Figure out what you don't want to do first.

Doing what you love starts with knowing how to say 'No'.

No!

There, I said it.

It’s hard for me to say “No” because I’ll say “Yes” to just about anything. Just ask my Ph.D. adviser. “Most of my students have a hard time coming up with one bankable dissertation topic,” he told me one day. “You come up with a good one every couple of weeks.”

That’s faint praise, for sure. But he’s right. I can’t say “No”.

Yet being able to say “No” is a crucial first step in reinventing yourself.

When I decided to go back to graduate school, I was not looking to get a leg up in my career. I had pretty much topped out. It wasn’t a bad place; in fact, I was where a lot of people wanted to be. I was confident I could do it long time.

But deep down, in the place where you can’t help but be honest with yourself, I knew I wasn’t happy. If we think of a balanced life as one where you have to make deposits into your soul to be able to make withdrawals later on, I was leveraged to the hilt. Something had to change.

So, I said “No”.

At first, it was “No” to an equity offer which required me to take a loan from the company I wanted buy into just so that I could buy into it. Maybe it was a good deal, but it didn’t make sense to me at the time, and it still doesn’t.

This was a big deal. I wanted to own a PR company, and I had just turned down an opportunity to do the one thing I went to that company to do. I know, smart, right?

But this decision to say “No” to one aspect of life forced me to scrutinize other aspects about my career trajectory. If I wasn’t going to own a piece of the action, then what was I doing there? It was a completely salient question.

I said “No” to other things as well, like being gaslighted, to the recurring cycle of being agency poster child one day and pariah the next, to refereeing the sibling rivalries in the office, to kissing the asses of horrible human beings just because they were clients attached to fat monthly retainers.

Suddenly, there was more clarity about what I wanted to do by knowing what I didn’t want to do. Getting to this point really helped me fully embrace my move to academia.

Being a scholar and a teacher made more deposits into my soul than they took back. And it’s paying off.

For the first time in awhile I’ve noticed how much more comfortable I am in my own skin. I was driving to work MSU this week and it dawned on me: I am a professor, at a really good university; this is what I do, and it feels right. That falls under the “priceless” category of the old Mastercard commercials.

I couldn’t get to that epiphany without the “No”.

At some level my experience flies in the face of much of the free career advice floating around social media.

We are constantly bombarded with messages assuring us we can have everything we want. We can make six figures working only 5 hours a week. We can build the next unicorn startup and maintain work-life balance at the same time. Here’s a pro tip: you can’t.

And this is what I tell others who call me thinking I’ve discovered the secret sauce to a new career: You will need to say “No” to a lot more things than you say “Yes” to.

It’s hard. You won’t like it at times. People will get mad at you. You will be full of second guesses (This is why I always say “Yes” because I don’t want to face those things.) But you can’t get to where you need to be by saying “Yes” all the time.

“No” helps us make sense of who we are, and what matters to us by showing us who we are not.

I believe we shy away from the “No” because we think a negative action. But we need to avoid seeing it as a value judgement. It is just one possible outcome of the “Yes”/“No” disjunctive. And it’s a powerful discernment tool we often overlook.

Please don’t think I’ve got this figured out. I still say “Yes” way too often. I am very much a work in progress, even at 58. But for the first time in a long time I feel like I am making progress again in a career that is fulfilling to me and others.

I’m not going to lie. My journey has been hard. And it will be hard for you if you decide to say “No”. I’ve had to face aspects about my life and personality I would rather ignore. That’s just part of continuing to grow up.

But I would make the same decision to say “No” that I did a few years ago knowing now that the path leads to a much better place.

Reinvention is possible at any age. I am proof of that.