Maui. I'm currently in London. I'm actually from California originally Egyptian by ethnic background.Um And today I'm going to talk to you about a very challenging scary um journey that I went through and something that is really important to me, which was learning when to keep going and learning when to just quit. Um And early on, but not early enough, I discovered that quitting is not the same thing as giving up. And I feel really compelled to share and, and talk to you about when and how to know the differences and also what tangible steps you can take to make this decisions about your life, your career, your future. There weren't a lot of resources around, at least for me on how I should do it, how I should find something new, how to figure out what I love, what are the practicalities of passion and where are the kind of barriers to entry, right? So just going through, uh let me tell you a little bit about me. So again, my name is Selma.

Um I remember back in 2018, I was working for a company where I was so unhappy I had been there for about four years at the time and a manager came over to me and asked me if I was planning to leave. And this question really struck me because I realized, you know, it felt like a space where I was supposed to be comfortable to say no and, and, you know, I love it here or, I don't know, I don't, I don't know what I want or what I'm doing. And I felt a little bit in my better judgment that I should keep my real feelings towards myself. And at the time, my real feelings were that I was unhappy and I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't know exactly. And I couldn't pinpoint exactly what was wrong with my current circumstance or situation at my work. I had great pay. I was working for start up company that was doing fairly well, but I was not feeling fulfilled. I didn't feel like the work I was doing was something I was passionate enough about or something I would want to invite other people to do. And that's something that was really important to me. So I had been unhappy in this work environment. I didn't know what I wanted to do and I was kind of just stuck for a while. Um, and nobody had told me at that time that I should uh figure out what I wanted. People told me that I should quit.

You should leave your job, you should find something new. Well, this is all great advice and I understand that that is something that you should do. But I don't know. Have you guys ever been in a situation where you feel stuck? You feel unmotivated to go on? I don't know if some of you, uh used to be there if some of you are feeling that right now, but there's a lot of anxiety that comes with that. It's, it's really challenging to, to step out of the space that you're stuck in because you can't see further than what you're doing right now. And so even though that advice was, I love that you guys have been there, done that. Um Even though the advice was understandable, I needed to figure out what I wanted to do before I figured out what the next step was gonna look like. And I wanna talk to you a little bit about how I did that. So, uh the first thing that's really important to figuring out whether you should quit or whether you should keep going is to figure out what your options are. And sometimes that's not super clear. So a piece of advice that I got that was excellent advice was to write out all of my options. So this doesn't mean what are your available options or what are the options that you, you could successfully accomplish based off of your current skills and experience?

No, these are your options that are infinite, that are limitless, that are not based off of your experience that are not always practical that are not based off of the career options or the next step from what you're already at. But it's really about the realm of possibilities and opening the doors. So I took a physical piece of paper and a physical pen. I know we're not into that. You can use an ipad and maybe like a magnet pen if you need to. Um And I wrote out all of the options that were interesting to me. So that included uh I was working in marketing and um account management at the time. So I wrote marketing manager, sales manager, teacher, lawyer, working for the UN event planner blog writer. I wrote all kinds of things down things that were feasible, things that were not feasible. And I, I, I really realized that there wasn't a lot of rhythm to the things that I wanted except for I really liked people apparently because a lot of the jobs that I was looking at involved some kind of interaction with other people. Um An important piece of advice that I can give is not to focus on the realm of what is reasonable, feasible or possible, but really what makes you spark inside? What makes you happy? Is it writing a book? Is it um helping Children? Is it volunteering?

Think about the things that really excite you, you would be happy to wake up in the morning to do it and you would be happy to work overtime, honestly. Um The second piece to this is something that I learned about called uh Ikigai. Have any of you ever heard of it? You can write in the comments if you have or not, but it's a concept that I came across probably way too late. Um And this concept is a Japanese concept and it's really focused on the discovery of your direction. So uh Icky is to live and guy is reason. So it's kind of like your reason to live for your fulfillment, your purpose and your purpose is often at the center of what you love. Um What you are good at what you have the skills uh to do and what the world needs, what you can be paid for right there. They are practicalities that belong hand in hand with excitement and purpose and separating those pieces and differentiating between those pieces is really important. So for example, if you love to write, that's something that you love to do. There are plenty of jobs that you can be paid to do it for, right? You can write blog posts, you can write articles, you can write copy for social media. There are plenty of different opportunities, but the focus is to compartmentalize each of those different pieces.

