Are you choosing to be underpaid and overworked? Maybe not consciously, but you are staying put at a job that doesn’t value you. Times have changed, being loyal to the same company that’s exploiting you isn’t going to give you the career growth you deserve. 

I know you want bigger and better things for your career, you just don’t know what to do about it. Which is exactly why I’m going to share the secret to career growth – pivoting. 

In this week’s episode, we’re talking about why a career pivot is not a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have priority. Pivoting in my career is why I went from earning six figures working at a doomed company to running my own multi-million dollar coaching business. Four years ago, I took a leap of faith and embraced a new change in my life. And now I’m going to teach you everything I learned so that you can too. 

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http://www.theerikacruz.com

How to work with Erika:
Enroll in the Courage Driven Latina program now!

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Podcast production for this episode was provided by CCST.

Episode Transcript:

Erika: Hello, hello! Welcome to this week’s episode of Chingona Revolution podcast. This week we are talking all about why pivots cannot wait. We’re talking about how change is inevitable, especially when it comes to your career. I’m excited to talk about this because I think a lot of our podcasts have been focused on personal growth, on entrepreneurship, on starting the thing that you’ve been wanting to start.

But your career is one of the biggest projects you will work on. Even if your ultimate goal is to start a business, we’re typically using our career as a stepping stone to get there as an avenue to entrepreneurship. It’s also just something that we spend a lot of time. Doing and thinking about we spend a lot of time at work and it’s not just the physical time we spend there if you are in an office or even if you’re virtual right, but all of the Thinking time around your career all of the okay Well, what is my next step in my career all of those different thoughts?

It takes up so much time So in this episode we are going to talk about Why career pivots aren’t a nice to have. They are necessary. Career pivots are inevitable in today’s society. We’re going to talk about how you can leverage your career to help you get to your life goals. And if you have business goals, how to help it get to your business goals as well.

We are going to talk about what happens when you don’t allow yourself to change. So kind of the negative, um, consequences from resisting change. I’m going to share a little bit about my story. I’m going to talk about just a few different examples of clients inside of Courage Driven Latina who have worked on their career from setting boundaries to negotiating their salary, to leaving the job, how to decide, um, from pivoting industries.

And, um, we’ll see what else comes out during this episode. But before we get into this, I wanted to remind you that the doors for Courage Driven Latina are open and they are about to close. The doors are closing on August 7th. So if you’ve been eyeing this program, if you’ve been wanting to make a pivot in your life, in your career, in your business, or if you’ve been wanting to start something new, this is the program for you.

Courage Driven Athena is a 12 month group coaching program that helps you take action on your courage project. Your courage project could be building confidence, your career. You could be starting or growing a business and you do it alongside of a community of supportive badass women who are also working on courage projects.

Do not wait until 2025. Do not wait until, Oh my gosh, the next Monday. Now is the time. What you do now is prepping you for the next year. There is no better time to start than now. What is that quote? It’s like the best time to start was when you first had the idea. The second best time is now and we can’t go back in time, right?

So don’t let another year go by without taking action towards something that feels fulfilling to you. All right. So let’s get into today’s episode. Again, it’s specifically around careerand a lot of the coaching that takes place inside of Courage Driven Latina is actually around careers and actually around their jobs, even if they are working on a courage project that’s like content creation or a courage project that’s on building their confidence. A lot of times career is so embedded in there that we end up coaching a lot around, around career.

So let’s first talk about why retiring from one job is no longer a thing. And if you have immigrant parents or just parents who are baby boomers, or maybe a little older than you, then you are probably used to your parents, uh, talking about having one job. one job that they retire from. Maybe your parents retired from a job.

Um, I know that my parents wanted me to graduate college, find a stable job and then retire from there. Oh, especially if you are in a job that has some type of pension, right? Like education or some of my family members are in construction. So there’s definitely Yeah. an incentive to stay a certain amount of time because at the end you get this pension or if you find yourself working in the tech industry and maybe have some stocks we call those in the tech industry the golden handcuffs because it’s like oh I don’t want to leave because you know I have this stock and it could end up turning into large sum of money that can be totally life changing and there’s so much narrative, especially if you come from, again, immigrant parents or just older parents of staying in a job for a long time.

