Why I Quit My Job
I had been thinking of starting my own agency for many years and found myself listening to strategies that I could take to start my own agency. Well, it appears that I have ignored all the advice given. But why? It goes like this: my wife wants to be a stay-at-home mother. She has wanted to do this since we got married 10 years ago, and I wanted to help make that happen.
Let’s take a look at everything that brought me to this point.
When we got married, I was in graduate school finishing my last semester of a Master’s in Social Work. I was going to become a therapist. It also happened to be 2008, which was at the height of the real estate recession. The economy was horrible and there were very few jobs available for mental health professionals. My wife, on the other hand, had a great job. After I struggled through a frustrating job, we decided that I would become a stay-at-home parent for the time being.
Let me fill in here that when I married my wife, she had two children, ages 3 and almost 2. Within that first year, we had our first child together. The birth of this third child is what sealed the deal for becoming a stay-at-home parent, because he was born with some birth defects. He required a great deal of attention. Instead of ruining a good thing, my wife kept her job and I became an overqualified stay-at-home dad. But truly nothing prepares you for being a parent.
The Beginning of a Career in Therapy
Enough of the flashbacks and back to the more recent past. My wife has continued to want to be a stay-at-home parent. After the kids were all in school and my son’s health problems leveled out, I went back into the workforce and eventually found work as a therapist, which I love doing. To which you might be asking, ‘why did you quit your job then?’ I’m getting there.
I have seen the wages for therapists in agencies first hand – they’re not great. In order to make it comfortable for my wife to quit her job, I realized that I was going to need to make more money if I wanted this to become a reality. Okay, here comes another tangent.
While at work one day, I spoke with my then-boss who is very in tune with energy and spirituality. She mentioned during a discussion with me on one occasion that I had a barrier between me and my inspiration; this being, for me, God. This statement got me thinking.
I believe myself to be a spiritual, religious person. I have some religious education and have thought on many occasions deeply about my faith. I believed I was connected to some degree with my God and with inspiration – but perhaps not as much as I had thought. So I took her observation as a challenge to become more spiritually guided.
I did not take this time to seek out a psychic or witch-doctor, because I am very grounded in my beliefs. (Caveat: for those that use psychics and/or witch-doctors for your guidance, that’s great. It is just not my preferred method.) I decided to work on removing “the barrier” between me and my God. I’m going to omit the details of this process because they are more precious and meaningful to me than I can appropriately convey in this context. During this process, I received some inspiration.
Here is where things begin to go against conventional sense. I realized I needed a new job. So, I started looking for the same work but more pay and more opportunity for upward movement. It is a tough world out there for qualified mental health professionals and many agencies would love to build their business on the back of a provider’s NPI number, without compensating the provider appropriately for the risk. (Okay enough of that rant – but this is part of what was informing my thought process.)
I was being led toward something, but I was not exactly sure what it was yet. I thought that maybe I would be starting my own agency and I developed tons of ideas – but I had not properly prepared for that kind of leap. I guess that is a takeaway from this experience: be prepared, because sometimes you need to leap. Along the way, I also got some inspiration to develop myself as an internet personality. This is when the stars began to align.
The Path to Understanding Anxiety
Over the last three years, I have been developing a model for understanding anxiety. This model helps people to understand why they are having anxiety and how they can manage their anxieties. It has become more obvious to me that I must develop this content for distribution across different types of media. One of them is through the internet.
This particular model uses insecurity as a foundation of where anxiety stems – being faced with my insecurities. I must confront my appearance, my voice, my hand movements, the positioning of my mustache. These are things that I previously ignored and avoided confronting. I knew they were there, but they were being mitigated by not needing to directly interface with them. But now as I begin to develop web content, I am confronted with my insecurities. This is not bad, though, because I have often held the premise that I would not ask my clients to do anything I was not willing to do myself. Let me add here that it does not help when others tell you that the task I was undertaking was really difficult: “build an agency … it’s so hard and expensive. Why would you do that … no one wants to listen to that stuff.” Frustrating.
I quit my job because I felt compelled to create a product that others can use to overcome their anxiety and I believe that it has value. In fact, I believe that it has enough value to potentially fund the establishment of an agency that is founded on the principle of building a community of support. At least that’s where I’m going at this time. But who knows – God may turn me in a new direction. I just have to be prepared to leap and keep the barrier vacant between me and God. All in all, I quit my job so that my wife will have the opportunity to come home. How that happens exactly I don’t know, but God knows!
Therapy and Anxiety Support in Las Vegas
If you’re in need of therapy or help with learning to navigate the path of anxiety and/or depression, I’d love to hear from you and we can figure it out together. Let’s talk about your story. Call me today for an appointment, 702-682-6080. I have immediate openings – I can’t wait to support you through Headway inSight.
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