Um I, I realized in my journey that my purpose or, or what I believed was my purpose and what I love to do really didn't align in the industry that I was in, but it did kind of align for me in the job that I was working at. So to give you a little bit of background, I was um an account manager in marketing and I was working for a start up company and they were very exciting but just not something I felt purposeful or uh enthused about selling, right? Um or, or helping people market. And now in my current life cycle, I run APR and marketing firm and I still manage accounts, right? I manage clients, I manage people. But what I'm doing is working with companies that I believe in companies that I think have purpose companies that I wanna see grow. And there's a huge difference in my inter feeling of commitment and um fulfillment from working with these companies because I choose, I choose who I work with and I choose what I do. And at the time when I was stuck, I didn't know that I didn't see it. I had no way of knowing. And I wish I had somebody to kind of give me these practical pieces of guidance to help me sort of find that out. So take a screenshot if you haven't already, but definitely look up I a guy, it's very, very helpful for just really solidifying tangible practicalities. The second step and a great piece of, of um tangible usable information is defining your ideal job.

Now, this is something that I think I misunderstood throughout my process. So I mentioned to you that a lot of people were asking me what I wanted to do and we kind of always get that question throughout our life, right? So when we graduate from university, even before people are always asking us what we want to do, well, how do you know there are so many jobs and especially nowadays, you can be paid to do anything. There are a number of jobs, job descriptions don't even match their titles anymore, right? So how do you know what you really want to do? Uh a really practical and, and um kind of reasonable piece of advice that I could give is to define your ideal job, not by a description or by a title, but actually by a specific core elements of what you will be doing. So I've listed these out, right? What is your level of responsibility? What industry are you in? What is your job function, your compensation, your benefits, what does your company culture look like? Um For me, when I was writing this out, I I started to understand that it was really important for me to have autonomy uh to um to understand that I had a strategic space in the company to be able to make decisions with other people, to work in a team, but also work autonomously on my own.

Um There were really core elements of, of things that I wanted in my job and I didn't know exactly how to define them against a job title. I just knew there were things that were important to me. I would really encourage you to write those things down. Um, don't limit yourself again by, this will be a theme throughout. Don't limit yourself by what's available to you and don't limit yourself by what your friends do. Don't limit yourself by what your parents tell you. Don't limit yourself by what that people around you are doing.

Just really try to understand yourself and try to give yourself the time and the space to be able to make decisions based off of things that, that, that really you're excited about. Um So again, these are things that work for me. I know that they may not be for everyone by everyone but and try it out and, and you never, you never really know. Uh I think so kind of going back to my journey when I was uh at the company for about four years, moved around 2018. I made a determination that I was unhappy. I made a determination that I wanted to do something different. I wanted to um to, to try something new, but there were really practical barriers to doing this, right? So I, I actually interviewed for other companies, I've gotten other jobs.

Um and I had been rejected from many, many jobs that I thought, were it, you know, like I thought, ok, if I get this job, this is it, this is definitely what I want to do. And of course I didn't get those jobs, um, which today I'm grateful for. Uh, but one of the things that you really want to think about is the practical barriers to entry for your next step. So for me, I decided then that I was going to quit my job and I was going to take time for myself. I've been working since I was 16 years old. I had been nonstop. I was part time when I was in high school, I went full time when I was in university, I was volunteering, I was doing all kinds of things that were supposed to do to gain experience and to network. But I needed time for myself. And honestly, that's, that's a necessary piece of, of information that nobody really tells you that you should take time for yourself. Now, there are a lot of spaces where we talk about mental health. But um at the time, nobody was really telling me that that you should take time to figure yourself out. You should have self discovery periods. Um But there are again practical barriers to this.

So when I, I was going to quit my job, I knew I wanted to travel, I needed money to do that. And so what I did is I stayed at the company. I worked. I made a very specific goal for myself about how much money I wanted to make. And I wrote that down on a piece of paper. I hung it up next to my desk so that I was looking at it every day and I saved that exact amount of money so that I could comfortably. But my job travel and be able to sustain myself through a period of time of travel and then also through a period of time where I was going to need to uh find a new job, right. So again, not just looking at the world as uh anything can happen, but really taking the steps that you need to take to uh remove the barriers to entry. Um And just to kind of give you guys a little bit of motivation, everybody had told me that it was a horrible idea to quit my job and to not have anything lined up.

Every single person that really loved me and wanted the best for me told me that most people aren't gonna be interested in hiring me anymore that I wasn't in a skill level where I could get to the next step. Um Companies would be turned off by the fact that I left for no reason and I was determined to be happy at the end of the day, I wasn't determined to prove them wrong. I wasn't determined to, um you know, put it in their faces. I was just determined to figure it out and if you are determined to figure it out, then you can figure out where and, and how to overcome the barriers. Um I spent six months traveling, I traveled all over uh Europe, the Middle East. So I went to um Russia, Italy, um Egypt, I went to London. Uh and at one point I was planning to go to South America and I was with my best friend and we were in the airport in London and uh I remember the flight attendant that was taking our luggage told me I'm so sorry, I can't let you on this flight and I didn't understand. I, I was like, what do you mean? You can't let me on this flight.