So something about job loyalty is so embedded in us culturally in this generation. And mind you, people of all different ages listen to this podcast, but if you’re listening to this podcast, then you probably fall into this bucket where you’re questioning that narrative of, am I really supposed to stay in a job forever?

And that is Not it anymore. With the advancement of technology, there’s jobs that exist now that did not exist two, three years ago, and the jobs that are going to exist in five years don’t exist yet because technology is changing the way that we work. It’s changing the demand of different jobs. It is shifting so much.

And with the amount of layoffs that we’ve had, especially in the tech industry, which I used to work in tech, which is why I’m a little bit more familiar with that. But there’s been layoffs in so many different industries because of these shifts in jobs. And yet we’re told like, Oh, be loyal to a yet we could be out of a job tomorrow.

So that thought pattern. is outdated. It is no longer relevant. You are not supposed to stay in the same job forever. Obviously there are some exceptions. Like I have a cousin who is actually encouraged driven Latina and she’s an educational counselor and she’s now tenured. So when you become a tenured counselor or professor, it is actually really hard for you to be Late to be laid off your job is pretty secure Contractually, I mean you really have to do some messed up stuff in order to get yourself fired But even with that type of job, I mean my cousin is Traveling in the summers picking up different hobbies.

Like even though that one thing is pretty stable She’s still going to go through shifts in her career, right? The way that Um, like the type of topics that she teaches in her, in her classes are going to change the type of students that come in are going to change. Like even within that same job, there will be changes and she will probably have to embrace those changes and allow herself to evolve.

So let’s talk a little bit more about how change is inevitable. There was a job, so I’m from the Bay Area, so I am currently located in Northern California. We have, uh, I’m about 45 minutes from San Francisco and there is a bridge connecting my side of the Bay to San Francisco, which is called the Bay Bridge.

And during the pandemic, so actually let me go back. So the Bay Bridge would always have traffic because there was these little toll booths and there was people collecting money there. And you’d have to pay a toll. I think it was like six or 7 at that time, uh, to cross the bridge. And there was people who worked in these tolls.

And you could, there’s something called fast track, which is a membership type thing that sits in your car and it scans when you cross the bridge. So you’re just billed for it monthly rather than having to stop. But not everybody had fast track because not everybody crosses the bridge on a daily basis.

Like I didn’t cross the bridge on a daily basis, but. The point is that these folks who worked in the toll booth probably thought, Oh my gosh, I have a job that is so secure. I work for the government. Everybody’s going to have to, people are going to always cross the bridge. I’m never going to run out of a job.

And suddenly boom, the pandemic hit and the pandemic ended up requiring companies and government to advance so much technologically because we could no longer rely on in person things because of the pandemic. So these people’s jobs were eliminated. And they probably thought they had the most secure job in the world, because yeah, of course people are going to always cross the bridge.

And if it wasn’t for the pandemic, this technological shift probably wouldn’t have happened, and these people would have still had a job. But now they don’t. And now you drive through the polls, and there’s still the little booth there where the people were, but nobody is in there. And it’s crazy, now it’s been four, over four years, we’re almost going on five years since these folks had a job.

So change is inevitable. We never know what is going to happen. I remember when I was working in the tech industry and I decided that I was going to, so actually if you don’t know my story, I, Graduated from college, started working in the tech industry, and I moved around to a bunch of different companies.

I also had a few different jobs while I was in the tech industry. I worked in sales and then partnerships and then marketing and then product and then back to marketing, which technically what I do now is all marketing, right? Content creation, podcasting, this is all a form of marketing. And I remember when I decided that I was going to go all in on my coaching business.

This was at the end of 2020 and I talked to my mom about it and my mom was so concerned for my sanity. And she says, you have such a stable job. They allow you to work from home. You’re getting paid really well. You’re allowed to travel. Well, not right now because it’s the pandemic, but typically you’re traveling.

