get overwhelmed or feel overworked I take that time to look after myself whereas before I would have pushed through till I hit burn out. I have learnt to put myself first.
If you could help people to follow in your success of changing paths, how would you encourage them to proceed?
Believe in yourself and know your worth! I realised the whole time I was unhappy was because I was doing things for other people the whole time. The moment I started putting me first and realising I deserved to be happy and only I can control that everything changed. Also being kinder to myself also made me stronger, stopped me responding to things emotionally, and made me better at work – which made me more successful!
How did you find what you really wanted to do? Was it something always there but you hadn’t acted on, or did it take some searching for?
It wasn’t easy! In fact, I ended up going full circle back to my psychology roots and went into performance coaching. I then put the two together to create my business and podcast Winning in Work. I started by looking at what I liked about work – what did I enjoy every day, what did I want to be remembered for, what could I build on and made the choice that I would only apply of a job that made sense and I would really enjoy. In doing that I started to enjoy work again. From there I created winning in work and the Winning in Work philosophy was born. Now hundreds of people have used the value pillars I created and believe in and have found happiness in the workplace too!
We just wanted to give a huge thank you to Nikki for allowing us to send over some questions for her to answer. We are very pleased with the answers we received and really hope they provide value to everyone that is reading this.
If you would like to follow Nikki, you can find her on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Nikki’s website: https://www.nikkithomas.me/
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