So let’s say you’ve made the decision to leave academia, and now you need to start poking around for a whole new career. Or you’ve realized you love academia, you just hate this particular university, and you need to look for other jobs to apply to. Or you love your institution, but you’d like to move into administration.

In other words, for whatever reason, you now have to gird your loins and put together … a job application package.

Here’s what happens next for most of us (and yes, I happen to resemble these remarks).

“Oh my god, I have to explain to someone else why I want this job.”

“Why do I want this job again? This is too much work. Where I am isn’t that bad.”

“Who am I to think I could get a better job?”

“No one’s going to hire me anyway — I’m both overqualified and underqualified and this is just doomed.”

“Am I really qualified for this? I’m not qualified for this. Why would someone hire me for this when they could hire X?”

And the next thing that happens is that we’re somewhere — anywhere! — other than sitting in front of that particular computer file or piece of paper.

It’s not you

Putting together a job application package, especially when you’re trying to change careers, is not just a simple, concrete, measurable task, however neat and precise the @nextsteps are in your GTD planner.

Tasks like this have enormous, weighty, complicated emotional tasks attached to them, and those emotional tasks get in the way of the practical next steps.

There’s grief attached. Fear. Confusion. The stumbles of being new and learning a new language, even enough to apply to something. And most of all, the shift of identity.

It’s really fucking hard to portray yourself as the perfect museum curator / frog handler / graphic novel editor when, inside, a little voice is saying, “but really, we’re a historian / biologist / literary scholar.”

And getting from point A (academic identity) to point B (shiny new identity) is also really difficult.

And the combination of hard — the fear, the grief, the identity work — just sits there in the way, putting lie to any attempt to tell yourself that “it’s just not that hard, dammit,” or “just do it.”

Let’s experiment

If it were your best friend in this situation, what would you do? You’d probably give him a hug, make her a cup of tea, fold yourself into the corner of the coffee shop and let him vent and rage and stomp his feet, tell her of COURSE this is hard! Look what you’re doing!

In other words, let’s try being compassionate. To you. Right now.

What do you need in order to feel centered about this shift in your life? What do you need in order to feel secure and comforted even though this is scary and hard and intimidating? What do you need to express about this whole mess so that you aren’t exploding from all of the held-in emotions? What do you need to hear in order to move through the fear and the anticipation and the uncertainty?

Get a hug from someone who loves you. Spend fifteen minutes visualizing success. Play desperately sad music and cry along. Go for a long run. Turn the music up and dance like a fool. Write a nasty letter to academia. Write a love letter to the life you’re walking towards. Make yourself a cup of tea. Hell, make yourself a chocolate cake!

But however you do it, acknowledge that this is hard. Acknowledge that telling yourself to just get a grip and do it isn’t likely to work. Acknowledge that there’s emotional stuff that needs attention, and then give it some compassionate attention.

And then notice how much easier (not easy, just easier) it is to sit down and work on that application that has the potential to jump start the next phase of your fabulous life.

(And in case you missed it, I’m doing a free teleclass on Wednesday about how to work through the issues specific to leaving academia in job applications. You can read more and sign up here.)

There are lots of reasons why people who are unhappy in academia think they can’t jump. Lots of them are emotional (“but this is what I do!” “but I’ve worked so hard for this!” “What will my advisor think?”), but some of them are decidedly practical. Or so they seem.

Two of the most common practical reasons I hear are these: anything they would want to do would require either more schooling or it would require starting at the bottom.

So let’s take a look at that first one.

I have to admit that, after years and years of education, not to mention the debt and the lost wages, more schooling is hardly appealing. (Did I ever tell you about the time, late in my graduate school career, that I filled out a credit card application that asked how many years of schooling I’d had and I had to write 23? 23?!)

But there aren’t, actually, that many careers that require a professional to completely retool with a whole new round of degrees. In fact, I can only think of a handful: accountant, medical doctor (and all the variations thereof), therapist, lawyer — basically anything that requires a license. It’s true that these cover the vast majority of “aspirational” jobs, the ones you get special pats on the head for, but as we academics well know, those aren’t always all they’re cracked up to be.

And there are more — far more — jobs that require no licensure whatsoever, and because they require no licensure are both more flexible and more interesting because more flexible.

Artist. Writer. Policy analyst. Curator. Stock market commentator. Filmmaker. Human resources expert. Event planner. Researcher. They all require expertise, but not necessarily a degree. And if you’re interested in them, chances are you’re working on that expertise as we speak.

But as exhausting as more school sounds to most of us, I’d bet hard money that, at base, the real problem with more school is that it’s about starting over — at the bottom.

So let’s talk about that career ladder.

One of the myths of careers is that there’s only one way in to anything. Now, there may well be a standard way in, but given that there are tens of millions of job holders in this country alone, do you really think they all happened in standard ways, by starting at the bottom of the proverbial ladder and working their way up?

The standard ways in are meant for people who set their sights on a particular career from the beginning and went for it. Those standard ways provide a path, a set of guideposts, to help people get from here to there, and part of what they do is train people in the kind of professionalism college can’t convey.

You know, things like showing up on time, wearing clothes that don’t smell funny and don’t have cartoons on them, using Standard Written English in professional emails and documents, finding a tone that isn’t entirely impersonal but neither is it colloquial, meeting deadlines…. The list can go on and on.

But you’re not standard, and you’re not an overeducated equivalent to some 21 year old who can’t figure out that “because my family has a ski trip!” won’t excuse her from actual responsibilities. You’ve got this fabulous degree (which testifies to all kinds of advanced skills) and all of this specialized knowledge and all of this professional experience. And that means you won’t be starting at the bottom.

When I jumped ship, for instance, I jumped into grant writing. I had little to no experience in it, but I had excellent writing and organizational skills (proven not just in my job materials but in programs I had organized and run).

I didn’t start out managing the files of potential and current grants, keeping tabs on deadlines and writing first drafts of reports to be fixed by someone else. No, that was the job of a lovely young woman fresh out of college who still needed to figure out that she had to plan for the metro to be late rather than coming up with creative excuses for her tardiness — again.

I got to start out writing grant applications and doing final drafts of reports, managing the whole process and creating systems to make all of our different deadlines run smoothly. Because let’s face it. After eleven years of running my own classrooms and writing a dissertation, I didn’t have to prove that I could work independently or manage projects.

Now, the idea of grantwriting may make you want to pluck your eyeballs out with forks, but the point is not that you should be in grantwriting. The point is that you have, by dint of earning a PhD, lots of transferrable skills that will get you in somewhere closer to the middle if you enter a new career. There will still be lots of things you need to learn — hey, it’s a new career, after all! — and you’ll likely end up working for people who are younger than you are, but it won’t be filing and making copies and doing only the dirty work. And you’ll probably advance a lot faster than the people around you as well, as all of those years of focused learning help you … learn this new career efficiently and effectively.

There are many, many reasons I’d tell you to stay in academia. (If, for instance, you adored teaching and just couldn’t stand your colleagues or your institution.) But the fear of starting at the bottom is not one of them.