Like, why would you leave? Ultimately she ended up Supporting my decision, not understanding my decision, but she ended up supporting my decision. And I recommend you check out the episode that I have with my mom because I did interview her. Uh, it’s a mostly in Spanish, but I do translate everything that we talk about and she shares her perspective, but anyway, she ends up supporting me.

And I would say about a year after I left, I was talking to a former coworker and we were just kind of catching up and she was like, oh, I forgot to tell you. The company that we worked for doesn’t exist anymore. I was like, what? She was like, yeah, it does not exist anymore. So pretty much it went under and I was sitting there in this moment of, wow, had I not acted on my intuition and had I stayed at this company and ignored this hunch to go follow my calling and start this business, I wouldn’t have had a business and then I wouldn’t have had a job.

And the thing is that nothing is promised. Nothing is guaranteed, right? And this episode is not about leaving your job. No, no, no. Cause every situation is different, but I just think it’s, a great example of how we no longer are retiring from one job because jobs aren’t even lasting a lifetime anymore.

And I, as much as these job shifts has have happened very quickly, I think they will continue to happen in the future. Faster and faster and faster. I mean, even with chat GPT, right? Like sometimes I use chat GPT to review my podcast scripts or my podcast outlines, and it’ll give me additional ideas. And do I think it’s going to replace humans?

No, not at all. But I do think it’s going to shift the way that We work and again, work is such a fundamental part of us. And I do want to share a quick example of when you resist change. So I just shared a personal example, right? Had I resisted that change, I would have been without a job and I would have been without a business.

But if you know the story of Blockbuster video, and if you’re young, you’re probably like what the heck is Blockbuster, but Blockbuster is how we used to rent movies. So I was born in the 90s, and I remember as a kid, my dad would take my brother and I to go rent a movie, and we’d be so excited because we would go and look at all the, at this time they were like VHSs.

And then eventually DVDs, but you’d go into the store, pick the one you wanted and then take it home, rent it. And then you’d have to bring it back. So kind of like whenever you go to the library and you check out a book when you do it in person and Netflix came around and Netflix was like, Hey, we’re doing this a streaming service or we’re actually delivering first.

They started delivering DVDs to people’s homes and then they started doing the streaming. And they tried to partner with Blockbuster and Blockbuster was like, ha, yeah, right. No, like we’re just going to keep doing our thing. And Blockbuster decided Blockbuster and Hollywood video, they were like the two main people that you could rent videos from.

And they decided to not partner with Netflix. And so Netflix was like, okay. And this in the tech industry, we call it the innovators dilemma. So what happens is whenever you’re a pretty big company and you’re already making money, it’s really hard for you to innovate. Because you have to keep doing what’s working and what’s making you money.

So for Blockbuster and for Hollywood Video, for them, they were already making so much money doing what they were doing and they resisted the change of technological advances of first shipping out the videos and then eventually streaming them online. Well, within a few years. Netflix took over and blockbuster and Hollywood video all went out of business and the same thing happened with Kodak, who is the camera company and they were selling Polaroid.

So, like, it’s so funny that now Polaroids are a thing, but in the past, that was the only thing we have because we didn’t have digital cameras, but Kodak also resisted change. They did not want to move to digital. And then of course, digital cameras came about and then Kodak was just like, Not a thing anymore.

So when we resist change, we are making a decision, right? So sometimes we think, Oh, I’m just going to stay where I am and I’m not going to decide. But deciding to stay where you are is a decision. Not making an active choice is an active choice, right? So let’s say that you are in a job and you’re super unfulfilled.

And you’ve decided not to apply to other places, then you’ve chosen to stay where you are. Or let’s say that you’re in a job and you know you’re underpaid and you’re not choosing to negotiate your salary, you are choosing to stay underpaid. So not making the decision is a decision. And this is why pivots cannot wait.

They can’t wait because change is inevitable. It’s going to happen. So why not make the intentional choice that you want to make?

