Surviving Your Quarter Life Crisis: Step 12

Step 12: Commit to Staying on Your Career Change Path

All of the soul-searching, planning and executing you’ve been doing over the last few months is paying off.

You’re on your way to a gratifying, fulfilling new career—and annihilating that annoying quarter-life crisis in the process.

There’s one final step in this transformation, however: committing to staying on this career change path.

This should be a no-brainer, right? After putting in so much hard work, tossing it all away doesn’t make sense—even if you stumble slightly or don’t feel like these changes have made a difference.

Having patience can be tough especially when the forward motion is incremental.

That’s why it’s better to look at these changes from a long-term view, as we talked about in step #9: “If things don’t start happening as quickly as you’d like (or think they should), that’s okay—results don’t happen overnight.”

Revisit your path every few months—maybe every three months initially, and then every six months or so after that. Progress might not be visible from week to week, but you should be able to see positive momentum over time.

To keep perspective, it also helps if you have a support system in place. Call it a network of accountability: a core group of friends, family, past co-workers and/or mentors you can count on to keep you focused and motivated.

Not only can this network verify that yes, you are going in the right direction—but it can also be your sounding board when times are tough.

And where big life changes are concerned, the best advice comes from people who know you best.

They won’t sugarcoat things or simply tell you what you want to hear; in fact, they’ll challenge you to live up to your potential and not give up when times are tough.

No matter what happens, keep in mind that you’re not alone. Everyone is either currently going through or has previously dealt with a quarter-life crisis.

And career changes—even drastic ones—are way more common than you think. You’ll navigate this period of your life and triumphantly emerge as a happier, more successful person.

If you’ve found these quarter-life crisis survival tips helpful, we’d love to hear from you. Shoot us a note on Twitter or email us to let us know your thoughts. If you want to review the steps again, start with step 1. And share the hell out of anything that you think could help others. Thanks for reading.