Over a year ago, I accepted and started a new job. I’m not sure that I ever explicitly talked about starting a new job on this blog, but you may have figured it out from Instagram or other comments I had made along the way. I thought I’d talk a bit more about how I considered changing jobs after being in the same function for my entire adult professional life.

{{Side note: This picture above is from my masters year in North Carolina of press pictures we took for the graduate school. I never take pictures in work attire, so struggled to come up with pictures for this post. 😆}}

I spent my entire career working for a public accounting firm. When I moved from North Carolina back to Kansas City, I made a switch from one public accounting firm to another, but the work I was doing for both companies was exactly the same. I spent thirteen years working my way up in my chosen career path. For all intents and purposes, anyone would look at where I was just below the very top of my career path, and wonder why would you spend thirteen years of your life doing something only to give it up just *moments* before reaching the very top?

Let’s delve into that further.

From the time I graduated with my masters to the point when I became a mom and had Harrison, I churned hard in my career. It was really long hours many weeks in a row, demanding clients and leaders, but some of the most talented people I could ever hope to work with each and every day.

There were things I really loved about my career path: the challenge it presented me each and every day, the access I had very early on to top leaders at my clients, and the connection and mentorship of super high performing, young individuals who were just starting their careers. But I also struggled leading up to having Harrison trying to conceptualize how I would make my high-stress, high-demanding job work while balancing being a new mom.

But we did just that, for another two years after my maternity leave.

The leaders at my firm supported me as I went to a flexible work arrangement after returning from my first maternity leave, which allowed me to drop to an 80% full-time workload, and 80% of my full-time pay, to make my career work as best as possible while juggling being a new mom. I was desperate for more time with my little guy, but we were in a position where we still wanted the income that came with two working parents. So, the 80% schedule & pay worked for us for a long time.

And then we got pregnant for a second time. Something a bit different started happening around this time for me, too. I had reached the very last level in my organization that I could reach before applying for the pinnacle position I could make in this career path. This was a big deal. People who made it to the very top in my career stayed there, for the most part, their entire lives until they retired. My leaders began asking me what my plans were for my career. And I began asking myself the question, “Do I see myself doing this for forever?”

The answer was no. I contemplated for myself, though, that same question that everyone else would have had for me. How could you spend that long in a career path only to pull the plug so close to the top? Would I regret doing something else?

Maybe. But finally the price I was paying at home and my physical and emotional health was outweighing the price of taking a chance on finding something else.

I made a list of the things that energized me about my current job. And then I set out to understand whether there was a different role within my organization that would align more closely to the things that energized me at work, while at the same time, allowing more flexibility and availability for me to my family.

I started my job search at my own company, because being a large professional services firm, I knew there were tons of things that my company did that I knew nothing about, but could be a good fit, potentially. I loved the company that I worked for, and in an ideal scenario, I’d be able to stay with the same company but do something different.

I gave myself a timeframe of how long I was going to look internally for roles before expanding my search to other companies. I gave myself six months from the time that I came back from my second maternity leave to find something internally. Over that timeframe, I applied for no less than 15 positions, I made everyone in my network that I had built over the past thirteen years aware that I was looking for something different so they could help me by keeping me in mind for roles as they opened up. And finally, I was offered a position within the same company almost five months later.

I have former colleagues ask me all the time a similar question. “Do you wish you would have left to do something else earlier?”

And the answer is both yes and no. I think leaving earlier could have saved me some additional stress, probably more days than I care to admit being short with my family because I was too tired/stressed from work. But I also don’t know if I would have gotten the same position I’m in now without my previous experience. That’s always the question. Our previous experiences shape how we are able to handle and adapt to new challenges and work. At the very least, I’m really proud of how much I achieved in my previous career. They provided for me the foundations of the confidence I have in myself today career-wise. It proved to myself that I could do hard things and be really good at it. I’ll always be grateful for that.