Erika: So if you don’t know my story, I left tech and I started. My business. The podcast didn’t come about until a couple of years ago, but I did have a pretty big TikTok following and I was obviously creating content on Instagram. I created Courage Driven Athea. That was the program that allowed me to leave my job.

So as of this month, courage driven Latina is officially four years old. I’m so excited about this program, not. I feel like I love this program more and more now because now I’m like, Oh, this works. Like I’ve seen so many people go through this program and I have an exam, a list of different courage projects that people have worked on specifically around career that I’m going to show you all.

But when I followed that career pivot for myself, I mean, y’all, I went from being In the tech industry to then becoming a yoga instructor and then becoming a coach like talk about pivots, right? Like i’ve pivoted so many times and not just me my clients as well Actually, I think maideli who is the support coach inside of courage driven atina is a perfect example When she was a student in courage driven atina, I think she was in the second or third group that I ever had She was a teacher And she was working in education and she knew that she didn’t want to be there forever, but she didn’t know what she wanted to do.

So she joined Courage Driven Latina. She wrote a children’s book. Isn’t that amazing? She wrote a children’s book and then was like, you know what? I actually don’t know if like, this is what I want to do. But she learned, she was always about financial freedom. Like she was always interested in it. And that’s where she learned that she wanted to be a money coach and now she is a money coach.

And she’s also a support coach inside of Courage Driven Latina. So she herself has pivoted so many times and she pivoted from being a teacher to a coach. The tech industry and she works now in learning and development in the tech industry, which is the perfect pivot, right? Like sometimes people think, Oh, I can’t, I can’t change from one industry to the other, but my daily is such a perfect example.

She was already working, educating people. That was her expertise. She just shifted industries and is now training people in the tech industry. And it is such. Like a little bridge job. It’s such a perfect transition. And the fact that she’s a support coach in Courage Driven Latina, she’s also teaching in here.

And this is a great example of how pivoting to different industries is so possible for you because all of the experience that you have is coming with you. And sometimes people are like, Oh, I already invested so much time in, in teaching, or I already invested so much time in being a lawyer. So like, What you’re going to keep investing the rest of your life.

Like if you already know you want something different, why don’t you take the experience you already have and go somewhere else.

I’m going to give you a few more examples of different career pivots and overall courage projects that people have worked on around their career. Because remember, even if you don’t want to be in your career forever, you are in your career now, and it can help you get to where it is that you want to go.

So, so far I’ve shared my career pivot from going from the tech industry to entrepreneurship. We talked about Maideli, who went from being a teacher to working in the tech industry and also being a coach. And then we have Lisa. Lisa has been on the podcast. She’s a current client inside of Courage Driven Latina.

She actually used to be a principal. And then she left the educational system because she wrote an incredible poetry book. We’re going to have to put that down below in the show notes if you want to check it out. And the, she’s like gone on book tours, she’s done little pop ups at different book events.

And recently we made the decision, well she made the decision, but we supported her through this Encouraged Driven Athena to go back to education. But the beautiful thing about this is that Lisa has gone back to education. as a totally different person. So she left education because she was completely burnt out.

She had given it her all through her courage project. we realized that this educational job gets to be what we call inside of Courage Driven Latina, her sugar daddy job. So we don’t do sugar daddies in real life. We do sugar daddy jobs. So what is a sugar daddy job? It is a job that’s allowing you to.

to do the thing that you love doing. It is providing you with the resources so that you can survive. So it’s providing you with funds, maybe healthcare, maybe additional benefits, but you know, it’s not your long term goal. It is nothing more than a stepping stone. And when you make the conscious decision that a job is going to be your sugar daddy job, the way you think about the job, changes.

You know that it’s just a stepping stone. That means you are better at setting boundaries. You don’t take things that personally, you’re not looking for fulfillment in that job because you’re working towards something bigger. So the next, this version of Lisa’s Courage Project is going back to work, but doing it in a way where it feels good for her 

 Rather than giving her job 150 percent of herself, she’s showing up and she’s giving exactly what I want. It is written on her job description. Nothing more. She’s leaving at the time she needs to leave and she’s ensuring that she is spending her time outside of work on her rather than thinking about work.