We have tickets, we booked these tickets out six months ago and it turned out there was something wrong with, um, with the tickets and there was no way he could let us on and I called the airlines. I was trying to get things fixed and in the end there was literally nothing I could do. And I was stuck, I was stuck in London of all places which in case you didn't hear I'm still here now. But um, when I got stuck in London, I thought it was the worst thing that could ever happen to me because I didn't like it. I didn't want to be here. I, I had a plan, I wanted to go to South America I was excited for this. I had all of these expectations of life, right? And what I learned from this experience as well as many others is that oftentimes a lot of these things that we feel are the the end all be all for us, right? The things that we want the most, the things that are going to be the most exciting that we're gonna love are not actually the things that are gonna fulfill us and there are opportunities that open up and doors that open up. Um for us when, when everything else fails. Um Oh Paula, I can't wait to go to Colombia. And when I do, I will let you know, I definitely am still gonna come to South America.

Um But, but I wanted to share a little bit of that because I think something that is important is to take time to marvel at the world to have experiences in which you are stuck in uncertainty that you become familiar with. Fear that you work through all of these emotions that are consistently considered negative emotions that are really not, they're just spaces that were not often feel uncomfortable. And as soon as we feel uncomfortable, we kind of move away from it, the comfort and the security and finding ways to put yourself in that space of uncomfort discomfort. Fear is great because it allows you to hold on to the expectation and the notion that things can always get better even when they're horrible. Um, the kind of last piece that I'll bring out are, are two, focuses that I, I would say, are really important to defining your next step and to consider whether or not to persevere or to quit. Right. It's at a time where you recognize if your values align with what you're doing, your core values are fundamental to your fulfillment. If you feel that you are, um, the type of person that needs to uh give back, you don't necessarily have to go volunteer to do that.

You don't have to um work for a nonprofit organization. You don't have to uh not make any money. There are a lot of ways where your core values can align with um the work you're doing, especially technology, you can work on um on diversifying candidates, right? In recruiting to tech companies that are primarily male, right? You can work in the space of um artificial intelligence and ensure that decisions are being made where there is equal opportunity. There are a lot of spaces that you can um work in that are not necessarily the do good spaces that we think of. And I would also argue that a lot of these do good spaces in the nonprofit world in the um organizations that we consider the the good organizations also come with a lot of bureaucracy and red tape. So don't limit yourself and feel like doing good is only working in those spaces. It's, it's really not. Um, and then lastly people that love you will try to tell you a lot of things. They're gonna try to push their, their safe ways on to you. They're going to try to, um, to share with you what they feel is best for you and what's safest for you because ultimately they love you and they care about you.

But at the end of the day, you have to take the advice from the people that are doing what you want to do and it's ok to love somebody and to know that they love you and to appreciate them and to also know that their choice or path is not the one for you. It's ok to have friends that tell you no and still do it anyway. It's ok to have parents that care about you and love you and tell you that you're making a bad decision. These are all things that are ok. What you have to do is find the right and the best decisions for you. Um Finally, if you're interested in starting a business, I would give you a couple of pieces of advice to having done it myself in a brand new country. Um I would say that if you're going into starting a business to make money, probably not the best decision because it's very likely that in the beginning of, of starting a business, you're gonna find you don't make a lot of money. The second piece of kind of practical advice I would say is uh start from your own network. So if you are selling a product or service and you have a network of people who would be interested in it, work from your own network. People that already know you. And then at the end of every conversation, you have ask them for a recommendation of who you should speak to next. Even if you only talk to five people, you'll have another five people at the end of those conversations, right?

So again, just trying to give you practical advice on things that you can do. And um one thing that I wish somebody had told me, well, I guess a couple of people had told me is that it's not gonna be perfect and you're not gonna be able to make it perfect. So don't worry about perfection. Uh Things are going to alter before they, they kind of are pushed through. Um, you're gonna feel a lot of the time like maybe an impostor, I definitely did. Um And maybe you won't and that's great. But at the end of the day, don't stop because you think that it's not good enough, you have everything that it takes to be successful. So my advice, make the best decisions for you. Take practical steps if that's what you need, don't take it if you don't. And at the end of the day know that if you are committed to finding a way to make it work. You definitely will. Um Thank you all for joining. I hope this was helpful, useful. I hope you found information that you could take away. Um If you did I, I hope you leave it in the comments. I hope you let me know. Also please add me on linkedin. Please add me in any space. Um Message me. I love seeing your comments. I love 30 minutes away from London.

Oh, Marian definitely messaged me. Let's talk since you're living very close to London. Um I quit my job 10 days before Christmas in a pandemic year. Yeah, let me tell you. I understand that. I really love that. I think you guys have everything it takes. If you need motivation and support, I will be your motivation and support for you. Um But good luck in everything that you do. I'm happy to connect with all of you and I wish you the best in your journey here and later on.