So this sugar daddy concept in Courage Driven Latina reminds us that one, we are not our jobs. Two, we are so much more than our jobs. And three, a job is nothing more than a job. They’re paying you to do your job, not to think about them outside of work. So if you want to stress about work, you do it when you are on the clock, you don’t do it when you are out with your family or working on your hobby.

And that job, again, is nothing more than resources for you to be able to do what you ultimately want to do. And we were actually I was actually coaching Lisa on a recent call and we were talking about how. Good. She’s getting at setting boundaries and disconnecting from work that she almost started to feel a little guilty.

And I was like, we just have Lisa 2. 0 here. So that’s an example of a courage project, going back to an industry that you left, but ensuring that you don’t burn out. We also supported somebody else. In, uh, really building the confidence around walking into salary negotiations. So this client was really underpaid.

She was an engineer. She, uh, came in as entry level, but she had been there for over a year. The company was growing a ton and she had not gotten a raise and she was still just really underpaid for her position, for her experience and for the amount of work that she was doing. And so much so it was affecting her on the weekends.

So for her, her courage project was building the confidence to show up as her worthy self at work and to ask for a raise during her salary negotiation. So her courage project consisted of documenting everything that she had done, documenting the following feedback, really working on her own identity. at work and finding evidence of how valuable she was at the job.

And we should, we did this for a few months leading up to her performance review, her annual review, so that she could then negotiate her salary. And sure enough, she did. She negotiated a nice. Upgrade in her salary and also just found so much more peace because she learned how to set boundaries. She learned how to speak up and she was still a great worker, right?

Like she wasn’t trying to go start something else. Her goal was to move up in the company, but to do it in a sustainable way. We also have supported other people who have left toxic work environments. So sometimes, uh, your courage project could literally be building the courage to leave. And a lot of times that requires maybe finding something else, because the best time to leave is when you have something else lined up, especially with career.

But there are situations where clients have been in really toxic situations. Like Sunken is a great example. She was on the podcast. She left not one, but two toxic work environments. and is about to complete her yoga certification. And now she’s taking on clients so that she could coach them in health and yoga and her career completely transformed.

Like she was working for the government and then working for another agency. And then now she’s a yoga instructor and it is, she’s just glowing. She really, she’s like sunken 2. 0 as well.

We also have Adelie. Adelie works in a lab. So she’s a PhD candidate. And she’s been working in a lab and she was also on the podcast and she used to spend so much extra time at work. She was not compensated for this. Uh, really like toxic boss, like control freak and her boss was really a micromanager. And it was affecting the way that she felt about herself. It was affecting her confidence. It was affecting her well being. It was even affecting her completing her thesis. I mean, all the different things. And when she joined Courage Driven Latina, we really worked on the way that she showed up at her lab.

Like, that was her courage project, how she showed up at work. And, um, I mean, I swear I really was like, it feels like she was in the matrix and suddenly had all this realization as to what was going on because it felt like from one day to another she completely shifted. She then ended up asking for two months off.

She was like, no, I can’t stay late. She started setting boundaries and because her boss needed her more than she needed the job, she was underpaid and overworked. And once she started speaking up for herself, everything changed. Everything changed.

So here’s what I want you to know. Your career is going to shift. Your career is going to evolve. Even if you stay in the same industry, even if you do the same kind of type of job, things are going to shift because change is inevitable. The times of staying at the same job forever, Have gone out of the window.

A company will lay you off in a second if they need to. What we really want you to do is be your biggest advocate when it comes to your career. Whether you want to move your way up the corporate ladder, whether you want to quit and shift to a different industry, whether you want to transition into entrepreneurship, or if you just want to get a pay raise so that you could really start investing in your retirement, whatever your goal is.

It has to be bigger than just staying at a job and being loyal to one company your entire life.

Inside of Courage Driven Latina, we help you identify what that goal is. We help you identify if you want to stay at your job, but just change the way you’re thinking about it. If you want to stay at your job and negotiate your salary, or if you want to apply for that promotion that you don’t feel like you’re quite ready for yet, or we’ll help you transition to a different industry.

If that’s what you’re looking for, we will help you. Figure out if your job is a sugar daddy job and we’ll help you create an exit plan. If you know that you want to leave, we’ll help you transition into entrepreneurship or to a different job. If that’s what you are looking for. When you join Courage Driven Latina, not only do you get access to all of these incredible stories that I just mentioned, because all of those people are still in Courage Driven Latina.

You get immediate access to the career path inside of the Courage Driven Latina course. These videos include setting boundaries and advocating for yourself at work, how to deal with layoff anxiety, how to know when it’s time to move on, as well as a collection of podcast episodes where I’ve interviewed clients on their career transitions, on their career shifts.

I know it can feel like you are stuck in your career, but you are not. There are so many options. Even if you know you don’t want to be in your career forever, there’s so much work that we can do to make it easy to be there right now. Oh my gosh, I forgot to mention one client. So I have one client. I’m not going to say her name just because I haven’t gotten her consent, but.

There’s a client, Encouraged Driven Latina, who joined, she, um, is a lawyer, she’d been working for a company, and she knew she might want to leave, but didn’t know exactly what she wanted to do, and through being Encouraged Driven Latina, the first project she worked on was Encouraged Driven Latina. easing her anxiety at work and setting boundaries.

So not only did she set boundaries, she ended up renegotiating a bonus. She was also like, Hey, this is a lot of work for me. If you want me to keep, if you want me to stay, you need to hire somebody else. They hired somebody else. And eventually like her job got a little bit better and a little bit better, but ultimately she decided, I don’t want to be here.

And she has officially put in her notice and she is set up financially. She is set up mentally. And just seeing this shift in her has been beautiful because there was a lot of, you know, Work to be done here, right? This narrative of, Oh my gosh, there’s not a lot of Latina lawyers and I’m leaving the, the industry.

What am I going to do? Maybe I should just stay. I spent all of this time in law school and watching her go through this, navigate this decision is the ultimate form of courage. So just know that you are going to be surrounded by people who get you people who know what kind of courage it takes to make these decisions.

But remember. Pivots cannot wait. The longer you wait, you are setting yourself up for inevitable change, right? So you might as well make intentional change. Remember the story of Netflix and blockbuster video or the story of Kodak or the story of how when I left the tech industry, the company dissolved.

It didn’t even exist anymore. I wouldn’t have had a job. You are in control of your life. You’re in control of your decisions. You have everything that you need. to make decisions for yourself. And then you know what? The beautiful thing is you can always make a new decision. When you join Courage Driven Latina, not only do you get instant access to all of those videos, you also get access to the strategy.

We have a courage project cycle inside of Courage Driven Latina that makes it so much easier to make decisions. We help you find clarity. After you find clarity, we then make a decision and then we support you in taking brave action. And then we reflect and revise and guess what? You can always make a new decision because every decision is going to lead to more and more clarity.

Just like the last client I talked about who was a lawyer. She kind of knew she wanted to leave, but she had to take these other steps before she ultimately decided to leave. She had to do these other projects first, and she was taking herself through that courage project cycle of finding clarity, making a decision.

Um, taking brave action, reflecting and revising, finding more clarity, making a new decision. And it’s this ongoing cycle that we never, we’re never going to stop growing as human beings. We’re not supposed to. So I’m going to stop talking now because I’ve been talking for about half an hour, but If you know that you want to join us inside of Courage Driven Latina, this is your final call.

Go to CourageDrivenLatina. com. You can learn more there. Hopefully this podcast episode resonated with you. If you have any questions, you can respond to our emails. If you’re getting our emails or you can reach out to me on Instagram at TheEricaCruz. That’s Erica with a K and I will be checking that. But remember your pivots.

Cannot wait. You have everything you need right now, and it doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t have to take a long time. And the decisions that you make today are going to dictate what the next year is like for you. All right, friends have a great, great day, and I’ll see you next week.